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Who is Todd Atticus? His name came to my attention only yesterday, when I thought I’d spotted a bizarre typo on the cover of our current City Gallery Wellington season brochure. Instead of ‘Colin McCahon, Petra Cortright, Martino Gamper, Shannon Te Ao’, it read ‘Colin McCahon, Todd Atticus, Martino Gamper, Shannon Te Ao’. WTF! My jaw dropped. Was this a monumental screw-up or was I just having one of my typo nightmares? Someone pinch me. But, when I looked closer, I saw it was a fake. Mr Atticus had also replaced the Cortright image-and-blurb with his own, which explained his sleight. Where we had spruiked the LA post-internet-art it-girl as ‘the Monet of the twenty-first century’, he proposed himself as ‘the Duchamp of the twenty-first century’. Atticus had sneakily inserted himself into our brand, and he’d gone to great trouble to do so. (He has, apparently, done another version of the brochure, trading places with Gamper.) I hear there are now a thousand rogue brochures out and about, in the city’s bloodstream. We could be offended, could call the lawyers, but it’s too clever, too funny, too well done, and ultimately too flattering—sometimes it’s reassuring to be part of someone’s fantasy. I was reminded of Julian Dashper, who once took out an advertising page in Artforum to print a fake look-alike Artforum review of his work. Positive, of course.

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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).