Douglas Coupland
Like most of the people my
age -- post Generation X -- I am aware of Douglas Coupland partly because of
his first book, Generation X. As
the artist’s bio has it, his interest in Generation X first emerged after he
published 1988 magazine article about his generation that was post Boomer and
post Yuppie. Eventually, in 1989 St.
Martin’s Press in New York asked him to write a guide to Generation X --
something on the model of the Yuppie Handbook – that made Coupland world-wide
known.
But novelist Douglas
Coupland’s first love was really art. Visual art. Sculpture and design and photography. Douglas Coupland graduated from the Emily
Carr Institute of Art + Design in 1984 and had his solo sculpture show three
years later. Since then he had many successful shows such as the famous 1999 Spike
where a number of enlarged plastic toy soldiers and gigantic plastic
bottles and household cleaners were presented in Vancouver’s Monte Clark
Gallery. According to the artist, this
work was a reaction to a tragic event from Coupland’s life. His niece – born in the same year of 1999 –
was missing a part of her forearm as well as her left arm due to birth
defect.
Coupland and his family
believed that the child’s deformation --
as well as similarly malformed infants, who were born around the same
time in the area of North Shore of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland -- has been
affected by a toxic agent that caused the rise in limb abnormalities. The Coupland family along with other
families called for an investigation which was cut short due to authorities
claim that the rise in abnormalities was accidental enough to exclude a
possibility of one single cause.
Douglas Coupland, frustrated and determined to make a statement about
his family’s misfortune went back to the art studio and created his startling
sculptures.
Coupland’s art is influenced
by artists such as Andy Warhol, Jenny Holzer, Jeffrey Koons and James
Rosenquist. Similarly to these modern
artists Coupland makes a connection between the world of humans and the world
of technology and the developing world.
He is influenced by mass media, product consumption, the evolution and
the poisoning of the natural environment.
As according to Douglas
Coupland himself, after the death of such musical movements such as Punk and
New Wave (which the artist sees as reflecting on Western younger society’s
attitude) there was a need for something more intuitive and something
fast. Where Punk was dirty and New Wave
was over the top with its prissiness, the new era demanded a different
reaction. The different reaction came
in synthetic – plastics and photographs, garbage, computer parts, stuffed geese... The
energy of that time and how his work started taking on its shape is best
summarized in the artist’s own words: ”The work had to be done. That it all had
to be done at Emily Carr up in the painting department seemed quite natural,
and it’s only with hindsight we can see just what a rare and exciting explosion
it was.”
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