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I’ve just been on a mini-break to Melbourne, where my art highlight was Patrick Pound’s show, The Great Exhibition, at the National Gallery of Victoria Australia. Pound is a New Zealander, but he’s been based in Australia since 1989. His art has developed out of his activity as a collector. For decades, he’s been working away quietly, steadily, somewhat under the radar. In 2013, he presented a brilliant project, The Gallery of Air, in the NGV show Melbourne Now. He packed a room with hundreds of exhibits, drawn both from his quirky personal collection and from the NGV’s more well appointed and elite one. Each thing had something to do with air. Pound scrambled the cheap with the chic, the obvious with the occult, the venerable with the vulgar. Or, as he explained it, the display went ‘from a draft excluder to an asthma inhaler; from a battery-powered “breathing” dog to an old bicycle pump; from a Jacobean air stem glass to a Salvador Dalí ashtray made for Air India; from a John Constable cloud study to a Goya print of a farting figure’. Pound had his way with the NGV’s treasures, while pulling them down to the level of his own modestly acquired trophies, making them somehow equal, all just tokens in his game. The project managed to be, at once, super smart and a carnivalesque crowdpleaser. Perhaps that’s why they invited him back, to expand on the idea.

The Great Exhibition is an epic show. It fills all of the NGVA’s ground-floor galleries—and they’re jam packed. Again, Pound scrambles his collections with the NGV’s. Again, the show builds on his artist-collector-curator sensibility—that is, perhaps, its ultimate subject. Pound collects vernacular photos: there are displays of photos of photographers’s shadows, of people holding cameras, of reflections, etc. Riffing on Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia, Pound is forever categorical. Sometimes the commonalities are crystal clear, sometimes elusive. There are gatherings concerning holes, falling, and ‘there/not there’. There are collections showing people sleeping and showing people with their backs turned. There are collections of pairs, of brown things, and of French things featuring the word ‘choses’ (the French word for things). Some sets allegorise Pound’s enterprise overall. For instance, he displays his collection of different editions of John Fowles’s novel The Collector. The Great Exhibition manages to be both epic and trivial. It suggests a set of Pinterest boards or Google image searches. Indeed, Pound made great use of the Internet to assemble his collections.

As a curator, I couldn’t help but ponder the way the show addressed my own vocation and its distorting effects. I felt pangs of pleasure and of guilt as Pound foregrounded the curatorial bag of tricks, flaunting the ways my colleagues and I place things into contrived contexts, fetishising some properties while forcing others to take a back seat, making things dance to our own tune. While artists legitimately fear being subsumed by wilful curators who have minds and projects of their own, Pound has turned the tables, making ‘the curator’ a trope for his art. (Patrick Pound, The Great Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria Australia, Melbourne, until 30 July.)

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For designers, the chair is an archetypal form—a challenge. Over the years, various designers have sought to create the most efficient chair, the most ergomatic chair, the most elegant chair, the perfect chair, the ur-chair, their signature chair, etcetera. Necessarily, ‘integrity’, in one form or another, has been crucial to their grail quests. But the Italian-born London-based designer Martino Gamper threw integrity to the wind to create his project 100 Chairs in 100 Days a decade ago. He set himself an assignment: to create a chair a day for 100 days, mostly by collaging together bits of discarded and donated chairs. Each chair had to be unique. The project was a prompt to (and test of) his creativity, working within the limitations of the materials to hand and the time available. Gamper wasn’t seeking to make the perfect chair but to create a ‘three-dimensional sketchbook’, a lexicon of alternative ideas. Grafting contrasting, even opposing design logics and languages (with ranging historical and class associations), his hybrids were witty, absurd, conflicted. It was as if Gamper was trying to increase the genetic diversity of the chair, through perverse, experimental cross-breeding. It was the same impulse that gave us the cronut and the cruffin, the Cockapoo and the Labradoodle. At City Gallery Wellington, half the ensemble is on one side of the room, arrayed in rows and columns—a phalanx; the other half is on the other side, all higglety-piggeldty—feral. It’s pitch perfect for this project, where Gamper rules out nothing. Either, or, and both. The opposite is just as good (until 13 August).

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We live in a big social world, with lots of other people. Seven billion people. We don’t have time to get to know everyone deeply, to learn of their struggles, their journeys, to give them all the benefit of the doubt. So we batch process them. You could call it profiling, you could call it prejudice, you could call it judging books by their covers, you could call it social triage. The first cut is the deepest.

