WORDS, THOUGHTS, AND ACTIONS THAT SHAPE TIME:

Thoughts On Building For Everyone A Fountain

For Everyone a Fountain is a nod to both Marcel Duchamp and Moshe Safdie. Duchamp’s 1917 artwork Fountain undercut the existing hierarchy of aesthetic values and disciplinary autonomies of his time. Safdie’s 1967 vision for urban living and the environment in his building design for Habitat opened up a new frontier of possibilities. Perhaps an odd mix of visionaries, but these are nevertheless two iconic bookends in my own understanding of creative/philosophical possibilities, bold risk takers, and true iconoclasts for change.

For Everyone a Fountain forms a volume of space determined by a set of tables stacked together in the appearance of a room. Tables are gateways to our private imaginings and aspirations—where plans and dreams are incubated. What if all the tables of a life lived were stacked one on top of another, one structure giving way to another in an ambivalent status of order and subject? What if everyday task lamps designed to provide light to desktops also surrendered their primary function of basic illumination, becoming instead a communication system for the flow of photographic representational colours? Can tables, lamps, a room, and all materially inanimate things of this world share consciousness with us in remembering things we can no longer touch? Can structure, material, and objects be thought of as more than stuff accumulated, as an anthropology of the self in symbiotic flux with the pictorial mirage of time? Does the current tsunami of advancements in AI technology possibly change the scope and dominance of human consciousness and its cleave upon our world construction?

I grew up in a big family where private space was not easily achievable. From the vantage point of my blue subterranean bedroom, shared with as many as three siblings at a time, I built my first foundational tier of consciousness in a world different from the one I knew or resided in. I began by imagining how the prospect of moving the furnishings in my shared room might begin a process of conditional change. I also made posters and badges, silk screened T-shirts, and produced strobe lights, all carriers of an identity to be telegraphed outward onto the moving field of life. My suburban neighbourhood of Deep Cove, North Vancouver, was flanked by industry, a First Nation reservation, and a beatnik/hippy counterculture of the Maplewood Mudflats. All these conditions existed together and were pitched precariously on the lower shoulder of a mountain, which met the sea overlooking the city of Vancouver. This vista from one shoreline of a somewhat rural cultural compression toward the seemingly bombastic and built urban sophistication of another coastline edge has persisted in my thoughts all my life. How looking at something can stimulate thinking about something else—or how artwork can provoke the temporary partition of the everyday, opening up questions onto future prospects.

ROBERT YOUDS

April 2018

FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN , 2017

Thirty-five pieces of aluminium honeycomb sheet, forty task lamps, forty Wi-Fi LED bulbs, fifty-two galvanized steel sawhorses, forty electrical cords, Raspberry Pi computer, two speakers, amplifier sound recording, 144 legal-sized painted cardboard boxes, thirty lbs. of cloth, four electrical surge protection bars

YOUR BEST ROOM IS A GLOSSARY , 2017

I AM ALONE IN IT, IN FRONT OF IT ,