Douglas Coupland: Never Left Art School
Story: Craig David Long.
Photography: Mark Peckmezian.
Veer to the gas station and go to the stop sign (it’s unmistakable).
Follow the yellow line for a half-mile.
Along this road you’ll drive straight through a weird roundabout thingy.
I’m at the end but there’s no number there.
The driveway is hard to see from road. Look for bamboo.
The front door is by the coloured pots. There’s no door handle.
If you find yourself walking down the driveway too far, it means you’ve missed it.
This is a sampling of the route markers to Douglas Coupland’s home. Or do they guide you to a portal that throws you into his hyperreal world? It all bears an eerie similarity to the fate of poor Ethan Jarlewski, the central character in Coupland’s 2006 novel JPod, who, in an unfortunate twist of events, is stranded in the bleak hinterlands of avian flu–inflicted industrial China. In exchange for a lift back to Shanghai, Ethan is coaxed to sell his laptop and all its contents—every digital manifestation of his personal life—to who else, the novel’s antagonist, Coupland himself. The author, artist and public figure’s motive? Fodder for his next book of fiction, which turns out to be JPod.
Coupland’s self-referential deus ex machina literary device is a delight that gives the entire novel up to that point—its storyline, layout, typographic design—a clever new context. And while, admittedly, it may be a little self-indulgent to think the mastermind has you pegged for his next sinister plotline, Coupland’s work, including the curation of his own persona, is an exercise in contrasts, where the lines between reality and fiction, digital and traditional, public and private, are often blurred.
Coupland’s directions reveal as much about the path as the man and his astute observations of the physical and social environment around him, a trademark of his artistic practice and writing style. It’s through Coupland’s lens that the mundane, ordinary aspects of life—the normalized behaviours, the objects we interact with on a daily basis but accept at face value—are refracted back to us to reveal their social or cultural meaning, sometimes even their absurdity. His characters are the bit players and beta personalities of the world, who remind us of everyday people we ourselves know and loathe or love in our own lives. In JPod and Generation X, it makes you LOL. In Hey Nostradamus!, it makes you :’( .
Thirteen novels, two short story collections, eight non-fiction works, seven dramas or screenplays, three post-secondary degrees, three honorary doctorates, numerous permanent public artworks in cities across Canada, countless solo and group exhibitions at galleries, museums, and art fairs worldwide. Coupland has even designed a clothing collection in collaboration with Roots Canada. The details are all there on his website and on Wikipedia, and with over 417,800 Twitter followers, what more, really, is there to add about a creative mind as prolific and well-documented as Coupland’s? His own line in “A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years”, a list of 45 survival tips he wrote for The Globe and Mail’s October 8, 2010 edition, is apt: “16) ‘You’ will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze. While its already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances—it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.”
“Here’s the thing, we’re doing a profile right?” Coupland remarks. “That’s like scrimshaw. It’s an art form that’s borderline extinct. In fact, it’s almost kind of retro that we’re doing this. Maybe the profile is going to come back. Or maybe you have to reinvent it first.”
Weighty advice from someone who does so effortlessly; Coupland has penned biographies and created artworks that have interpreted the lives of some of Canada’s greatest: Marshall McLuhan, Terry Fox, the Group of Seven, Emily Carr, soldiers in the Battle of 1812, the country’s fallen firefighters. “All dead people,” Coupland says, flatly. “I realize I sort of have this sub-career of documenting dead Canadians, which is not something I set out to do. And at the moment, I’m weirdly respected, and I don’t know where that came from. I think it’s because my hair has gone prematurely white.”
Of course, Coupland has his adversaries too, who criticize his literary ability, his persona, his relevance. But that comes with the territory: Coupland’s first novel (published at age 29 in 1991), Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, is proclaimed to have defined the times it was written in, and he has achieved similar acclaim when writing about Vancouver (City of Glass), Canada (Souvenir of Canada), corporate culture in the tech industry (Microserfs; JPod), and the human experience in general (all the rest). As such, public expectations are high. But at home, Coupland is remarkably calm, quiet, reflective, and in some ways shy, even—almost an antithesis to what you might expect. And to see his mind at work, the wheels turning as he processes stimuli, is remarkable. “See, now you are seeing me in my thinking out loud mode, which no one ever sees,” he quips, mid-thought.
