Douglas Coupland is as much of a visual artist as he is a writer. With his book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture Coupland engraved his name on popular culture by tagging the post baby-boomer generation. Books; however, are more than words for Coupland.
Coupland’s latest book piece is titled Fifty Books I Have Read More than Once. Coupland takes the covers from the 50 books he has read more than once and glues them to the ends of wooden blocks, the length of which is determined by the books importance to Coupland. The installation is on view at the Simon Fraser University Gallery in Vancouver until October 20th.
Coupland has said that his “big issue with the book world is that only rarely does anybody address the physicality of books, as if to do so is somehow an insult to ‘words'”
Coupland understands the materiality of the book and it’s life outside the text. He acknowledges the inherent inability of most of those that operate in the new book world (publishers, bookstores that sell new books, most writers and the army of journalists, reviewers and others who follow the trade) to get beyond the “words.”
Fifty Books I Have Read More than Once is a sculptural Lego-like piece defined by Coupland’s textual influences yet represented by the images that adorned the cover or dust jackets of these books. The essence of the physicality of the book, the binding, is pasted front and center. It leads the piece. A book is more than the sum of its words. The piece provides “a methodology that would allow viewers to visualize the structure of their own bibliographic histories – no two of which are ever identical.”
Great stuff.
The Copeland 50 includes books by Warhol, Pynchon, Jenny Holzer, Patty Hearst, David Leavitt and 2 by Joan Didion.
Also included:
Paul Fussell’s 1983 book Class. The book that the laid seeds for Generation X. In a 1995 interview, Coupland said “In his final chapter, Fussell named an ‘X’ category of people who wanted to hop off the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern existence.”
and
Morrisey & Marr: The Severed Alliance Johnny Rogan- clearly The Smiths have had a major influence on Coupland. He titled his 1997 book “Girlfriend in a Coma” after a Smith’s song of the same name.
Thomas Hirschhorn is another artist deeply influenced by the book. His 2003 installation Emergency Library was his selection for the Artist Choice section of the 2004 monograph on him published by Phaidon. The piece consists of 37 larger than life sculptural reproductions of books important to the artist. Hirschhorn says:
Each of these books is important to me. Each of the books count. All books are equally important. Important does not mean significant. There is no book that is not ‘significant’ or meaningful’. Even ‘bad books’ are meaningful. Meaning is not the issue. Meaning is never the issue! The issue is that I cannot do without the books I have chosen.
If you got the book thing you got to love what these guys are doing.
Previous Hirschhorn Book Patrol posts:
Where He Called From: Raymond Carver’s Landscape
The Book That Didn’t Get Built
photophonic has a nice Flickr set for the Fifty Books exhibit.