Robert Youds Retrospective

The Space:

Robert Youds’ BeautifulBeautifulArtificialField is one of a number of shows that the AGGV has put together that don’t just present work within the rationale of a survey or retrospective, but also create an installation of that presumed summary or framing, so that in effect a manifesto is created. Along with the artists involved, contemporary art curator Lisa Baldiserra and the AGGV staff should be credited with putting together shows that have often brought out a more physical, immersive quality in the work. This is certainly true of BBAF, in which one room constantly alternates between light and dark and the other is completely dark, with the only illumination (and that also in flux) being provided by the works themselves. One is immediately drawn into the quality of light as a present, consequential environment, as a backdrop for the questions presented by the work itself as to their relative effects as windows or screens, objects or atmosphere.

This argument about light succeeds wonderfully in the Kerr Gallery, which is dominated by three works only (more on that momentarily). The tone is more argumentative or aggressive in the Centennial Gallery. My feeling is that the room is a little crowded. The undertaking is to draw together three distinct passages in Youds’ light box pieces, and while this can become very rich with just a little time spent comparing and contrasting, there is a danger of being met a little too heavily by the sheer (in both sense of the word) physical presentness of the pieces.

The alternating light enforces a kind of binary on it all, and that unifies things in a way that can be a little physically taxing. Once one adjusts to the meter it imposes, however there are distinct (and valuable) effects it offers on the experience of viewing individual pieces, in such a way that it becomes hard to imagine them - in an institutional setting devoid of natural light- without it.

To go a bit further: the light also has a curious effect of foregrounding the amount of time one feels one has spent in front of a work or in the room as a whole. Youds is coming from and commenting on a tradition of abstract painting, and one of the things that emerged in the heyday of North American large-scale abstraction was the question of duration vis a vis immersion. That is, at what distance does the viewer first approach a large, involving ‘field’ of the painting’s surface? As one moves toward it, does it reward a progression from the emblematic or monumental to the intimate or topological? If the painting presents as simple (as in a fourteen foot high red stripe on a blue field by Barnett Newman), is its effect on us instantaneous, or are there rewards for looking longer (the saturation and afterimage of Newman’s coloured bands, the sense of being dwarfed that arises from the parallax view of the towering canvas)?

Paint, after all is a ‘slow’ medium (as in ‘slow food’) and painters lament how to grab and hold the necessary allotment of attention of viewers weaned on TV or digital imagery. The lightboxes present themselves ‘fast’ paintings – Youds has referred to them as ‘shopping mall Mondrians’- and the alternating light-dark room makes you very aware of the relative staying power of each encounter. Superficially, it proposes to offer the image-saturated viewer a condensed experience of the back-and-forth, engagement-interval experience that one characteristically has with a conventional room full of paintings. Of course, large-scale abstraction came of age at the same time as the modern art viewing space (gallery/museum as white, featureless cube, as vacuum), and Youds’ work is pitched to that competition. One wonders how his work might operate in a domestic setting with longer, slower intervals of light, dark, and attention.

It is the contrast between the convention of a room full of paintings and the Centennial Gallery that is problematic, but interestingly so. In a recent review of an important survey of classic Colour Field painting and its descendants (in which work by Youds was included), David Moos’ “The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art, 1950-2005”, Robert Linsley commented that much of the current abstract work looked back to its roots for a reference point rather than forward…”I am struck by the general inability of recent work to respond to its predecessors in any way but through quotation” (1.) The danger with the display of work in the Centennial Gallery is to take it in too quickly, reading the whole as some critique of historical abstract painting, to accept and then dismiss its various novel approaches as elegant and/or elegiac repackaging. To do so is to miss one of the retrospective’s most rewarding aspects, which is the movement by degrees from the referencing of paintings’ received tropes against the horizon of an assumed shared historical moment, into a more immediate and physical engagement with the viewer’s perceptual imagination. Let’s unpack this…

First, finish.

