EVENT PLANNING: FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN

What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.

— ALAIN BADIOU

When Robert Youds was ordering aluminum sawhorses at the local hardware store franchise in Victoria, Canada, in the summer of 2017, a crowd of employees began to gather behind the desk in response to the size of the order. Rather than a handful of sawhorses for a domestic project, Youds had ordered sixty. One worker finally broke from the pack and asked, with both curiosity and some trepidation, what he was using them for. Youds replied: Event planning

Youds’ wordplay is not an addendum but a continued performance of his conceptual practice as it moves from the world and spaces of the everyday to aesthetic objects that relate to language, light, and information systems. This anecdote reflects the artist’s humour and also his generosity: why make the staff uncomfortable? He quickly located words that would slip across worlds, creating spaces of welcome and hospitality in both the functional and instrumentalized realm of objects and consumption, and toward the post-Fordist worker, still stymied in the current century by the obfuscated end result, whether it is a wedding, a staff retreat, or an art installation.

Using elements in his work as diverse as Plexiglas, natural and artificial lighting that includes neon and digital signage, aluminum, prefabricated doors, closed circuit televisions, and window frames, since the 1980s, Youds continues to perform this act of hospitality, using his knowledge derived from training as a painter to work with design, popular culture, and architecture in order to transform spatial environments. Describing his early fascination with painting and the transition into an expanded field, Youds says, “I wanted my work to exist here in the world.”1

Youds’ art practice brilliantly acknowledges the quixotic, contagious, and numbing nature of contemporary life—from clickbait, surveillance, the instrumentalization of human labour, sensation and imagery, and the normalization of conflict,—as troubling signatures of our times and their instability, but not in the way that you might think—and he is interested in the long game. Youds responds to these conditions by constant invention, curiosity, risk, and fearlessness, reaching out and suggesting new ways in which we might approach perception and self-knowledge. As he states, “The most important work always carries with it the long curve of time—it may be a broken chain of time, but nevertheless, time.”2

Architecture also becomes a key feature of his urban archaeology. He says, “More importantly, [my work] is intended as a cinematic collector for the urban field, a sort of spatial poetry that is intended to disrupt the incomplete partition between it and the everyday. Stop and look and catch yourself looking; maybe your next task of the day will be slightly changed by this experience.”3 Youds imagines his work as a kind of architectural future, a building that is able to communicate with its observer or inhabitant, a building that can communicate its feelings or, potentially, remember.4

How does Youds’ art function within these fraught virtual and actual sites?

On the occasion of his installation of his recent related public art project, For Everyone a Sunset, workers in the high-rise buildings adjacent to his activities onsite at the installation began to regularly stop their work to observe the evolving project, seeing their own labour mirrored in the artist’s activities below; Youds was excited at how “a beautiful visual conversation of materiality and labour” was “unfolding in time and space.”5 This experience points to the way in which Youds’ work articulates and manifests the conditions of a site in order to note and to value the simultaneous effects of presence, sensation, and cognition, as well as how individuals recognize and shape consciousness within these forces. Youds’ work is essential and incisive in decoding realms of neo-liberal self-expression within complex global Internet/web environments (deep and shallow), social media and collective forms of popular culture—reality TV, curatorial labour, and the regular circulation of matters of taste online, including forms of belonging as expressed by allegiances to this or that architectural, social, or political movement or brand—and yet he still allows aesthetics to hold a crucial place in assisting with these tasks.

1. Robert Youds, in an interview with Karin Davie, beautiful beautiful artificial field (Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2006), 19.

2. Diana Freundl, Robert Youds: For Everyone a Sunset (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2015).

3. Ibid.

4. Robert Youds artist talk at Open Space, Victoria BC, November 18, 2017.

Youds’ approach to his materials also forms a muscular political and aesthetic resistance; it may be said that throughout his practice, he has had a sense of how quickly a genre (or politic) can be instrumentalized and its meaning fixed. Youds states that “it is true that my work acknowledges the overlap between jurisdictions of pictures, objects, and things. I am attracted to complexity in general and not so interested in echoing convenient ideas and aesthetics we have already absorbed.”6

In a 2014 interview with Diana Freundl, he noted, “My work falls between the negotiation of aesthetics and the perceptual. This means we all carry with us a pre-existing knowledge, and this is largely a sensorial lexicon that involves matters of colour, materiality, light, geometry, space, etc.

