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Julian Dashper has been a key figure in New Zealand art since the mid-1980s. He changed the way we think about New Zealand art history. Dashper made art about art. Some of his works pay homage to older celebrated artists, particularly canonical figures of New Zealand art, including Colin McCahon and Rita Angus; others address the workings of the art system. From the mid-1990s, he increasingly exhibited overseas, becoming an international artist. Dashper died of melanoma in 2009—he was just 49. Today, he represents a transitional figure between the ‘New Zealand painting’ that preceded him and the new generation of post-nationalist, post-medium artists that followed.

Dashper was an important artist for me. I can’t think of another artist who has been as influential on my practice as a curator. So, it’s been a huge pleasure to curate the exhibition Julian Dashper & Friends. It’s a tribute show, and, for me, something of a labour of love.

Dashper’s work was self-consciously art historical—it was always in dialogue with other artists’ work. He was one of New Zealand’s most influenced artists and one of its most influential artists. Because of that, I thought that presenting his work in splendid isolation would be confusing, like listening in to one side of a phone conversation. So, instead, my show presents his works in conversation with works by other artists—his elders, his contemporaries, and younger artists. These ‘friends’ include Rita Angus, Billy Apple, Daniel Buren, Fiona Connor, Colin McCahon, Dane Mitchell, Milan Mrkusich, John Nixon, John Reynolds, Peter Robinson, Marie Shannon, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jan van der Ploeg, and Gordon Walters. Friendship wasn’t incidental to Dashper’s project, it was his medium. (Julian Dashper & Friends, City Gallery Wellington, 5 December 2015–15 May 2016.) (Here’s my essay and here’s Peter Ireland’s review.)

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Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey is no longer with us, but his legend lives on. Indeed, it grows stronger. Facebook is creaking with tributes, with everyone claiming a connection. McLeavey was a brilliant gallerist, a consummate salesman, a storyteller. It’s hard to imagine New Zealand art without him. In Wellington in the late 1960s and 1970s, he pioneered art dealing—at least, his brand of it. He was influential. Those who followed, especially in Wellington, had to contend with his example, his preeminence.

He had his shtick. Although visitors to his gallery had met him countless times before, McLeavey would sometimes pretend they were strangers. He’d greet them with an odd mix of humility and presumption. He’d say, ‘Hello, my name is Peter McLeavey. I show modern art. I know what the old people think of my gallery. But tell me, what about the young people in the discotheques—what do they think of my gallery?’ When Hamish McKay opened his gallery in Wellington in the early 1990s, he put his own spin on McLeavey’s routine. When people visited his gallery—the young people’s gallery—McKay would say, ‘Hello, my name is Hamish McKay. I show contemporary art. I know what the young people think of my gallery. But tell me, what about the old people on their heart-lung machines—what do they think of my gallery?’

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And, with McLeavey, there was much to imitate. His departure creates a vacuum.

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Olafur Eliasson’s The Cubic Structural Evolution Project (2004) must be one of the most popular participatory works ever. Since being acquired by Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery in 2005, it has been shown all around Australia. Now it’s touring New Zealand. It’s been at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery, and it’s currently at City Gallery Wellington. Eliasson’s Project is catnip for punters and catnip for the museums who want to pull them. Who can say no?

The Project is a long table covered with zillions of Lego blocks. Visitors are invited to participate, by making what they will from the blocks. As they do, forms emerge from the rubble and collapse back into it. No one tells participants to create architectural forms, but almost everyone does. Someone replicates Chartres Cathedral, others build skyscrapers or Jetsons-inspired sci-fi minarets. The Project is a utopian nowhere, but every building is ‘destination’ architecture. Starchitect gimmickry abounds.

Sometimes participants start from scratch, sometimes they cannibalise what went before. As more blocks are used, participants tear down existing structures to build their own (or just for the hell of it). A few may collaborate, but typically it’s every man for himself. Participants show off, trying to build the tallest, biggest, stupidist, or most distinctive signature thing. We all become Howard Roark.

The Project looks like a city skyline in a constant state of evolution, emergence, and becoming. It’s amazing, but also a mess. We get skyscrapers, but no streetscape, no town planning. It’s unregulated, cancerous, a developer’s paradise, like Sao Paulo or the Gold Coast. There’s something psychologically or culturally revealing about what participants build and how they build it—aspirational penile skyscrapers abound. On the other hand, there’s also a sense of inevitability, as similar structures are endlessly reinvented. (The Project is as much about blocks expressing themselves through people as about people expressing themselves through blocks.)

The Project’s popularity has also been its curse. On the one hand, it is routinely framed as a happy-clappy kids activity, forgetting the art part. On the other, participants also get caught in the thrall of their own artistry and forget it is someone else’s artwork. Content with a spike in visitation, museums routinely collude in the confusion, as long as punters keep coming back. In one place, the Project was so popular that they added a sign telling parents that brats must take turns—twenty-minutes max!

That rather missed the point, because the Project is not about fair, it’s about anarchy. It’s less about the Lego than the people playing with it. If someone wants to demolish everyone else’s structures—that’s fine. If someone wants to be there all month and create their new Berlin by hogging all the blocks—that’s fine. If someone doesn’t get a go at all and starts crying—tough titties. The Project is about human interaction, good, bad, and ugly. It’s about competing desires and world views and how they play out. It’s about ‘the city’.

So, while the Project is fun for all ages, it also has a dark, septic side. It may be spruiked as a sharing group activity, but it demonstrates how venal and solipsistic we all are. It may be hailed as a showcase for everyday creativity, yet it finds everyone endlessly ploughing the same mental ruts. That’s why I’m rather pleased by how we are currently presenting the Project at City Gallery. In his show Demented Architecture, curator Aaron Lister has played the spoil sport, by surrounding the Eliasson with other works that riff on architectures of doom and on architects as cranks, meglomaniacs, and fascists—lest we forget. In doing so, he has restored a political context—and a bitter aftertaste—to this wonderful, but too-much-beloved work, where the patients build the asylum.

Demented Architecture, City Gallery Wellington, until 8 November.