Coupland art exhibit gives Penguins a punk twist

Last Updated: Monday, July 30, 2007 | 5:27 PM ET

CBC Arts

Vancouver author and screenwriter Douglas Coupland has drawn on his punk roots for an exhibit of new works that opened last week at Toronto's Monte Clark Gallery.

He has created more than 100 collages out of old Penguin paperbacks mounted in a picture frame, with a single word in block letters over top.

The words include "Anarchy," a reference to the Sex Pistols' song, Anarchy in the U.K. and "Bizarre," "Love" and "Triangle," from the New Order song, Bizarre Love Triangle.

For Coupland, author of Generation X and JPod and a writer who considers himself influenced by punk, the exhibit is a way of giving old literature a new life, he said in an interview with CBC News.

"It took a really old dead book and put the word 'Anarchy' on it and now, this object is just vibrating," he said.

"There is a sense of investigation that fuelled the punk movement and to a lesser extent the New Wave movement that in 100 years, we will look back and say, 'There's a pure sense of honesty.'"

The show is the first of several he is planning that examine the "relationship between books and visual culture."

Coupland gathered second-hand Penguins from stores in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Calgary to create the collages.

The process forced him to consider his own mortality as a writer, he said.

"Most of them aren't still in print. Most of them haven't been read by a human being in two or three decades," he said.

Yet at the time they were printed, they were the must-have literature of the day.

"For me it's kind of like Shakespeare holding a mirror and saying, like, 'Face it, Doug — to you books are, for better or worse, mortality, and someday they'll go out of print and how are you going to deal with that?'"

He chose Penguins because of their history — the series was created by its U.K. publisher in 1935 as literature that could be bought by the ordinary man for the price of a pack of cigarettes.

Literature no longer has that kind of primacy — most young people don't know what Penguins are, he said.

"I worry, not so much about history being lost, as about historical links from one generation to the next," Coupland said.

Opening an art exhibit is rather like giving a reading, as it puts your work out there in front of people, he said.

"I remember every single scissor cut and every single letter of every one [of the collages] and … watching everyone walk around, when they physically stick their head into a collage, it's very satisfying. They're finding things that I didn't even know were there."

The show, called The Penguin is at the Monte Clark Gallery in Toronto until Sept. 16. A second show, Fifty Books I Have Read More Than Once, opens at Simon Fraser University Gallery in Vancouver on Sept. 8.

Coupland became a screenwriter with last year's Everything's Gone Green and he's currently working on the set of a TV series based on JPod.