IT’S NOT EVERYTHING
Douglas Coupland’s multi-venue art exhibit leaves our reviewer wanting more,
I never know what to do with Douglas Coupland. Being critical of his art career, which he’s spent the last decade-plus building after the remarkable success of his life as a writer, feels like standing up in front of a kindergarten class to say there’s no Santa Claus and by the way, forget the Easter Bunny, too. And if you’ll just step outside for a moment, I have a Canadian flag I’d like to burn for you.
Such is the appeal of his multimedia popular output: one of our own, commanding the world stage with his quirky, devotedly Canada-centric world view, he’s as sacred a contemporary cow as we’ll ever have.
So when the current Coupland-palooza rolled into town — his show Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything spans galleries at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Royal Ontario Museum, with another show at Daniel Faria Gallery and a giant bust of his head at Holt Renfrew, covered in chewing gum — I steeled myself for my inevitable killjoy role.
So here goes: Having seen the show, packaged by the esteemed Vancouver Art Gallery curator Daina Augaitis, I’m left unmoved.
Coupland makes big things and huge assemblages of hundreds of tiny things; he makes paintings and sculptures, collages and photographs, aphoristic posters and what he might describe as conceptual furniture.
With the rare exception, it all has a slickly manufactured sheen. Optimistically, maybe that’s the point: if you’re going to extract anything from the Coupland oeuvre, it’s the sense that, through technology, humanity is so disconnected from the physical world it inhabits as to no longer know the difference. Mediation — a world viewed through a screen, desktop or pocket device — figures largely in Coupland’s view of things.
So does consumerism — the endless accumulation of unnecessary stuff — but it’s far from a guiding ethos.
If there is one, in fact, I can’t find it.
That’s part of the struggle. Generation X, his breakthrough 1991 novel, epitomized a deflated recessionary moment of overqualified youth, blankly hostile to a world that refused to deliver to them a life their baby-boom parents took as a given. Through a near-dozen other books, Coupland showed a canny ability to extract very real human moments from indifference to the same.
So why then does his art feel so inhuman?
Translated to form, his ideas seem smarmy and glib (odd, because Coupland, a warmly funny and sincere guy with kaleidoscopic interests, is anything but).
At the ROM, candy-striped spindles tower a dozen feet in the air, polished to a plasticized sheen. They’re bright, shiny and lifeless. His “Pop Heads,” photo portraits undone with thick globs of paint, should be expressive and subversive, but instead, they’re tidily sterile. Nearby, his QR code paintings — big blowups of those things you scan with your smartphone — feel manufactured and dull.
At the ROM, a huge wall is festooned with a grid of non-sequiturs on colourful paper. It’s a friendly monument to distracted indifference.
So the scale model of the World Trade Center positioned beside it leaves me at a loss. Around the corner, Coupland has generated indistinct images of people jumping to their deaths as the towers smouldered toward collapse on Sept. 11. Snap a photo with your iPhone and the figures, airborne against a grid of window, come into clearer view.
I get it: cataclysmic disaster is literally at our fingertips, viewed from the safe remove of our smartphone screen. Here Coupland comes closest to art: a certain fearlessness of taboo, an embrace of social critique, an incisive grasp of technology’s place in the social sphere. It’s his best Warholian nod, but it’s also a frustrating tease: the quiet power here also amplifies the cool veneer of the merely clever that lacquers the majority of his work.
Coupland gives you a ton to look at but, for the most part, not a lot to think about. At the ROM, his giant installation The Brain has possibilities — a representation of our mind’s quixotic attempt to organize the mountains of uselessness we accumulate — but ideas don’t serve form here, or at least not much. With the rare exception, the works lack tension. They divert briefly but don’t provoke.
I found myself thinking about another polymath, Sigmar Polke, whose recent retrospective at MoMA in New York was equally disjointed and broad. So why did I leave that show electrified and this one kind of bored? For Polke, jumping from painting to sculpture to photography embodied a fiery sensualist’s passion for materials. Coupland’s own diversions seem less provoked by unbridled enthusiasm than furtive, neurotic distraction.
It’s apropos of our ADD era of online everything, maybe, but good art — that holds you and takes you deeper than you knew you could go — it’s not.
To borrow a phrase: There’s no there there. There’s something here, but he remains uncommitted. But this is Coupland’s Act II. Despite the outsize display, he’s still an emerging artist, isn’t he? Let’s hope the best is yet to come. Douglas Coupland: Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything continues at the ROM and at MOCCA through April.