The standard Coupland criticism: too witty, too flippant, not political or aggressive or profound enough. But his work satisfies me deeply - I'm so starved, as a Canadian, for contemporary art that speaks to me in the language of my own cultural identity that I'm overcome with delight by nearly everything he produces. Here you are, here we are, this is us, look at us, his work says to me, and no one else has said it so loudly, so specifically, so ingeniously. It's very gratifying. I'm also extremely charmed by the work as a physical manifestation of an endlessly restless, inventive, industrious mind, able to successfully realize its many creative impulses. His dual career provokes in me a powerful sort of pride-envy. The convenience store ice chest at MOCCA, perfectly reproduced with only the addition of a small, bloody leak, strikes me as a sinister visual narrative, though of course it can also be interpreted as a metaphor or a comment. I thought for a long time of the many gas stations I've visited in my life, where this chest often sits. How alike those places are, no matter where. They have what author Lisa Margonelli calls a "clannish ugliness," describing them as "a crime scene before the fact."
"Is there a better-known, bigger, more zeitgeisty guy in contemporary Canadian art than Douglas Coupland, OC, OBC?" the Globe and Mail asked recently and the answer is a depressing nope. But there should be -- or at least there should be more
Douglas Couplands. Why aren't there more multidisciplinarians like
him? And why aren't there other high profile artists his age
in Canada? What's wrong with our art schools, our government arts
funding, our societal valuation of artists, that Douglas Coupland is
such an anomaly? We must be suffocating so many dreams here. That, or
somehow Canadians are just largely and irrevocably unartistic as a people.
On til April 19.
