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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but which words depends on who's looking. Every month, Evan Solomon sends an unidentified image to someone in the public eye along with a challenge: Give it a title and share the ideas and experiences it evokes. Today, the artist and novelist behind Generation X and the new TV series jPod goes even further — using the mystery photo to create his own piece of art
The original unidentified images sent to Douglas Coupland
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
Although he is best known for his landmark slacker novel Generation X – and coining such catchphrases as the McJob – Douglas Coupland has since written six books of non-fiction, a feature screenplay and 10 novels. And the TV series based on his book jPod launches on CBC next Tuesday. The 46-year-old Vancouverite is also a prolific visual artist: He designs furniture and has mounted art installations around the world – most recently, a nod to pop art (visit coupland.com/news/newsart21.html), which inspired the image above.
-- Evan Solomon
(Douglas Coupland. Photo by John Hryniuk)
Photo illustration by Doug Coupland
Evan Solomon: So Doug, what is your caption?
Doug Coupland: I've gone a step further and worked with the image you sent me. My title for it is, "Wow! What a Great Way to Start the Day!" You know my long-standing love of pop art. This photo seemed like the perfect base for a painting that might be done by Jeff Koons or James Rosenquist.
ES: First, tell me more about your caption — and then about your desire to screw with the whole concept of this column.
DC: Okay. The American pop art painter James Rosenquist did a painting in the early 1960s that was called, "Hey, Let's Go For a Ride." I always thought that it was really great that you could have a painting with a title that had an exclamation mark at the end of it. And I've been following James Rosenquist my entire life.
And then you have another artist, Jeff Koons — who is basically just copying James Rosenquist and sometimes doing a much better job of it — with these paintings with all these overlapping symbols and images.
Oh, I make it sound so dry. I guess for me it's a very nice way of gaining some semblance of control over the infinite abundance of information and images on the Web.
ES: By the way, how did you make this Koons-like collage?
DC: Oh, just Photoshop.
ES: But what prompted you to start using Photoshop on the image I sent you?
DC: The over-the-top happiness of the clown. In the picture you sent, he is almost like clip art, so stylized, like a generic clown as opposed to a specific clown. And the background was a generic Virgin Mary as opposed to one rooted in an artist's gestural strokes or anything like that. And I almost got the impression it was kind of like a Koons or Rosenquist ready-made. But then I thought the red on the clown was a bit dark and a bit under-saturated — so I had to go and mess with that and change it, and then fiddle with the hues. To sum it up, it just seemed so darned cheerful.
ES: So your instinct was not just to caption the image, but to engage with it. Tell me what you've done in your altered version.
DC: What you do is you take an image which has two potent signifiers there: Christianity and clowns and all the baggage they bring. And then you add a bit more to it. And it's almost like it's playing symbol overload.
So, for example, you take the image of the Virgin Mary and then you mask out a rectangle, and on top of that you put Jessica Simpson's head, minus the face. And then you get into all sorts of sacred and profane issues. And then you take a car, I guess a Camaro, and you put it on top of the clown's head and then you erase part of it. Is that gesture or graphic? What's the car got to do with the plywood down in the other corner? And then, what kind of molecules are these? Are they propane or ethane?
And suddenly you end up with … well, it's almost like beachcombing. Your brain becomes completely engaged with trying to figure out a code and a relationship between objects in the frame. And I find that comforting. It's a way of cooling down the brain.
