The City Gallery within Melbourne Town Hall is small, yet the complex installation Patrick Pound has installed within it feels as if you are falling through the vastness of space in a toy Dr Who phone box. This is totally appropriate for an exhibition named The Museum of Falling. In it, you will find a poetic taxonomy of images, all submitting to the power of gravity and the vagaries of chance. Pound does this sort of thing better than anyone else on the planet.

Not only is he billed as the curator of his own exhibition, but quite appropriately he has penned the catalogue essay. Like the installation itself, it is outwardly small. Its dimensions are similar to a CD case. Yet, to continue the Dr Who comparison (with a bit of Whitman and Bob Dylan thrown in), it contains multitudes. There are animals, film stars, rock musicians (Nick Cave), paperbacks (All That Fall by Samuel Beckett) and famous tourist sites (The Leaning Tower of Pisa), all classified by displaying different aspects of the word “Falling”.

As he explains to me later, “half the show is drawn from the several thousand images in my personal collection, mostly photographs purchased online and from around the globe. The other half come from the City of Melbourne collections. It’s been wonderful working with them.” Once, showing me around his archive at his Brunswick studio he told me, “My images are created with the click of a mouse, not the click of a camera shutter.” Columns of filing cabinets seemed to go on forever, like a collaboration between Jorge Luis Borges and the East German Stasi.

I’ve been following the career of Patrick Pound for over three decades, since I created my own fictitious museum in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Ideas on Park Avenue (1989—ongoing).  It is a growing and idiosyncratic field. Similar Superfictions masquerading as museums include, David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, Suzanne Treister’s The Institute of Militronics (London), Claus Oldenburg’s Museum in a Suitcase, and the grandfather of them all, Marcel Broodthaers’ Museum of Modern Art Department of the Eagles (1968).

In 2001, Pound was in a survey show of paintings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Around the same time, he was exhibiting, often in artist-run-spaces, certificates he’d purchased through the mail, or actual books, that lauded him as being one of the Five Thousand Personalities of the World. There was his listing in the New Zealand Who’s Who 1994. But he never submitted a photograph of himself to these fame-for-hire anthologies, but always one of a Lithuanian sculptor and soap carver called Lester Gaba.

Later still, he exhibited series of multiple, unrelated photographs in a grid (paying tribute to the great German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher). But wait! They are in fact related. One set of images shows men whose ties are all blowing in the wind in the same direction, left to right. Another grid is made up of photographs where the photographer’s shadow is cast across the foreground of the family portrait or the sunny street. Another memorable set plays on the commonality of each photographer’s thumb partly obscuring the lens. When I interviewed Pound by phone for this review he told me, “If I could find a single photograph that represented all these visual tendencies, that would be the time to stop.” I could never imagine him stopping, so I asked about other fictive museums he has created.

There’s The Museum of Holes,” he replies matter-of-factly. “And The Museum of Air, which grew out of my installation at the National Gallery of Victoria called Patrick Pound The Great Exhibition.” Like many, I remember this with joy. It was a vast wunderkammer of an installation made up from objects drawn from the NGV’s collection and from Pound’s own systematic collecting. It ran through the galleries like a vast river of all things connected to the notion of wind and air; from Jethro Tull’s 1971 album Aqualung to 19^th century gilt-framed paintings of windswept shores, to an asthma inhaler, a 1799 Goya etching titled Blow, and of course a ubiquitous photograph of a man shivering on a wall while his tie is blown to the right.

“A large book of my museum work is being published next year in America, by Saint Lucie Press, Florida,” he says.  “Other projects are happening in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.” He’s just returned from there, says it’s great to be back and, “I’m keen to do some work on Gombrich’s ideas of what it takes to make an image, and on experiments with pattern recognition.” This current exhibition runs until Valentine’s Day, 2025. Fall towards it as soon as you can!

The Museum of Falling
City Gallery
On now—14 February 2025