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Last Thursday, as part of City Gallery’s Open Late programme, I chaired a discussion about dolls in art and life. The speakers were artists Yvonne Todd and Ronnie van Hout. We talked a bit about the ‘uncanny valley’, the idea that, as dolls become more and more realistic, they go from being cute to being creepy. I couldn’t resist illustrating the idea with this photo of One Direction posing with their waxworks at Madame Taussauds. Cute and creepy.

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Aaron Lister has curated a lovely satellite exhibition—Other People’s Photographs—to accompany the major Cindy Sherman show currently on display at City Gallery. This sidebar show presents the vernacular photos that Sherman has collected over the years, including a massive haul of snaps taken at Casa Susanna, the now-infamous crossdressers’ retreat in upstate New York. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, men went there to enjoy a vacation from their gender, to become one of the girls. They enacted stereotypical, normative views of femininity, aiming to pass as middle-class housewives, mostly. The snaps are an eye opener, offering an odd perspective on feminism. On the one hand, they anticipate a familiar feminist insight, highlighting femininity as a social construction, a masquerade (a Sherman idea). On the other hand, they complicate feminism, as the men discover their own freedom, release, and agency in the repertoire of characters and gestures, fashions and adornments, that feminists will soon reject. They pad the bras that feminists will burn. But do they retain their male privilege through the process? (City Gallery Wellington, until 19 March.)

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When I was young, we thought art was progressing. Everyone was vying to be on the cutting edge, and to define the trajectory of art history. Now art is understood as a network, and people seem more interested in the synchronic fabric of art, how everyone is intersecting—what node you or others are on this web. There seems less at stake; people seem less a part of a greater cause, and more concerned with their own ability to find a niche. On the other hand, artists seem to have much more freedom to carve out their own eccentric territory. There is much greater interest in the world, socially and politically. Art used to be much more about the self: private or archetypal. We used to worry about posterity. Now artists worry about relevance.
—Mernet Larsen, 2016.

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‘All Nature faithfully’—But by what feint
Can Nature be subdued to art’s constraint?
Her smallest fragment is still infinite!
And so he paints but what he likes in it.
What does he like? He likes what he can paint!
—Friedrich Nietzsche

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I finally got to see Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–9), which is now permanently installed in the Brooklyn Museum—that’s one off my bucket list. With its kitschy conflation of ancient and modern, craft and minimalism, this feminist magnum opus reminded me of the Stargate, only triangular. Being installed in a spooky, triangular, black, glass room didn’t hurt.

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Yesterday I visited Queens Museum to see Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s survey show. Her ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’, written in 1969 after the birth of her first child, distinguishes two ‘basic systems’: development (positive feedback—generating change) and maintenance (negative feedback—generating homeostasis, equilibrium). Development, she argues, is celebrated, while maintenance (although crucial) remains unsung and overlooked. A feminist, Ukeles sees that art is identified with ‘development’ and domestic work with ‘maintenance’, even though art involves much maintenance activity. However, by proposing her ‘maintenance art’, she sought to exploit and upset that simple opposition. In 1976, for I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day, she invited 300 custodial workers in a Wall Street office building to designate one hour of their shift as art. In 1979–80, for Touch Sanitation Performance, she traversed New York city for eleven months to shake hands with each of its 8,500 sanitation men, saying ‘Thank you for keeping New York City alive’—a gesture linking class and gender.

For me, Ukeles’s show found its perfect companion in the Panorama of the City of New York, which is on permanent display in the Queens Museum. It’s an incomprehensively massive, 1:1200 scale model of New York’s five boroughs, showing every street, every bridge, every building. Of course, one of those buildings is the Queens Museum itself—it’s a mise en abyme. The Panorama was made for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Back then, visitors were transported around it on tracked cars (called ‘helicopters’), receiving a recorded audio tour. Those cars have long gone, having been replaced by a pedestrian ramp. In 1993, the model was updated, with subsequent buildings—including the World Trade Centre—added. The Panorama covers 9,335 square feet of the Museum’s floor, rivalling the space taken by Ukeles’s show. (While her show is on, it has been dotted with tiny lights, marking the itinerary of her epic handshake tour.)

From the Panorama’s god’s-eye vantage, New York is an anthill. Looking at it, it’s hard to think of the city as anything but infrastructure—sheer logistics. If Ukeles’s art asserts its maintenance logic down-and-dirty at a personal and gutter level, the Panorama asserts the same thing from above. Perhaps ‘development’ and ‘art’ hover somewhere in between, as the fugitive meat in this high-low sandwich.

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Ilsa: Let’s see, the last time we met …
Rick: Was La Belle Aurore.
How nice, you remembered. But, of course, that was the day the Germans marched into Paris.
Not an easy day to forget.
No.
I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.
—Casablanca, 1942
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[IMAGE: Stardust Memories 1980]