Gorillas In Our Midst
Curated by Pippa Mott with Jane Clark for the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)
Inspired by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons’ book ‘The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us’. The exhibition, developed in collaboration with the authors, set out to expose the gap between how the mind works and how we think it works. Gorillas in Our Midst featured new commissions, loaned artworks, and works from Mona’s collection that highlighted the ways we can look without seeing.
Featured artists
Areogun, Pierre Bismuth, Polly Borland, Christian Boltanski, Peter Feiler, Tony Garifalakis, Gianluca Gimini, A.R. Hopwood, Andy Hutson, Alicja Kwade, Damien Meade, Christopher Miner, Sidney Nolan, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Tony Oursler, Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Dasha Shishkin, Roman Signer
Alicja Kwade, WeltenLinie, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist and Mona (Museum of Old and New Art), Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Gianluca Gimini, Velocipedia IRL, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist and Mona (Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart), Tasmania, Australia
Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Somniloquies, 2017, installation view. Image courtesy Mona (Museum of Old and New Art), Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Tony Oursler, The Imponderable Archive at Mona, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist and Mona (Museum of Old and New Art), Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
The Imponderable Archive at Mona.
The Imponderable Archive existed long before it was named or shown publicly. It was a private resource; a tool with which the American multi-media, video and installation artist Tony Oursler sought to understand the world around him and to produce his artwork. It’s now well over three thousand assorted objects, photographs, books and pamphlets—ancient, old and new—medical, zoological, pop-cultural, supernatural, occult and more—collected over at least twenty years: a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of human belief.
For Gorillas in Our Midst, Dan Simons, Chris Chabris and I worked with Tony to select about 170 items from the archive to bring to Mona, along with a few from the Mona collection. These objects exemplify the power of narrative, the influence of confidence and personality, and the human propensity to fill in gaps and assume causal relationships where there maybe none at all (we also found him local, Tasmanian material). Tony Oursler’s archive is titled ‘imponderable’ because, he says, it’s a term used to define the limits of scientific and human understanding; because there’s always more to know. The Imponderable Archive is his way of inviting viewers to contemplate the culture in which they live from multiple perspectives, and to look through other peoples’ eyes.
Oursler comes from a long line of cultural producers with varied relationships to the imponderable. His father was a writer and editor at Readers Digest and founder of the magazine Angels on Earth. Oursler never knew his grandfather, Fulton Oursler (1893–1952), a journalist and detective novelist who worked with Houdini and was well known as a polymath, skeptic, general debunker of unfounded beliefs, and devout Catholic. Oursler’s work continues this family fascination with the variety of human belief systems. Amid apparently polarising extremes—from ESP and UFOs to homeopathy, iridology, saints’ relics, sea monsters and the possibility that thylacines aren’t extinct—viewers can trace universally human ways of thinking.
The display at Mona is definitely not intended to be didactic (although attentive visitors should learn a great deal). Viewers are compelled to make their own judgements and ask themselves: to what degree am I convinced by this material? As part of the Gorillas in Our Midst exhibition, Chris and Dan also developed in dialogue with Tony Oursler a ‘magical thinking’ questionnaire in which people are asked to indicate the extent to which they agree with statements such as ‘Hallucinogenic drugs can allow people to tap otherwise hidden powers or abilities’; ‘Astrologers and horoscopes can accurately predict the future’; and ‘Most people use only 10% of their brain capacity.’ Results will be published when the project concludes.