Coupland churns out a series of seemingly superficial observations, like the fact that tekka maki rolls are sold at the Lonsdale Chevron gas station, and that ready-to-plant cedar hedges are sold at local supermarkets all over town. Then he underscores that these things are actually Vancouver-only phenomena. “People must come to this city and think, ‘What the fuck is with you and hedges?’ There are all these really self-evident things out there once you realize it, once you start to look at them harder, once you start to aestheticize them,” he says, comparing this thinking to that of his idols of the pop art era. “Back in 1962, people were driving around to huge motels and restaurants—signage everywhere. It wasn’t until Andy Warhol said, ‘okay, it’s pop,’ that you saw it that way. And then you could never see the world the way it used to be. I ask myself, what else can we look at that’s actually an aesthetic, but we haven’t yet discussed it as such? I like writing about these universes that are still under the radar, or that are not culturally visible yet. There is a lot to be said for pursuing seemingly useless things. We’re social creatures, so to be interested in, and watch carefully, what people are doing, is a very high expression of what we are about as a species.”
Glance around his house, or at any of his “stacked” artworks, and you quickly understand that iteration is a major theme. Today, the University of British Columbia Library has accumulated over 200 boxes of Coupland’s personal effects: notepads, early drafts and manuscripts, prototypes and moquettes of artworks, fanmail and professional correspondence, samples from the Roots Collection, ephemera, and works in progress—anything and everything that documents his process from concept to creation. As lead archivist Sarah Romkey says, “We sometimes have to rethink what we consider an archive, when we’re working with Doug’s material. We learn a lot about our own practice as archivists—what you keep and how you organize it. Sometimes it’s hard to understand why a piece of ephemera, like a Gap receipt, a boarding pass, or Styrofoam cups, is significant. But then you look all the way down the road, and you gain a new understanding or perspective on his work. Getting lost in the contents is an occupational hazard, for sure.”
There is also the interdisciplinary aspect of Coupland’s work, the seamless intertwining of digital and traditional modes of creation, that presents other challenges, and opportunities. “Coupland’s digital archive will probably be the most complicated ever,” Romkey laments and enthuses at once. She points to a series of collages that demonstrate his fusion of art, design, and technology. Coupland created them while on a book tour in the mid-nineties, affixing receipts, tickets, and product packaging to airplane safety guides or planks of wood with glue and elastic bands, whatever he came across during his travels. He would then send them by courier to his partner back home, who would work with a computer technician to scan and upload them to Coupland’s website, in what is believed to have been one of the first blog-like formats to appear on the Internet.
Lately, Coupland’s artistic practice has largely been informed by his pursuits in the digital sphere. In his 2010 exhibition and series G72K10, Coupland revisited famous Group of Seven artworks by vectoring their likeness in Adobe Photoshop and repainting them on everything from canvases to canoes. The past informs the present, and the present informs the past. Similarly, his pixelated orca statue, publically displayed along Vancouver’s harbourfront, is an interpretation and manifestation of the physical world as seen through the lens of the digital age.
Slogans for the 21st Century is one of Coupland’s latest series. The text-based artworks were recently presented in a solo exhibition at Toronto’s Daniel Faria Gallery, where Coupland is represented. The words “being middle class was fun” and “it’s okay to want to stop being an individual” can be understood as protests, affirmations, epithets, and more, depending on the context in which they are perceived. (Just imagine seeing one on a t-shirt, or as a billboard.) At the Daniel Faria Gallery, however, they were presented alongside large-scale paintings of multicolour pixelated QR codes, which are capable of being scanned by a smartphone to display statements about life and death written by Coupland. “Imagine a car crash that never stops,” one begins. Despite their cheerful appearance, together, the two bodies of work are rather haunting and aphoristic.
This past November, Coupland was recognized by Canada’s design museum in Toronto, the Design Exchange, as their inaugural Gamechanger, an award that will annually honour an “internationally acclaimed designer who effortlessly moves between creative disciplines, consistently demonstrating an expression of creativity across all platforms”. There’s no better candidate to kick off the campaign.
