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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.

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I recently found myself on a panel at Wellington’s Massey University, as part of their Art School of the Future symposium. Industry representatives were asked the question: What do your organisations want from art schools? I spoke for art museums:
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There are three big sectors or wheels in the art world: the market, the museums (in which I include alternative spaces, art criticism, public funding, etc), and the art schools. These wheels turn one another as well as themselves. Those of us in the market and museums sectors sometimes think we are the be-all and end-all, that art school is something you pass through on the way to the real world of the market and the museums. However, from the years I’ve been on the scene, I know this isn’t true. Art school never goes away—you can check out but you can never leave.

Although art schools are a big player, their influence on the other sectors can be piecemeal, masking the extent and nature of that influence. Art schools can be to the market and museums what dark matter is to the rest of the universe: pervasive, invisible, influential. As a curator, I am constantly interfacing with art schools and art-school culture, in different capacities, to different ends. I work with artists who teach and artists who study. I tap into art-school funding and residency programmes, I drop by to participate in art-school discussions, and art schools represent a key part of my audience.

The art world looks different depending on which sector you spend most of your time in. That determines who you talk to, in what order, and what language you speak. Each sector contains good and bad. There is a joyous, communal aspect to inter-sector and infra-sector interaction (‘the art life’), but there is also a bitter, agonistic one. Each sector wants things from the others; each wants to co-opt the others to its own ends, to turn them into enablers. And, each wants to safeguard itself from co-option, to not be made an enabler itself.

What do museums want from art schools? First, better art from students and staff. Not box-ticking, sausage-factory art. Not production-line expressions of art-school priorities and in-grown research-evaluation methodologies, approved by the ethics committee. Art that is audacious and transformative, that adds something, that changes the landscape. Second, bigger audiences, more art-school participation in what we are doing. Students and staff should be a larger and more regular part of the museum audience. Informed art-engaged audiences help us to raise the level of the discussion. (With regard to this, there is a good side to art schools having their own galleries, museums, seminar programs, residencies, publications, etc. It can facilitate engagement. But, it can also do the opposite, making art schools into gated communities—self-serving, self-sufficient, solipsistic; art worlds unto themselves, ultimately disengaged with the art world beyond. Too often, engagement is the argument, but isolation the reality. Art school becomes a wheel turning nothing but itself.) Third, capital. We want access to art-school energies, networks, resources, and, always, money—without strings attached, of course.

Museums want what’s good for museums. We want art schools to deliver flowers, pay for dinner, and open doors for us, but also to respect us when we say ‘no, not tonight, I have a headache’. In short, we want art schools to treat us as ends not means (while we happily treat them as means not ends). Love is a battlefield.

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My new exhibition—Unseen City: Gary Baigent, Rodney Charters, and Robert Ellis in Sixties Auckland—just opened at Te Uru, in Titirangi. It’s a pet project. The show grew out of my fondness for two works made by then-young artists in the 1960s—Rodney Charters’s short film Film Exercise (1966) and Gary Baigent’s photobook The Unseen City: 123 Photographs of Auckland (1967).

In the 1960s, Auckland was growing. Its population passed half a million and new motorways were enabling suburban sprawl. It was also the dawn of the counterculture. In both the Baigent and the Charters works, roads, cars, and motorbikes play starring roles. Both works contrast a conservative older generation with the beautiful young people. Now, they read as time capsules.

Originally, my plan was to simply juxtapose the film and the photos. Robert Ellis came in later, when the discovery of some little-known 1960s drawings revealed how much Auckland’s new motorways had informed his iconic Motorways paintings.

For me, the show has personal resonance. I was born in Auckland in 1963. Most of the images were made when I was a small child. While they tally with my earliest memories, they concern a place I never really knew. And, I suspect, for others—and in different ways—the show may be something of a nostalgia trip.

Unseen City runs until 16 August 2015. If you can’t get to Titirangi, the show comes to City Gallery Wellington in December. Thanks to Andrew Clifford and his team at Te Uru. (Here’s my essay, and here’s John Hurrell’s review and Tim Corballis’s.)