Enter the Matrix: An Examination of Patrick Pound's The Great Exhibition

Abstract

This thesis considers the practice of New Zealand-born artist, Patrick Pound (b. 1962) through an analysis of his survey show, Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition, which was staged at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne between 31 March and 30 July 2017. The Great Exhibition demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of Pound’s practice, exemplifying the interconnectedness of his thinking and his use of an algorithmic approach to collecting, curating and categorisation. His depth of art-historical knowledge plays out as an intricate puzzle. The scope of The Great Exhibition is vast and, while it might appear to mostly involve the arrangement of more than 4,000 vernacular photographs and found objects, alongside 300 items from the NGV’s collection, the methodologies of collecting and curation employed by Pound are multifaceted.

I consider the constancy of Pound’s interrogation of authorship and meaning throughout his practice, which is integrally related to his use of vernacular photographs and found objects within The Great Exhibition. I examine our relationship with vernacular photography and how this is exposed in The Great Exhibition. The practices of artists such as Erik Kessels, Joachim Schmid and Marcel Duchamp provide context here. Chapter Three asks how The Great Exhibition fits within a wider context of exhibitions by artist-as-curators such as Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum and Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man. This chapter also examines how computer algorithms can be applied as a framework for understanding The Great Exhibition’s curatorial logic. Pound’s complex system of sorting and categorising into matrices and intersections is considered in relation to writer Georges Perec and his understanding of Alan Turing’s conceptualisation of the ‘Automatic’ and ‘Oracle’ machines. My conclusion reflects on what can and cannot be learned from Patrick Pound’s The Great Exhibition.