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Like many of my antipodean-curator colleagues, I’m away in Europe, on the biennale trail, looking for the next thing. So far, the standout work has been French artist Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead, in Sculpture Projects Munster—a show of new commissioned works that occurs throughout the city of Munster, once every ten years.

I’d heard Huyghe’s project was a ‘mind-blowing, living, breathing installation’, ‘a complex living organism’, and ‘a biosphere’, so expectations were high. It was a bit of a hike to get to there, followed by a two-hour wait in the queue, but it was worth it. When I entered, with a handful of others, I felt I’d been granted access to another world.

Huyghe had taken over the whole building—a huge, dilapidated, retired ice rink. He’d cut away areas of the concrete floor, revealing the cooling pipes that ran through it. He’d excavated the site, digging metres down—through strata, through time, into rock, then dirt—creating a landscape with clefts and mounds, an indoors outdoors.

After receiving the briefing—no climbing, no jumping—I descended into the site. Prompted to look for significance everywhere, I considered ponds spawning algae and two tall mounds, which turned out to be buzzing beehives. Grass sprouted on one bank. There was a triangular section of the concrete floor, incised with saw lines, cut adrift. But the chimera peacocks I was expecting were nowhere to be seen.

Overhead, in the ceiling, retro-futuristic pyramid-like shutters slowly opened and closed their petals, apparently responding to temperature and humidity levels in the room, letting in light, air, and, on other occasions, rain, and perhaps letting the odd bee escape. They looked more like spaceship hatches than ice-rink plant, an impression enhanced by an intermittent industrial-noise effect.

A minimalist box sat on an intact remnant of concrete floor. It was made of switchable glass. Sometimes, it was pitch black; other times clear, revealing that it was an aquarium. In it was a mini-diorama of triangular shards—echoing bits of the concrete slab—piled up like the ice in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1824). This set was home to a venomous sea snail, a conus textile. The pattern on its shell had been used as a score, to determine when the glass became clear, when the sound played, etc.

A machine on the perimeter of the site, I learnt, was an incubator, containing human cancer cells—HeLa cells. There was also an app, where visitors could see augmented-reality pyramids on the ceiling proliferate (as cancer cells split) and disappear (when the ceiling opened).

That everything was connected was clear, how everything was connected remained unclear. One writer summed it up as: ‘Heterogeneous dynamic systems—organisations, biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic, material and immaterial—are shifting configuration in real time in an uncertain symbiosis.’

Epic and disorienting, Huyghe’s work scrambled time, sci-fi style. I had a sense of being, at once, in the past (in a primordial landscape), in the present (in an excavation site), and in the future (in some imagined hereafter, when the ruined rink would be colonised by new life). Might I be in all three times at once? My temporal confusion seemed to be confirmed by the title.

I was not clear about my own place in the scenario: was I (as opposed to the sea snail) the addressee of this artwork, or just another temporary participant within it? What did it mean to approach this thing—which the artist had left to its own devices to evolve—as ‘art’?

I felt echoes of those maverick American minimalists Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who were less modernists than adepts of deep history. However, for me, the reference points were more cinematic. The work was like a film set; I approached it through memories of films. First, I imagined I was a member of the search party in Alien (1979), descending into an ominous landscape, wondering if I might be impregnated by something in one of those mounds. Then, regarding the inky black aquarium, I remembered Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when they first encounter the black monolith, excavated from where-and-when it shouldn’t be. Finally, I recalled Stalker (1979), where Tarkovsky, with his zero special effects, makes the field his protagonists walk through seem ripe with paranormal possibility—uncanny.

After ALife Ahead was a crazy mixed metaphor. It’s not the first time Huyghe has weirded me out, and I hope it won’t be the last. He gives pretension a good name.

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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.)