P A T P O U N D

This weekend I decided to go to the National Gallery of Victoria, and managed to stumble across the Patrick Pound Exhibition. To be honest, I was extremely sceptical at first. How could a random expansive collection of things be art, how could this be interesting. It turned out to be on of the most interesting art exhibitions I have been to.

Basically the gallery exhibits Patrick Pound’s personal collection of things. His collections are expansive yet small, random yet particular, interrelated yet not at all. Certain collections operate within a constraint, such as a specific word, order or colour. The collections that were developed with a constraint were inspired by the Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians which formed in 1960 France, specifically, Georges Perec. The idea that restrictions and constraint can encourage new forms, patterns and structures. The process of this can end up unintentionally projecting ideas. One of the collections sparked my particular interest because of the seemingly random aspect of it. The collection 26 Brown Things involved him purchasing 26 brown things from the one shop on the one day.

“you can look at a piece of puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces.”
– Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual

Another part of the exhibition had a focus on relationality and connections between things. This is inherently extremely applicable to the art of noticing. The room featuring this aspect of the exhibition contained numerous collections which all interrelated in one way or another. The room was described as a ‘vast diagrammatic network of intersections’ (NGV, 2017). It reflected one of the core ideas behind the exhibition, which is to find patterns and connections across things and ideas. Moreover, it is also a reflection of one of Pound’s perspectives of the internet, how through algorithms the internet moves from one subject or thing to another and how this can be applied to the real world in Pound’s way of ‘thinking through things’ (Pound, 2016).

I found that the exhibition had an inherent focus on the connection between things, rather than the things themselves. Instead of concentrating on what the things were, I wanted to know what connected them to the things beside them, and the things on the opposite walls. There was no focus on the specific meaning of the things, rather what they inherently were and how they related to the things around them.

The exhibition made me think about the way people collect, and our own personal constraints put in place when collecting. What is a collection? Numerous things somehow connected by a singular aspect? If so all the objects I own could be considered a collection, all connected by one unifying things, me.