Douglas Coupland discusses his ongoing Slogan Project. The Canadian artist and novelist’s Slogans for the 21st Century are currently showing throughout the city of Copenhagen as part of CHART ART FAIR’s Special Art Projects.
I’m surprised by my ongoing Slogan Project. It wasn’t something that began with an agenda, and yet it grows and grows. Five years ago I needed to put up posters in downtown Vancouver for a YouTube crowdsurfing event I was doing at a local club. I needed words to get peoples’ attention, and I remember sitting down and thinking, “Well, what could we say about 2011 that would have made no sense at all in 1991? That ought to get some attention.” That’s where some of the most ‘classic’ slogans started: i miss my pre-internet brain and knowing everything turns out to be slightly boring.
And then I started thinking of more of them. There are about 250 now, and they seem to loan themselves to tight focusing when given a niche to explore: ecology for a show in Montreal; the year 2016 for a show in Shanghai; robotics for a show in Basel and Vienna; Japan for a show in Tokyo; and politics in general. The Slogans are a great litmus for letting us know how quickly our world is changing. I grew up in the seventies when the only change across an entire decade was telephones switching from rotary dialing to touch tone. You had all of these people yearning for technological change, but it wasn’t until the Internet and smart phones that true change arrived, and it then arrived at a staggering pace, and it continues to arrive at a staggering pace. It’s the new normal and I guess the slogan for this accelerated acceleration would be the good old-fashioned: be careful what you wish for.
I’ve tried having events where people make their own slogans and we print them out on a massive one-metre-wide drum photocopier, but with maybe 500 people having participated in total, not one of them created a slogan. It’s usually something along the lines of: in the future I will think of a slogan. I think brain circuitry that thinks up slogans is specialized in the way that musical pitch is divvied out genetically, it’s just a quirk, and I have it. (BTW: my brain doesn’t pun, and when I hear puns I mentally tune out, another quirk; I’d be a terrible advertising exec.) Obviously I’m a writer, but I’m not even sure if being a writer is a help in slogan creation. Slogans are about super-reductive thinking which also delivers an a-ha moment. A good slogan tells people that they’re not alone in having the freaky internal responses to the modern world: we’re all going through this together.
In the 1980s I went to art school and made a lot of 3D work. In the 1990s I wrote fiction while my visual energy, especially during book tours and while working at the nascent Wired magazine in 1993/94, went into creating the look and feel of the internet where, in the early 1990s especially, there was nowhere to go. But just after 9/11 I did a massive 42-city book tour which physically wiped me out and I knew something in my life had to change, and I had to start making physical art again. This was weird because one’s really not allowed to change or add careers midstream; you’re not allowed to have two careers at once. So at first I had a shrieking balcony of naysayers screaming, “He can’t do art, he’s a writer!” And I’m not dumb, there’s an obvious novelty value in a writer making visual work, but it’s hardly like Frank Sinatra doing hard-edge painting, and that kind of sensationalism only lasts for a few minutes in the puritanistic art world. So I’ve paid my dues that way, and it’s funny for me to think, “What exactly is the visual art work one would expect Douglas Coupland to make?” I’ve thought about it, creating work one would expect me to make versus the work I actually do make, which is absolutely from left field — except for the Slogans. They’re exactly what people think I should be making, and it’s what I actually do make, so there’s an uncynical overlap there that I really like.
My favourite slogan? …don’t mention the cloud.
Douglas Coupland’s ‘Slogans for the 21st Century’ are showing throughout Copenhagen until 28 August and have been commissioned as part of CHART ART FAIR‘s Special Art Projects
