ROBERT YOUDS: FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN URBAN SPACE AND STORAGE, DISPLACED NATURE, AND A TELEMATIC APPROACH TO REALITY

“What does it mean to experience something and then think of something else simultaneously, which in a lot of ways is symptomatic of the condition we live in today?”1

—ROBERT YOUDS

With our everyday existence being punctuated by tweets, vibrations, and urgent notifications of various digital platforms, our current relationship with reality is often one step removed. The yearning to “mentally travel” or escape one’s physical surroundings, however, is nothing new. As technology becomes a great “enabler” of simultaneous occupation of two spatio-temporal spheres, the need for a real connection to nature becomes increasingly desirable.

Over the last decade, Robert Youds has developed a body of work, which includes three significant installations that address his ongoing dialogue with the built environment through the use of materials—those associated with industrial construction and utility. His material vocabulary revisits a previous era, when labourers from farms or villages migrated to factories and workshops, eventually forming cities and even megacities. In time, the urban sprawl would oblige city dwellers to travel hours in search of a landscape that even remotely resembles nature.

For Everyone a Fountain’s sculptural form, both its verticality and seriality, recall the architectural vernacular of a metropolis—one that shares a similarity to Hong Kong as viewed in Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density, a body of work that fuses documentary photography and anthropological survey. Like Wolf’s images, Youds’ installation similarly acknowledges the city’s overwhelming concentration of crowded residential towers and soaring skyscrapers. The tables are stacked in a manner that at once recalls the DIY nature of Kowloon’s Walled City2 and the intense geometry of Hong Kong’s New Towns (a cluster of towers with more than half a million inhabitants). The painted cardboard boxes echo the palate of social housing blocks, with colourful hues assigned to the task of bringing levity to these concrete columbaria. The cardboard storage boxes, the kind found in archives, frame this architecture as “human storage facilities” where people can be neatly compartmentalized and organized in order to facilitate privacy and hygiene, as well as prevent social conflict.

Yet the tower blocks of these “new towns” present an interesting juxtaposition: they are at once brutal, almost violent in their uniformity, but like beehives, they swarm with life. Inside the individual concrete units, individuals live out their normal lives as they would in any other dwelling— lighting incense on their shrines, simmering medicinal Cantonese soups, binge-watching Netflix, or slaving over multiplication tables.

After first documenting the external facades of social housing in Hong Kong, Wolf turned his lens on the humanity that resided within the walls of this all-consuming concrete. Lost Laundry, HK Breaks, HK Flora, and Informal Seating Arrangements are all series that provide snapshots of the everyday: a crippled chair bound together with plastic string, a plant in a broken planter hanging off a water spigot, or an errant pair of underwear that has fallen off laundry poles to be caught by wall-mounted air-conditioning units. Created by the residents of the neighbourhoods, these site-specific street installations are monuments to the potential for human creativity within the concrete box.

Youds’ monolithic housing complex also bears these same traces of human existence: piles of rags, their soft forms bringing warmth to the gleaming steel composition, act as a symbolic reference to the labour inherent in the work. As explained by Youds in an online video documentation of his artist talk,

How traces of humanity settle in a human realm is interesting to me. [This] pile of rags, they are a gesture; they are a remnant; these were objects I used to clean the metal, and I became conscious of my own labour in the piece. And there is that trace of humanism which exists in the rags.3

The installation illustrates not only the idea of the city as a structure for human storage but also its logistics. In addition to the metal structures and the lights, there is an audio component—found sound from the hallways of Hong Kong’s subway system, procured during a trip to Hong Kong. Youds’ sound composition is created from different tones produced when passengers enter the subway turnstiles. What fascinated him was how the passengers’ demographic information was communicated through sound with the tone of the turnstiles: a student metro pass would have a separate tone to that of a senior pass or a tourist card. Public transit, in the context of the city, can be seen as a human delivery system; one which seeks to unite humans with their homes in the most efficient way possible. Though we often see ourselves, “humans,” as masters of the urban environment, perhaps the environment—through the design of buildings, arteries, transit systems, and pedestrian pathways—is driving us?

The tension in Youds’ installation lies within the essential need to store, categorize, and transport humans and the need for humans to express their humanity, their individuality, and their connection to the natural world. In titling his work For Everyone a Fountain, Youds borrows from Canadian architect Moshe Safdie’s idealist design theory presented in For Everyone a Garden. Youds shares Safdie’s utopian notions of architecture’s potential for social transformation or at least has faith in the power of design to enhance community, be it through the introduction of concrete thoroughfares or green spaces, which act as small yet important footnotes to a pastoral existence. In an article about an earlier series of paintings, handmade ultramarine mantra, in Canadian Art,4 Youds speaks of “a rustic modernism, encoded with an urban patina of longing for a self once imagined and enabled within nature”—a sentiment that seems very present in For Everyone a Fountain.