“It’s always nice to have your work recognized,” Coupland remarks. “And it makes me think about what it is I’ve been doing. It’s more of an acknowledgement that you can take one sensibility, and sort of apply it to another medium, or another practice. I call it ‘never leaving art school’.” But don’t mistake this philosophy for some puer aeternus complex. What Coupland means is that for him, creativity is creativity, and the idea should dictate the form. “In my head it still feels like 1983, in terms of getting all the neurons firing at the same time. I don’t see that much difference between these things. I realize, oh you know what, I’m a visual thinker, and so it’s very easy for me to think of ‘words plus images’.”
He continues to meander down that road: “When I look back on my work, it’s like driving past a school I used to go to a long, long time ago. When I started writing, people would say, ‘Oh, this is going to become dated. This is just a passing thing.’ And now, 20-something years into it, what was once something that people thought would become dated, has become a sort of time-capsule.”
Dust off a copy of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Strangely, the same sense of foreboding is still palpable. The concerns then, of over-education, lack of employment, and all-encompassing corporate and consumer culture, still pervade. It makes you wonder if we’ve really progressed at all. But what separates this generation from the one Coupland wrote about, is that now new tools exist that serve as coping mechanisms. It has never been easier to escape without leaving, to arouse the senses, and to find humour, information or inspiration. It has also never been easier to create or curate, to innovate, or to communicate.
The speed of technology has taught us to adapt, while corporate messaging has encouraged us to dream and desire. These things conspire to incite impatience and urgency. But as for how it will all translate to economics, politics, or civic or social life—we’re only beginning to see and understand the implications of that. Coupland won’t be able to provide us these answers, but he may hold a mirror up to us along the way.
The years don’t matter anymore. It’s more like technological assaults on our psyche every day that are what really measure time. The book happened in the 14th or 15th century. TV happened in a big way in the fifties. Now we’ve got the equivalent of the TV, multiplied by the book, to the power of data, all multiplied by the number of people on earth, times one terabyte for gratuitous “wahhhhh!” Our brains are barely wiring us up to take us from one thing to the next. I think everyone is saying, “Oh god. Okay. What pimple-faced geek in California is going to do something that’s going to fuck us up again and again and again?” And you know, I think we’re doing a pretty good job of dealing with that, all things considered.
From the Winter 2012 issue of MONTECRISTO.
![Rising Stars
Story: Craig David Long.
“Expose Yourself!” That’s the saucy new headline Leila Getz is working on to promote the 33rd season of the Vancouver Recital Society (VRS). “And no previous experience is necessary,” the petite woman adds in a trilling South African accent, audibly laughing as she types feverishly into her laptop keyboard. From behind the thick, round, black glasses that hang low on her nose, her eyes dart coquettishly in my direction to let me in on the joke. That scene captures the spirit of the VRS rather effectively, but why stop there? Already there is an impression that everything Getz does, she does with a splash—and at any moment she’ll dive into a pool of memories from yesteryear, when her idea to start a recital society dedicated to next-generation musicians was still being tossed around the kitchen table. “When I talked about starting a concert series with unknown artists, everybody except my husband told me I was crazy. Even David Y. H. Louie [the late arts impresario] said, ‘You’re absolutely nuts. Nobody is going to come. The day of the recital is over, and you want to present people that nobody’s ever heard of?’ ” The rationale was that there wasn’t a market for it—not in Vancouver, not anywhere. “The more people discouraged me,” Getz recalls, “the more determined I was to do it.” Living in Cape Town, South Africa, prior to Apartheid, Getz grew up attending chamber music recitals by up-and-coming artists brought to town. When she arrived in Vancouver in 1966, no such thing existed. Of course, stars like soprano Leontyne Price and flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal made their appearances, but not in the small, intimate settings Getz was accustomed to. “I don’t know why people came to our very first concert [in 1980],” she reminisces, “but I can tell you one thing: by all accounts—and I mean that because I spent all my time in the washroom, I was so nervous—it was a huge success. The pianist was fabulous, and the review in the paper the next day was: ‘The Recital Lives in Vancouver’. ” Word spread, and after the first year, the VRS was a modest success with a profit of $637. In the second year, that profit dropped to $320. By the third year, the VRS was poised to lose $14,000, “and that’s when I knew I had made it as an arts organization,” Getz says gleefully. “The mark of success? Lose money!”