These are the very foundations of consciousness and precede linguistic understanding.”7 His work combines his interest in temporality and materiality and “how there are often gaps between experience and our knowing.”8 He contends that colour is a core element of how we understand the world, and his elusiveness in pinning the terms of his practice to one art historical stream has allowed his work not to be tied to a specific genre or art historical allegiance but rather to a poetics of experience that moves effortlessly across disciplines and materials into the social and experiential realm. His titles in his latest work, For Everyone a Fountain (2017) and the related piece, For Everyone a Sunset (2014), as well as works such as Your Only Disaster Is Finally Here (2015), Say Nothing, Twice (2016), dirty words, salt air breath and all your midnight changes (2013), and Your constant waterfall (series) (2012), attest to his engagement in the poetics not only of words but of the affective and social qualities of language within these contemporary scenes and sites of engagement. In For Everyone a Fountain, Youds both performed and included a projected text work, set within a blue screen resembling a 1980s-era “no-signal” VHS screen. The title inscribes the work with Youds’ hope: that everyone will indeed find something that they need within his work. The title for this installation is drawn from architect Moshe Safdie’s principles of design and his broad, utopian inclusiveness and aspirational thinking about ways that things can be done better. both an image and a source of information within a network of task lamps, aluminum sheeting, and six dozen stacked galvanized steel sawhorses that resemble a proliferating (and possibly self-replicating) set of workstations, along with piles of chopped rags that suggest abandoned labour or a discarded living space.

Youds’ experiential pieces also explore the schism between objects and lived experience, the ability within contemporary mediated life to “experience something and think about something else simultaneously . . . in this case a physical space imagining a landscape.”9 Within this, Youds is also interested in information and systems. For Everyone a Fountain is “a set of tables that want to be a room, and a room that wants to be a garden.”10 It is 7. Ibid. 8. Robert Youds, accessed December 8, 2017, http://www.robertyouds.ca/ 9. Robert Youds artist talk at Open Space.

A Raspberry Pi computer organizes the circuitry of the lights; compositions are being continually determined. A computer code reads photographic images of a garden through the four seasons, beginning with winter and cycling through until it begins again; at each new cycle, the code may alter or be reinterpreted by that system, resulting in a migrating set of illuminations made into an emotionally and visually enthralling sensorium: the lamps occupy every floor of this ubiquitous work space, turning into an ad hoc approximation of a building with an inaccessible courtyard. The top layer of the constructed element is a series of stacked rows of legal boxes, the kind that may contain archives—or the shoes, folded suit, and reading materials of the dead. A painted rectangle on the side of each box is a tamping down on the formal (rectangles are painted in arresting colours on the sides of the boxes that face the interior, while black rectangles face toward the outer edge), providing an interiority and exteriority that suggests privacy and introversion, but also another set of systems: information.

A sound composition melts as equally into hearing as the lights transmit the beauty of a garden into a series of illuminations—digital encounters made friendly, hospitable, welcoming—an apprehension that sits mediated between the “real” of the garden photographed long before and the experience in the gallery. Equally, the sound registers something that could be cinematic: each tone registers a body moving through space and time and is taken from the melodious turnstiles the artist encountered during a visit to Hong Kong. This register of bodies passing through, lights that melt on and off, is a system of charting time and space that also edges on a feeling of nostalgia in its most academic sense: the longing for something which may not have been directly experienced, an idea of a time not necessarily encountered in one’s own lifetime. It is possible for someone to feel nostalgia for the nineteenth century while living in the twenty-first. Beyond Proust’s madeleine, this nostalgia seems most fitting for both Youds’ work and the mediated contemporary.

A fountain itself is aspirational, a form of civic beatification and an expression of hope. In classical times, water diversion was an expression of wealth and power: Hadrian’s Villa, an elaborate garden retreat with fountains, ponds, and architectural follies, as well as statuaries and living quarters in ancient Tibur, was also display of political power meant to dissuade his enemies. Contemporary cultural theorist Lauren Berlant addresses desire in the twenty-first century as a conflicted state; she suggests, “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project,”11 and yet continuing in the face of adverse conditions, despite being unable to effect structural change on a mass scale, is also a form of resistance.

Within his installation are also two wall pieces: windows that host a mesmerizing cycling of light, resembling his earlier work, Plato’s Cave, a reference to the fugitive, the trapped, who are only able to experience the world by watching reflections on the cave wall. Youds is interested in the synthesis between object and image as a root of consciousness; perhaps this is as Plato imagined long ago, a capacity to both look at something and imagine something else: nostalgia and advanced consciousness require both operations. As Youds says, “We do this 100,000 times a day; like every experience it is unregulated. We all navigate space and time every day and make decisions based on that moving through the world . . . art I don’t see as

May 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, forty-nine amplifier sound recording, 144 legal-sized painted cardboard boxes, thirty lbs. of cloth, four electrical surge protection bars