On the West wall, north corner, there is a series of three pieces all involving a tall vertical rectangle of coloured light: Booster, Visiteur, and Thank You. The works all seem to present ‘options’ (Booster’s grey and blue panels reference number-coded colour chips from a hardware store, Visiteur offers two near variations on a hotrod-style flame graphic, Thank You, a bit more complex, moves left to right over varying encounters of surface reading: hard, flat and bipartite to soft, mixed and gregarious). The red bar creates a hot frequency on the viewer’s eye as it makes its first approach from the left, phasing out the issue of choice, opening the painting’s proposition of parts and then collapsing it into a singularity. To paraphrase a passage of Nietzsche dear to Rothko, what pulls you in also stops you from going further, so that rather than read deeply, you linger over the phenomenon of attraction. The lights radiate something magnetic: not quite warmth, more like charisma. These works are about a display of power, not as a prelude to force, but to speculation - perhaps indecision- within very limited confines.

This progress (power-attraction -limited sensuality-paralysis) reminded me of a lot of my own experiences with recreational consumerism, that point-of-purchase-precipice feeling of being both master and servant to a host of undecided values. In this sense these works recall Ashley Bickerton’s 1988 work Tormented Self-Portrait, in which a collection of brand logos present themselves as a box, backpack or torso that has been hopelessly overbuilt with the chrome and detailing one associates with the ‘finish-fetish’ of hobby cars or luxury appliances. Youds’ wall-mountings are likewise heavy-duty, ‘overdetermined’ if you will, an impressive display for a pointedly marginal effect. The result is speculative frivolity underscored with doubt and anxiety, sustained by attraction… which feels right for the late ‘90’s, with its overbuilt SUV’s, and anthropomorphic, I-MAC fetishes.

Here I will agree with Linsley and say that these works derive urgency from the sense of something that has come before. We might regard the works as being at once both a nod to the abstract of late Mondrian or classic Kenneth Noland (with their utopian or contemplative baggage riding along), but also a pressing forward of that reference into the ‘now’ of a highly reflective, contemporary finish. The tricky thing is that neither ‘read’ has a lot of staying power: the works don’t quite hold your attention like a period Colour Field painting, and the newness evaporates quickly on a palette of dry wit. What remains is the obdurate obstacle (or spectacle) of the works’ materials and construction. The exception is Thank You, in which the small bundle of fabric – like a cellular anomaly on the frontal lobe- causes a kind of hiccup or seizure in the slick shifts of the surface. The bundle is a reference to an earlier body of work by Youds, Soft Works for Complicated Needs, and its presence as a kind of sub-loop within the larger order is that of an embryo or prisoner: it subscribes to its own calendar.

“Something Looks Back”

The vertical bars of light in the works just mentioned deserve a little more comment. I implied a kind of magnetism in their relationship to both the viewer and their place in a piece as a whole. One parallel that comes to mind is from Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’, the vertical bands that divide and dowse the surface, as a gesture toward unification, and immediacy. Yve-Alain Bois has commented repeatedly on the zip as a force that both absorbs and reflects, not to be read as a ‘figure’ in the ‘ground’ of the picture, but an address to the viewer that opens the rest of the work up to self-identification and location (paraphrasing Newman, ‘a sense of one’s own scale’). As such, the ‘zip’ is both a part of the painting and a definitive break with the painterly rhythm of suggestion and deflection. Bois identifies the zip as a ‘shifter’,

[…] A sign of a special kind, one that emphasizes a certain circularity between its signification as a sign and the actual situation of its utterance: It partakes of the category of words that linguists call "shifters," such as personal pronouns or markers like now, here, right here (not coincidentally, these are Newman titles) […] And this present tense is an attempt to address the spectator directly, immediately, as an "I" to a "You"(2.)

All this by way of reminding me of a remark I once heard Youds make, about knowing when a painting was finished: “Something looks back.” Something similar might be happening with the four pieces in the galley that resemble lamps or eyes, the two spherical pieces titled Argument for Absorption, and the more lens-like Friendlyburn and Skymud.

The Absorption pieces are aggressive encounters. Their surfaces (slightly brushed or scratched on close inspection) are sheer: in regarding them carefully, one immediately feels positioned by them. Standing before the green Absorption piece, I felt a less like the one doing the inquiring, and more as if I were submitting to examination (as in optical testing ‘look here please and do not blink.’)