Urban living necessitates a kind of trade-off: jobs, enriching cultural opportunities, and variety in exchange for green, blue, and tranquility. However, in many Asian countries, and in particular in China, this simultaneous desire for density and serenity has lead to interesting innovations in design and horticulture that seek to satisfy the two competing desires. Chinese gardens, bonsai, and landscape painting all attempt to replicate a sense of sanctuary and spiritual enlightenment through different artistic forms. Unlike English- or French-style gardens, which prioritize characteristics of open spaces, intricate pathways, colour, and flower selection, Chinese gardens possess a labyrinthine, gnarled sense of space and have limited interest in flowers. Navigating a garden pathway, one gazes upon a landscape of lakes, rivers, and mountains, all made small: the mountains are represented by complex rockeries made of “wrinkled rocks,” and the lakes are manifested as small ponds, often featuring boats made of concrete or stone. For those who cannot afford their own private garden, there are bonsai, carefully pruned to look like pines clinging to the sides of windswept mountains, and landscape paintings depicting transcendental scenes of mist-enveloped peaks—all designed to transport the viewer to another spiritual plane.

This sense of “mental travelling,” which one might call a “telematic approach to reality,” inspires the artist’s question: “What does it mean to experience something and then think of something else simultaneously?”5

Living in an urban environment, we experience nature in “degrees of separation.” We make forays into it—through the idyllic images on our screensaver, through documentaries narrated by David Attenborough, or through an afternoon visit to our local park. The City Beautiful and garden city movements6 posited that this kind of “nature tourism” would bring about a utopian society and eliminate social ills. For Everyone a Fountain explores “displacement of nature” further, using images of Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, taken during spring, summer, fall, and winter to create a durational light composition. An algorithm crawls through this source material, transforming it into colours that are fed into the Raspberry

Pi (a small, single-board computer) and outputted as brief glows of colour in a series of adjustable desk lamps, which dot the base of the installation. The soft chromatic choreography of entrances and exits mimics the movements of inhabitants in a faraway tower block turning lights on and off.

In the cinematic realm of science fiction, it is common to see individuals inhabiting alienating black boxes with very few personal items. Often, in such circumstances, the window is represented by an LCD screen of a waterfall or some other idyllic natural landscape. Applying an abstract filter to this concept, Youds began to explore natural simulations in 2009 with For Everyone a Window—a large picture window frame with digital-signboard arrows that guide visitors through a six-minute durational experience with changing colours and day/night alterations. In For Everyone a Sunset (2014), he took this concept a step further with a monumental public art installation that utilized industrial materials to create cinematic plays of light.

Employing the natural, the industrial, and the digital, Youds’ works manage to simultaneously occupy three different temporal spheres. Like a bonsai pruned to look as if it has withstood hundreds of winters, his work attempts to compact and chorale different periods of time into one space, making reference to the “chronology of nature and man” in the same way that Chinese landscape painting uses a visual and symbolic language to speak of “natural time.”

In traditional Chinese culture, nature and time were always inseparably linked. The lunar calendar, for instance, divides the year into twentyfour “solar terms,” which foretell both climatic and natural events. For instance, during the season of jinzhe, when the sun reaches the longitude of 345 degrees, thunderstorms are said to awake hibernating insects. This seasonality plays an integral part in Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, literature, and poetry, as well as in Chinese painting, where the seasonal shifts are represented by certain symbolic plants: orchids for spring; lotuses for summer; chrysanthemums for fall; and plum, pine, and bamboo, known as the Three Friends of Winter. The depictions of these plants are often more schematic than realistic. A full tree is never fully rendered: a few branches with leaves or blossoms are shorthand for the idea of “tree.” The purpose of these paintings is not to create a facsimile of reality but rather an atmosphere to be filled in by the viewer’s imagination. Similarly, For Everyone a Fountain offers us the outline of a cityscape, the aluminum work tables signifying the architectural grid of the city—the city being a symbol of work and economic productivity. Though today work tables have been replaced by cubicles, the labour of crunching numbers, welding pixels, and transporting cartloads of data still exists.

Youds’ work embodies this distinctly modern conundrum: the urge to return to a simpler state contrasted with the drive to remain within and often ahead of or our temporal framework—driven by the compulsion to install the latest mental or technical updates. Though we know that these artificial replicas of nature are not “the real thing,” we seem quite comfortable with our selfdelusion. After all the physical labour required to live completely within the realm of nature—free of modern conveniences—leaves little time for contemplation or meditation.

DIANA FREUNDL

March 28, 2018

FOR EVERYONE A FOUNTAIN , 2016

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, four electrical surge protection bars