When the Mountain Refuses to Stay Put - MONA, Anselm Kiefer, and the Architecture of Excess.

Museums tend to expand as though embarrassed by the act: a new wing announced in softened language, wrapped in glass, accompanied by a café. The implication is always reassurance. Nothing essential will change.

MONA has never made that promise. From its first incision into the Tasmanian peninsula, it declared itself less a building than a condition - one that privileges descent over arrival, confusion over clarity, and experience over explanation. Its expansions have followed the same logic: not accretions, but recalibrations.

From 19 December 2025, that logic reaches its most uncompromising conclusion. After four years of construction, a new wing opens that is not merely occupied by art, but authored by it. The space itself constitutes a single, continuous work by Anselm Kiefer. Walls are not supports. They are propositions. Voids are not neutral. They are charged.

Kiefer is not an artist easily accommodated by institutions. His work resists portability and defies the etiquette of exhibition-making. It is heavy in every sense: materially, historically, ethically. Lead, concrete, ash, straw, books rendered unreadable by their own mass. The detritus of civilisation pressed into forms that recall temples, bunkers, towers, ruins not yet old enough to feel safe.

For decades, Kiefer has worked in defiance of the modernist fantasy that art might be autonomous or redemptive. His practice insists that history clings, that myth metastasises, that knowledge accumulates faster than wisdom. It is art suspicious of its own authority.

MONA, by contrast, has often appeared gleefully irreverent. It delights in sensory overload, in profane juxtapositions, in the collapse of hierarchy. And yet beneath the spectacle lies a shared suspicion: that comfort is a cultural failure, and that meaning, if it exists at all, emerges from friction rather than affirmation.

New wing. Same refusal to reassure. Please do not relax. This is not an addition. It’s an escalation.

That affinity was clarified years ago, far from Hobart, at La Ribaute - Kiefer’s sprawling compound near Barjac in southern France. Neither studio nor museum, it is better understood as a private cosmology, constructed over decades with near-monastic obsession. Tunnels, amphitheatres, towers and voids unfold according to an internal logic that is never fully disclosed. Light does not illuminate so much as instruct. Darkness withholds rather than conceals.

La Ribaute overwhelms not through spectacle but through coherence. Everything contributes. There is no transitional space, no relief. Like ancient monumental architecture - pyramids, ritual complexes, totalising fortifications - it functions as a closed system. One does not browse La Ribaute. One submits to it.

For David Walsh, encountering this was less a revelation than a destabilisation. MONA was already underway, and suddenly it seemed inadequate - too polite, too segmented, too reconciled with institutional norms. The problem with genuine inspiration is that it arrives without regard for timing or feasibility.

Reproducing that intensity in Hobart was never a matter of imitation. Kiefer’s apparent improvisation is the product of decades of thinking and a tolerance for failure that public institutions rarely enjoy. To build something comparably potent required wrestling not only with material and scale, but with regulation, safety, gravity, and cost. Rawness, it turns out, is expensive.

Budgets swelled. Ideas multiplied. What began as an architectural homage evolved into something closer to a lived argument about space, meaning, and ambition. The decision to embed a library within the structure emerged less as an add-on than as a necessity. Books, after all, haunt Kiefer’s work: repositories of knowledge that collapse under their own weight, symbols of civilisation’s desire to record, classify, and thereby control meaning.

Here, the library occupies the negative space - the gaps, the pauses, the silences. It is both ballast and confession. Acknowledgement that thinking is cumulative, flawed, and never complete.

The resulting wing is oppressive in the most exact sense of the word. Concrete dominates. Scale destabilises. Works such as Elektra operate simultaneously as sculpture, architecture, and psychological device. You are above ground and underground, observer and intruder. The space does not guide you gently. It instructs through resistance.

This is not immersion as entertainment. There is no illusion of agency, no flattering interactivity. The work does not seek to be liked. It seeks to be endured.

What makes this collaboration genuinely significant is not simply its ambition or cost, but its refusal of synthesis. MONA does not neutralise Kiefer, and Kiefer does not solemnise MONA. Instead, they intensify each other’s contradictions. MONA’s accessibility sharpens Kiefer’s severity. Kiefer’s gravity disciplines MONA’s playfulness.

The result is a whole that exceeds its components: not a museum wing, not a sculpture, not an exhibition, but an environment that insists on duration, attention, and discomfort. It cannot be skimmed. It cannot be resolved into a takeaway. It resists both reverence and dismissal.

In an era of frictionless culture - optimised, legible, instantly exhausted - this refusal is quietly radical. The project is too slow, too heavy, too costly, too uncertain to align with prevailing ideas of cultural efficiency. It does not pretend to be sustainable in any moral sense. It simply exists, unapologetically.

Whether one experiences it as transcendent or excessive is almost beside the point. What matters is that it does not disappear upon exit. It lingers as weight rather than image, as memory rather than spectacle.

MONA has always argued that art need not redeem. Kiefer has spent a lifetime demonstrating that history cannot be escaped. Together, they have built something that acknowledges both propositions without resolving them.

It is not peace. It is potency.

And potency, as MONA has long understood, is the far riskier, and far rarer, achievement.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of MONA.