I had bookmarked Kenneth Goldsmith's essay Being Dumb (from last week in The Awl) but hadn't read it yet when I visited Douglas Coupland's new solo exhibition The 21st Century Continues... at Daniel Faria Gallery. And then I went away for the weekend and wrestled from afar with how exactly to explain my reaction to the multi-talented Vancouver artist/writer/etc.'s combination of oblique and obvious in assorted canvases, a couple sculptures, and one thing that combines the two. My initial response was, "this is dumb," but knowing (or, at least, assuming) there was an awareness behind these works, I did my best to discern whether they were in fact smart. Goldsmith helped out in the end with his third path: smart dumb. As he points out, Andy Warhol is the king of (smart) dumb art, and Coupland, with his mixing of high and low, skilled and not, fine and commercial, is clearly in his debt, but ends up coming off as dumb smart dumb, which, for those of you getting confused, is probably not the point (unless, of course, it is, which means I'm confused).
Douglas Coupland, Universal Luggage Bar Code Sunset: London to Berlin, 2013, acrylic on canvas
As befits the exhibition's title, I'd like to update a 20th Century amateur art critic's rejoinder to "my computer could do that." Coupland's graphics are as precise as bar codes and Letraset transfers (except when he purposefully drips paint over a post-globalization selection of globes). His art historical references are equally targeted and reward those who can identify both the "original" and the ongoing semiotic chain it engenders. In this sense, they are history paintings more than anything else, and, as such, trace a history of surface that is worth considering. However, the Op Art effect of all those parallel lines and polkadots gives them an air of brattiness that might keep them from gathering dust, but also drives me out of the room. Mounted on the rear wall of the gallery is a grid of silver wigs flattened under glass. I take this to be a tribute to his ancestry; Warhol would never have been so obvious, but at least Coupland is acknowledging the master.
Bridget Moser, Asking for a friend, video
Dumbness as a rhetorical strategy has been around since the time of Socrates (though he would have claimed it was dialectical) and I confess to use it on a regular basis in my approach to the dumb (as in mute) art I often come across. The participants in Xpace's recently closed Yahoo! Answers exhibition demonstrate a similar knowing naiveté as Coupland did in his era-defining first novel Generation X by using contemporary technology as a sounding board for existential crises. Bridget Moser dances a duet with assorted objects while Joële Walinga and Diana McNally collaborate with the unsilent internet masses through comment threads, but they share an obliviousness that comes off as either inspired or insipid depending on where you find yourself along the smart-dumb axis.
Daniel Faria Gallery: http://danielfariagallery.com/
Douglas Coupland: The 21st Century Continues... continues until August 3.
Xpace Cultural Centre: http://xpace.info/
See website for current exhibitions.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Douglas Coupland at Daniel Faria | Yahoo! Answers at Xpace
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