. Today, the VRS is deficit free, but still Getz maintains that “I hate doing anything that’s not risky. My whole philosophy is that if you don’t risk failure, you don’t risk success. I thrive on doing unusual things, and sometimes that scares me. But, I believe it’s an arts organization’s duty to lead their public, not to follow them.” That boldness is what has won the hearts of Vancouver audiences at home, and established the VRS’s reputation as an arbiter of talent within the music community internationally. The world waits and watches to see which artists the company will bring in, and even acclaimed Canadian baritone Joshua Hopkins can thank Getz for his nomination and win of a prestigious Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2006 (Getz is invited to put forward a candidate each year). Supporting emerging artists for over three decades has also enabled the VRS to call in big names—those who have gone on to become great successes down the road. And it is the little things Getz does that make everyone involved—the audience, the artists, young or old—feel belonging to her privy, inner circle. Each year, Getz rewards her donors with a private appreciation performance by a secret guest, programs sealed. Surprise! Prodigy violinist Timothy Chooi. “If I could present my whole series without announcing who was playing, I would do it gladly,” Getz says of the event. “I would just say, ‘Here are a bunch of concerts, come and be surprised.’ ” And in a way, that is exactly how the VRS operates. Who has ever heard of 25-year-old Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth? And who would want to sit through a nearly-two-hour-long solo trumpet recital, anyway? Sure enough, Helseth attracted a full house at the Vancouver Playhouse last season, and had the audience swooning at the gorgeous sound of her rambling Norwegian folk songs. “We have built a playhouse audience on trust,” Getz affirms, “and they think, ‘If the VRS is bringing in an oboist or a trumpeter in recital, then they must be phenomenal.’ I strive to present awesome concerts, always, but if they are not awesome, then I should hope they are absolutely, unspeakably terrible. I want people to go out roused. Adequate and boring are the worst crimes in the arts.” Getz continues, and admits: “When you pay to go to a live performance, you’re actually gambling. But this is why we go to live music—you never know when that moment is going to ignite.” And when chances exist that the unknown act who’s about to grace the stage could be the next Cecilia Bartoli or Leif Ove Andsnes, the odds are in your favour. The VRS presented both early on in their careers, and Getz remembers the latter performance vividly: “[Andsnes] is a good looking guy, tall, and he had made only one recording at that point. He strode out onto the stage and, at the very same minute he sat at the piano, he played. And the whole audience went—” She gasps. “Absolutely you could feel it. And I can’t tell you what that is, but it’s much more than talent.” Paul Gravett, executive director, provides a more sober perspective, perhaps his role within the organization. A former pianist and established artist and facility manager, Gravett has been with the VRS for just over a year. “For us, and for me in particular, the focus of our work is committed to that product,” he says. “In the most general terms—what’s on the stage. We hear any number of artists, we gauge the audience’s reaction, and we talk about ‘Have we changed that audience? Has someone come in and left almost like a different person. Emotionally, spiritually, are they in a new place?’ Because if they are, that’s the measure of a great performance.” Last year, Gravett was determined to pinpoint exactly what that VRS recital experience is, to aid the company in its pursuit of yet a broader audience. “It’s fascinating to see and hear what people have to say about what they perceive from a performance,” he says. “And every so often, someone will say, ‘Gee, I really can’t find the words to express what I felt,’ and then will go on to write an entire paragraph. Those are the really wonderful moments. And that is, I think, one of the great legacies of the VRS.” “It’s true,” Getz chimes in to enliven the mood yet again. “It’s like how do you describe the taste of a banana?” Yes, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as the saying famously goes. And for now, the recital in Vancouver lives on.
From the Autumn 2012 issue of MONTECRISTO.
Pictured: Leif Ove Andsnes.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_maoxkjB4VW1qzfe07o1_500.jpg)
