Speaking of art…
In August back when it was summer, Maristella and I were laughing our way through Vancouver, together again after 2 years. Vancouver is at its best on those sunny, brilliant days but alas our time was short as there was a ferry to catch. But before heading to Horseshoe Bay we made a daring raid on the Douglas Coupland Retrospective Exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Now, two months later, those images are still on my mind.
Douglas Coupland is a writer, screenwriter, painter, furniture maker, modeller, lego builder, flea market junkie, installation artist, film maker, colour passionista, and world class hoarder. He created the moniker, Generation X, and has a knack of coining new terms that stick, (McJobs comes to mind). He has written over a dozen novels, short story collections and non-fiction books and articles, often with themes of the impact of new technology on culture and society. This latest art exhibition, called everything is anywhere is anything is everything, was a retrospective of his art installations over the past 12 years and was well worth more than the few hours we had to spend there.
The installations were massive and iconic – the more you looked the more you saw. References to recent events, commentary on ecology, politics and western society, not so subtle hints of Canadiana and technology. In the first room upon entering, you are confronted with a large bundle of what appears to be trash, which turns out to be bits of Japanese life washed up on our western shores by the tsunami. Sofas upholstered in plaid, lumberjack material evoke the old cabins of cottage country. A 9/11 room with twin tower models had huge blown-up images on the wall that look like nothing more than a collection of dots until you looked at them through your smartphone lense to see that these “dots” were actually photos of Osama Bin Laden or even worse, bodies falling from the towers – an interesting way to present it, but nonetheless I had to leave that room in a big hurry. The biggest single installation, The Brain, was a collection of items from 1950’s and 1960’s life, meticulously arranged – old appliances, toys, gadgets, tools, kitchenware – memory jiggling. He references suburban neighborhoods represented by a massive flat lego design – house upon house, all identical. City towers in another lego piece, 10 feet high, reminiscent of something from the Jetson’s. He “paints” color with hundreds and hundreds of upright, pristine colored pencils on a 6 foot wide panel, as well as on shelves carefully arranged with Japanese laundry soap.
In one large room, Coupland takes on the iconic 20th century Canadian Group of Seven (plus Emily Carr) painters. He has painted large canvases representing a deconstructed painting of each of them. In the middle of this room was a massive collapsed metal sculpture that looked like a giant science fiction insect. Upon closer inspection of the label – aha, yes indeed, an image from the memorable eastern Canadian ice storm of 1998 an event still remembered and talked about all these years later. This was a flattened electrical tower. Again, memories came back to me. We were in Ottawa when it took a direct hit, before quickly moving into Quebec. As all hell was breaking loose around us, I was sitting on my couch warm and safe, listening to the radio as the weather story unfolded. Lucky for me I had nowhere I had to go as I’d booked that week off work. As I heard the horror stories of power outages and general mayhem happening, for me, in suburban Ottawa, the lights didn’t even flicker, although a friend down the road beyond us was without power for over 3 weeks. Coupland’s tattered tower of power looks to me like man’s technology bowing in submission to the forces of the planet.
Words and color – word fragments from life online.
Douglas Coupland has long been interested in technology and society and clearly has a lot to say about it in his writings since the 1991 Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. He’s just published a new non-fiction book, Kitten Clones and is on the interview circuit, talking about his thoughts on how technology has changed and is changing the way we live, think and experience. He says he used to view the internet as a metaphor for life but now has come to think that life is a metaphor for the internet, as people’s brains, thoughts, actions and activities have become rewired. He says that he used to say that he misses his pre-internet brain but now he says he can no longer even remember it.