The question of whether one regards a painting or is regarded is one as old as Byzantine icons or the Hindu notion of Darsan: the painter’s “I and You” is converted to “I and thou” by a viewer who has the uncanny but sensation of feeling the gaze of something specific and inhuman. Within a tradition that accepts the omnipresence of spiritual currency, this metaphysic is at home. In a secular culture, the sensation can be overwhelming: critic David Hickey once commented that being in a room full of Minimalist abstract paintings was like being judged by a circle of Old Testament patriarchs. The Argument for Absorption pieces position themselves as part of the larger construction of the institutional gallery space, a space whose ‘neutral’ white walls are not without connotations of cultural propriety, preciousness and power. To focus on them is to be subject to surveillance, and to stand apart from them is to feel the familiar sensation of being in the blind spot of an aloof security camera and feeling (for no rational reason) relieved (3.)

Friendlyburn and Skymud operate differently, demonstrating that the relationship between icon and the searching gaze is a two way street. Looking up into them, one feels a slight rotation, as if undergoing alignment, the effect of devices (clips? Fasteners?) along the edges of the circular lights. This feels like some preamble to the full affirmation, as does the first gloss of light bouncing off of the disk-like surface. A moment later an impression of colour arrives, but seems unattached to any specific material, (tinted plastic or cellophane, for example) instead hovering at the back of the lights in a way that is relaxing rather than painful to look at. The colours have a peculiar opacity (chartreuse for Friendlyburn and a lovely murky mixed grey for Skymud), despite their obvious transience, like the matte glare coming off the dull side of tinfoil, or the luminosity of rain clouds that are darker yet more luminous than the horizon beneath them. In their calm, almost-passive persistence, they recall the slight-of-hand that suspends a Kenneth Noland bull’s-eye or a pane of light forestalled by James Turell.

My suspicion is that pieces such as the Arguments or Skymud might be more fully enjoyed in the context of sculpture. They suffer from being positioned in a room full of objects that more readily connect to the flat-on-the-wall context of looking at pictures, as the ingenuity of their construction seems unnecessary, even arch, in illustrating how a viewer might (as this critic just has) pare away their presence in the space in a hurry to get to the optical prize: not looking at oneself looking. The opposite is true, incidentally, of works like Lo and Behold, which begin with the premise of flatness and move out from there.

Home is orifice

This argument becomes stronger in two ambitious pieces, Three Hundred Times a Day and Home is Office. Both have started to undertake the feel of self-referencing systems, and both succeed –in different ways- of projecting a sense of intrinsic and extrinsic structure that also allows room for a wandering gaze. They are assembled out of parts that look acquired, readymade, with enough obvious traces of the decision-making mind at work to invite the viewer into the narrative of their coming together. Home is Office establishes a range of forms and presentations from flatly iconic (decal-like squares of enamel) to quasi-organic (the red, float-like sphere bulging within what looks like a zippered garment bag). Likewise, Three Hundred Times a Day looks like a shop window but is also a modernist grid, laden with rows of bags softly enfolding lights. Both pieces invoke connections to a larger world of objects as commodities: 300 Times confronts viewers with both security alarm company stickers warning them to stay behind the glass, and monitor screen that shows that they are the object of surveillance; Home has false plug-like conduits attaching it to the wall and floor of the gallery.

For all of their reference to the Utopian schematics of Modernism, these reflect human situations and problems in a way that constructs a story within the proposition of a schematic. Here one of Linsley’s reductive remarks about contemporary abstraction seems apt: “[the] work is basically narrative, and, like any engaging story, full of interesting characters, treated warmly yet ironically by their author”(4.)

That is, the ‘shopping bag’ shapes in 300 Times a day, or the bulging ball in Home become stops along a visual route that picks up richer associations as the viewer looks, but they are associations from the world at large: garment bags, shop windows, security cameras, keypads. Despite their grid-like presentations, they are not (as Rosalind Krauss once remarked of the grid) about shutting out the world outside, like Mondrian turning his chair away from the window to avoid ‘corrupting his eye’. Instead, their interfaces are the routine ones we engage whenever we leave a world of intimacy – the domestic world- for the increasingly more evident world of travel and transactions.

An Aside

During my years as an undergraduate student at UVic, I recall Youds showcasing images of the work of Peter Halley for a third-year painting class. Halley’s, abstract paintings have been called ‘Neo-Geometric’. Like many of those questionable Neo/isms of the 1980’s, Halley's newness was caught up with the past…a referencing of the presumed power of seminal abstraction from the perspective of a contemporary cancellation of such possibilities: Halley cribbed his line from French savant Jean Baudrillard in suggesting that his abstractions were ‘simulacra’, insubstantial placeholders of the real thing. The compositional presentations of Halley’s seminal ‘conduit’ paintings were hard and flat, leaving no space for the kinds of dramatic experiencing of implied depth, projection or presence that can emerge from a Mondrian or Reinhart (for instance) when seen in the flesh…in fact, being composed from vinyl mac-tac they weren’t surfaces one penetrated at all, but (as Donald Kuspit observed) the fetishists’ version of painting surfaces (5.)

