Douglas Coupland

Biography

In 1987 the Vancouver Art Gallery showed more than two hundred handmade sculptures: giant pipes, pills, oars, antlers, metronomes, slabs of bacon. The artist was twenty-five or twenty-six, and he was one of the youngest to be given a show there. He would not open another exhibition for fourteen years.

Douglas Campbell Coupland was born on 30 December 1961 at a Royal Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden (at Söllingen, now part of Rheinmünster). He was the second of four sons: his father was a military doctor, and his mother had graduated from McGill University in comparative religion. In 1965 the family returned to Canada and settled in West Vancouver, where his father opened a private practice. Childhood in a military family during the Cold War later came back in his work as military imagery, toy soldiers and aeroplanes.

After school, in 1979, he enrolled at McGill University, intending, like his father, to study physics, but a year later he left and returned to Vancouver, to the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. He called those four years the best of his life. It was there that a circle of artist friends formed: Angela Grossman, Attila Richard Lukacs, Derek Root, Graham Gilmore. He graduated in 1984 in sculpture, then studied at the Hokkaido College of Art & Design in Sapporo and at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan; in 1986 he also completed courses in business, fine art and industrial design in Japan. In Tokyo he worked as a designer and researcher for Magazine House, and then went home.

He began writing almost by accident. From Japan he sent postcards to a friend, the editor Malcolm Parry read one of them and offered him a job at Vancouver Magazine. After his first assignment, on a scandal involving the Los Angeles gallerist Doug Christmas, Coupland was given a regular monthly column. He wrote, by his own account, to pay the bills for his studio. In 1988 Parry moved to the Toronto magazine Vista and took him along; there Coupland produced a monthly comic strip, “Generation X”, illustrated by Paul Rivoche. The strip caught the attention of the New York publisher St. Martin’s, which advanced him $22,500 for a book about the generation.

From 1989 to 1990 he lived in the Mojave Desert and, instead of a nonfiction handbook, wrote the novel “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”. It was rejected in Canada, and in 1991 an American publisher accepted it. Success did not come at once: sales grew slowly until the phrases “Generation X” and “McJob” entered everyday speech. Coupland accepted the role of spokesman for a generation reluctantly.

The books then followed one after another. “Shampoo Planet” (1992) was about those younger than the characters of the first novel; in “Life After God” (1994) the main theme was spirituality. In 1994, while working at Wired magazine, he wrote a short story about Microsoft employees, moved to Palo Alto, spent time immersed in the life of Silicon Valley and published the novel “Microserfs” (1995). His photographic book about his home city, “City of Glass” (2000), is assembled from photographs, archival images and fragments of his earlier texts. “Souvenir of Canada” (2002 and 2004) examines national identity through everyday things such as Kraft macaroni and the warnings on cigarette packs. The novel “JPod” (2006), conceived as “Microserfs” for the Google generation, became the basis of a thirteen-episode television series for the Canadian broadcaster CBC, scripted by Coupland himself. Twice, in 2006 and 2010, he was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2010 he delivered the CBC Massey Lectures on radio in the form of a novel, “Player One”, and in 2009 he published a biography of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

Around 2000 he returned to where he had started. His practice is not tied to one material: sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, with many found objects and mass-produced items. Among his reference points he names Andy Warhol and Jenny Holzer. In 2001 the exhibition “Spike” was held at the Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver: life-sized plastic toy soldiers with missing limbs among giant bottles of household cleaning products. The New York showing opened on 9 September, two days before the terrorist attacks. In 2003, in a bungalow in Richmond slated for demolition, he staged “Canada House” from furniture and found objects, including a “Treaty Couch” with a seat made from a Cowichan sweater. For a 2005 exhibition he chewed up the pages of his own novels and shaped the pulp into hornets’ nests.

His public works are visible in cities. The Monument to the War of 1812 in Toronto (2008) consists of two toy soldiers four metres tall, a gold British one and a silver American one, lying toppled. “Digital Orca” (2009), beside the Vancouver Convention Centre, is made of black and white aluminium cubes like pixels and stands about 25 feet high. For Canoe Landing Park in Toronto (2010) he made a huge red canoe on a hill and replicas of fishing floats. The Canadian Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Ottawa was unveiled in September 2012, and the “Golden Tree” in Vancouver, a 1:1 copy of the hollow cedar in Stanley Park, in 2016. In 2019 his light installation “Northern Lights” began operating on the Telus Sky tower in Calgary.

His first major retrospective, “everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything”, was shown in Vancouver in 2014 and in Toronto in 2015. His European solo exhibition “Bit Rot” was shown in Rotterdam and Munich from 2015 to 2017; it included the “Deep Face” portraits, in which the faces are covered with coloured blocks of paint. In 2015–2016 he was artist-in-residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. “Vortex” (2018–2019), at the Vancouver Aquarium, was built from plastic debris washed up on the coast of Haida Gwaii, including a Japanese fishing boat swept away by the 2011 tsunami. “The National Portrait” (2018) used 3D-printed busts of 1,700 Canadians scanned in Simons department stores. In 2023 at the Daniel Faria Gallery he showed his first entirely hand-painted series, of icebergs; by his own account, all his visual work until then had been mediated in some way by technology.

Coupland is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, of the Order of British Columbia and of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is represented by the Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto.