Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
Coinciding with the UK publication of his new novel 'Eleanor Rigby', Douglas Coupland has an exhibition at Canada House in London entitled 'Canada House'. Originally trained as a sculptor, he turned into a novelist by converting a journalistic lifestyle guide commission into 'Generation X' - the book which marked territory explored through later novels: lives lacking traditional narratives: drifting McJob non-careers, overwhelmed by disaster, or here fragmented by teenage pregnancy and adoption, warped by disease. They are books that describe the strange sense of awe and disappointment of modern life. Now, he writes, sculpts and designs furniture. Douglas Couplands novels are the best descriptions of the sensation of modern design. Perhaps it's the economy in his prose - the way a few words can generate giant cosmic enormity as well as the numbing comfort of the modern world. It's probably not exactly what Mies meant by 'less is more', but that's because it's all seen through a pop artists eye. That way of looking described by Denise Scott Brown in Learning from Las Vegas as 'with-holding judgment'. It's that eye which finely observes the 21st century habitat. His novels render the world as lucidly as Vermeer ever did. Sensations of vast profundity amongst things which seem so lightweight. Hysterical and dead calm. Magic realism in the parking lot of a video rental store. Dialogue flits between wisecracks and homilies. It's a hammy, stagey, sentimental, and kitsch place where people speak in Jenny Holzer-isms. But being real isn't what fiction is about. Novels aren't necessarily about narrative either. A novel tells a story about a fictional world. It uses the story to tell you about the real world. In the same way chairs aren't about sitting down. Chairs can't really be about function. There are already hundreds and thousands of perfectly good chairs on the market: padded, stacking, swivel or whatever variation you might need. The motivation to produce new chairs must be something else. What kinds of things can you say with a chair that you can't say with a novel? What can art communicate that design can't? Could a chair be as eloquent about loneliness as 'Eleanor Rigby'? In 'Generation X' one character uses the phrase 'I turned into furniture' to describe being on the point of crashing out. Perhaps chairs are personality turned into furniture. Perhaps they are also frozen situations. 'Two Solitudes Sofa' arrange its sitters on either side, facing away from each other. 'Treaty', another sofa, splits its seat into two parts - one a slither that's too thin to sit in, the other is a one and a half person size. Perhaps chairs are really poetry cloaked in function. His sculptures are often odes to plastic - human sized toy soldiers, frozen in grimaces of action or melted together like innocent carnage of the toybox. There is a series of detergent bottles made solid and anonymous, their handles forming holes in mass like Henry Moore. They look pristine - a shape rather than a container becoming idealized visions of the mundane. The symbolic figure on the cover of 'Hey Nostradamus' was also an installation: Toilet man fallen to his knees and preying - that generic symbol of suddenly discovering spirituality. The main character in 'Eleanor Rigby' has a cosmic experience involving a fragment of a Soviet space stations nuclear fuel cell that has fallen back to earth. Thinking it a meteorite as it crashes into the ground in front of her, she feels chosen as a witness to something cosmic. She carries it around as a lucky mascot. Eventually, it's discovered in transit at Frankfurt Airport. A little piece of space junk in junk space. Confused between the natural and the man made, the episode recalls Billy Bragg: 'Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?'. How about other objects? A classic Eames chair? Conran cookware? Can things carry hopes? or desires? or dreams? High Continental European Modernism meant objects in the cause of progress - fragments of future socialist utopias. Design once symbolized progress. Design was certain that it was a way of bringing a better world. People believed in san serif fonts. Helvetica was going to make a better world. Baroque chairs dreamt hysterical dreams in which they grew birds feet. Rococo chairs dreamt they were metallic foliage. What does furniture dream of now? What do Ikeas Billy, Klippan, and Glimma see when Ingvar Kampra turns out the light? Coupland might like to describe himself as a Futurist, but he's a long way from the wild eyed Marinetti. Reyner Banhams places those war-crazy Italians at the frantic heart of the Modern Movement. Their love of machines: faster, quicker bigger, noisier was the adrenaline thrill of harnessed power. But there are other Modern traditions, and other kinds of Futurism. According to Nicolas Pevsner, William Morris was the epicenter of Modernism. And ironically, Morris was driven into the future by nostalgia as passionate and all consuming as Futurisms love of the future. We live in the future which was imagined by 20th century visionaries like Le Corbusier and Walt Disney. Surrounded by these failed futures, its impossible to have the faith that older generations had in progress. Progress now seems much more complicated and full of risk. Perhaps its that faith that boosts prices for mid century modern furniture. Maybe it's that faith which drives architecture to repeat modernist mantras long after the event. Things that once looked boldly into the future are now repeated as nostalgia. Design finds the modern world problematic. It's because it confuses being modern with being slick, cool and right. Coupands work shows that being modern is really about feeling shattered into thousands of pieces, about loss and wonder. It's more likely to be the far off sound you hear when you are in a hospital waiting room than the products on the shop floor of SCP. First published in Icon
William Shatner acts and sings. Sting sings and acts. Sometimes one medium just isn't enough. Sometimes an artist, swelling with creativity, bursts the walls of their discipline.
It feels like flipping between the Wonder Years, Star Trek and the Discovery Channel.
Couplands modernity is a nostalgic-futurism. It reaches out both forwards and backwards in time, grasping for things that the now seems to lack. Things like certainty and meaning.
Posted by anothersam at October 18, 2004 7:06 PM.
Contents:
More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
The Best New Building In London
Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
Obscure Design Typologies: Life Guard Chairs
Osama bin Laden Cigarette Lighter: Novelty Products as Congealed Culture
Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
Now Showing: Dan Grahams 'Rock My Religion'
This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
Philadelphias Floating Architecture
Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
Viva Sectional Cinematography!
Now Showing: The Installation of an Irreversible Axis on a Dynamic Timeline
Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
Named Fabric: 20 Sponsored Pieces of Architecture at the New Museum
Form Follows Felony: The Secret Home of the Un-Dead Canoeist.
Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
Chapters for an Imaginary Book About Architecture
Shrouded Plinth - Urban Striptease
In the Night Garden - Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
The Marc Bolan Memorial Crash Barrier.
Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
In Search of Britains Vehicular History
Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
I Like Your Manifesto, Lets Put it to the Test-o
How to Become a Famous Architect
Northampton - Sci-fi Pop Planning Promotion
Advertising Central Milton Keynes
The Velvet Underground at the Glass House
Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
The Most Visited Location in the UK
Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
'Its beauty will know no season'
2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
Everything Flows: ideological cartography
How Geostationary Was My Valley?
The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
What happens when you cross a pen with a car?
Football Pitch: Best of British
The First Cut is the Cheapest - Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
Holiday Snap II : Giant Glowing French Balls
Holiday Snap: Canadian War Memorial, Vimy, France
Anatomy of an Architectural News Story
Its All About the Big Benjamins
Poundbury, unexpectedly, in the rain
The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
Berlin 1945 - The Obscene Picturesque
Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
Langlands & Bell - The House of Osama Bin Laden
Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
Christopher Dresser at the V&A
Fugitives and Refugees' - Chuck Palahniuk
Just What is it That Makes Yesterdays Homes So Different, So Appealing?
Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
Other:
|
Links:
IconEye
Leave a comment