In hindsight, the ‘simulacrum’ argument for Halley can seem a bit insubstantial (The Matrix for art students), unless you see the artist not as an academic commentator or futurist (credentials once used to make his work seem ‘radical’), but as a humanist acknowledging and working within a reduced scale of expectations as to what a picture –abstract or otherwise- has the power to express. That is, in the very narrow gap between our impressions of real experience, and virtual version of same, there is an authentic- if wan- human moment. The movement made in Halley’s work through the eighties into the nineties and beyond (a move, it should be said, made by many of his contemporaries as well) has been away from emblematic-yet-impenetrable presentations of ‘signs’, and toward increased play of relative aspects of colour, scale and surface, within an established network. They are not (and this is no complaint) aspiring to engage an institutional audience on any real level of moral or political seriousness; they are beautiful hobby paintings (6.)

The gambit is whether components of Modernist abstraction still work for us, and whether they do so as an argot of seriousness, set of glamorous tags or still-vital linkage of endeavours. In this sense it is hardly surprising that in works such as Visiteur we see Youds tapping a Hot Rod aesthetic: he is pointedly building new vehicles from spruced up old parts. In this sense these works are painterly, demonstrating the looseness and confederacy that belies their substantial resources as constructions…their components look adapted and are about adaptation.

Another Aside

There is a Duchamp poem I thought of when I saw Three Hundred Times a Day that I think has some relevance to both pieces. It seems schoolmarmish to analyse it at length, but suffice to say that I think with both 300 Times and Home, Youds starts on Halley’s ground, but expands the relationship that the viewer has to these flat, rebuffing surfaces into something more complex; less like ‘art’ and more like life:

Can one make works that are not works of “art”?

Submit to the interrogation of shop windows (therefore)

The insisting of the shop window (therefore)

The shop window proof of the existence of the exterior world (therefore)

When one submits to the examination of the shop window, one pro-

nounces also one's own sentence. In effect, the choice is “come and go”.

From the demand of shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop

windows, the decision of choice is concluded. No stubbornness, no ab-

surdity,: to hide the coition through a window glass with one or many

objects of the shop window. The task consists of breaking the glass and in

rueing it as soon as possession is consummated. Q.E.D.

Summing Up

On the East wall of the Centennial Gallery are a series of recent pieces that present themselves as larger, rectangular light boxes that feature colours and shapes created by not-quite-discernable objects or screens contained within them. The first features a stack of bottles like a floating refrigerator rack. The boxes with more specific contents could be read as examinations of routine. The objects of ­Saturday are presented like the shelves of the proverbial bathroom medicine cabinet. Moving in close to scrutinize them for answers, one sees them blur out like a mirage. The choices their contents potentially represent are suspended from judgement.

It seems as if with these works Youds has gotten comfortable with the problem of presenting painterly mechanics using other materials. To put it another way, has gotten through the other end of relating to ‘painting’ as such, and succeeded in producing works whose operations –while strongly reminiscent of the mechanics and metaphysics of painting- are not referential to that medium in a pointedly critical manner. Certain battles from the heritage of Minimalism that are evident in other works in the room seem to have been put aside here, such as whether we perceive a work as a whole or a procession of parts, or just how a painting maintains its powers to beguile and defer as illusion, while also claiming for itself some portion of the larger space – the space of sculpture or designed environment- as a party to that illusion. He has done so by making a series of gestures that could be read as conservative: relying on a consistent rectangular, wall-projected format for presentation, confining all of the works’ available information to a flat plane, and framing the content of the work in terms of the venerable stand-bye of still-life painting.

Author and critic Siri Hustvedt has written that still life lends itself to self-reflexive painting, because the subject is material but immobile, much like the substance of paint itself (8.) She comments on painters such as Chardin and Cezanne using the medium to effectively reassess the problems of seeing and rendering in a calculated, probing manner. Of course, still life as a subject is all about control over a view, and thus its depiction, a way of conducting an etude in which forms rather than subjects are the concern…this much is the accepted norm in modern painting. What is less obvious to contemporary viewers is that underwriting the escape into formal concerns was the presumed moral content of still life as an allegory of life and death, consumption and waste, venal and virtuous appetites. Arguably, it wasn’t left behind at all, but was transubstantiated into an added dimension of possession and mortality located within an attention to the paint body itself, which is to say that in a work by Cezanne or Chardin the sense of what whets the appetite even as it portrays its own frangibility is the paint stroke itself, as a unit of sensuous attention over time, adjusted for difficulty, pleasure, or both.

Youds’ inquiry into the territory of light and perception is also predicated on an escape from morally freighted allegory. Actually, two (related) allegories: the elegiac tone taken on in arguments for painting’s continued relevance as a public medium (or lack thereof), and –relatedly- the arguments used to supply moral and existential weight to photography, as representing all that painting no longer has to offer in the arena of social and political commentary. Both these arguments are couched around the question of representation - what painting represents and to whom – and undertake the notion that all presentations are conceptually filtered. Abstract painting in these context of these discussions is not abstract painting as an experience or event (that is, proper to the artist and viewer alike), but a cultural object; that is, abstract painting as a sign or placeholder for any number of cultural values: all cause and no effect. Perhaps while touching on these arguments, it’s worthwhile to recall Barnett Newman’s assertion that abstraction made the claim for the ‘presentation’ of itself rather than representation of something else, and that the same claim is made nowadays by artists working in virtual reality. The lightbox works present haptic staging grounds for virtual encounters.

The three pieces entitled Friday, Saturday and Sunday for instance, form a kind of lyrical bridge between the enjoyment of each piece as a fascinating puzzle-object, and the sense of continued time and attention building in the work. Each piece frames suggestions of a mood: sobriety, wakefulness, the residue of obligations, sleep. The blurred, filtered, delineation of objects within the cases speak of persistence and deferral, and over the course of several pieces, develop into a convincing measure of the passage of time in an active mind. The mood is domestic, the objects (as still life subjects so often are) familiar enough to be responsive to minor nuances of situation and attention. All of this happens in a very slim perceptual space, maybe between twenty inches and twelve feet from the surfaces of the lightboxes. Too far away and they become signeage; too close and they revert to being illumination. At just the right moment they project through this opacity an access to interior space that feels like privacy.

The most pleasurable thing about the lightboxes in this respect is their shallowness: the sense that whatever their contents are blur to a thin veil at the horizon of our taking them in. They reminded me of Seurat’s major pointillist painting, Afternoon on the Isle of the Grand Jatte, in one way because they offer a shimmering vision that loses its pictoriality -but not its cohesion- at close range, becoming equal parts admirable material fact and magnetic field. And while we might initially think that’s a good gimmick, we come around to realizing that admirable material facts constitute a pretty durable form of pleasure taking over time. We might go further and say that Youds has achieved what Seurat did: the couching of domestic urban experiences on a scale and focus of execution that is usually reserved for didactic public (political or moral) art, and done so in such a relaxed manner as to be entirely convincing.

Notes

1. Robert Linsley, “The Shape of Colour”, Canadian Art, Fall 2005, Volume 22, number 3, p 106

2. Yve-Alain Bois, "Here to there and back - Barnett Newman Retrospective", Artforum International Magazine Inc., 2002

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3. This has been said too many times, but a good unpacking of these ideas and their effect on viewership is Norman’s Bryson’s “ The Logic of the Curatorial Gaze”

4. Linsley, p. 106

5. C.f. Donald Kuspit, “ Young Necrophiliacs, Old Narcissists: Art about the Death of Art”, The New Subjectivism, Art in the 1980’s, New York: Da Capo Press, 1993

6. C.f. Thomas Crow, “The Return of Hank Herron: Simulated Abstraction and the Service Economy of Art”, Modern Art in the Common Culture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996

7. Marcel Duchamp, “Speculations”, Neuilly, 1913, adapted from Jerome Rothenberg’s adaptation of Peggy Gugenheim’s translation from the French, Poems for the Millennium,

8. Siri Hustvedt, “Ghosts at the Table”, Mysteries of the Rectangle, pp 43-66