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Best known for his novels including Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland has always created visual art too. Now, a new book from Black Dog collects and examines his artistic practice

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Black Dog Publishing, £24.95

Review by Jamie Mitchell

Douglas Coupland is best known for his era-defining novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), in which he gave a name and a voice to the disaffected generation born to the post-war baby boomers. Before that, though, he trained as an artist and graphic designer, only taking up writing when a friend's husband, a magazine editor, read a postcard he had sent from Japan and suggested he try his hand at something longer.

Amazingly -- given that he admits to not having been much of a reader -- what followed was a stream of original and insightful novels including Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) and All Families Are Psychotic (2001) which captured the hopes and anxieties of young people struggling to find happiness in a world of yuppies, dead-end jobs and broken families. It was Coupland who coined the terms 'McJob', 'mental ground zero', and 'celebrity schadenfreude', all of which are even more relevant today than they were when Generation X was written.

After concentrating on literature for most of the Nineties, he returned to art and design, producing a large and varied body of work that spans sculpture, painting, print and photography. Like his novels, his visual art deals with the themes of cultural identity, utopian optimism, the prevalence of technology and our innate fear of the future.

Published alongside a major retrospective exhibition of his work, which began at the Vancouver Art Gallery and is now touring Coupland's native Canada, this latest book collects his visual art and design along with essays and interviews by the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of London's Serpentine Galleries, architect Bjarke Ingels, and ex-REM frontman Michael Stipe.

For all their ennui and sardonic humour, Coupland's novels are also tender and optimistic, and the same is true of his visual art. It is often brightly coloured, beautiful to look at and witty, even while it deals with dark subject matter.

One series, Slogans for the 21st Century (2011-2014) continues the modern aphorisms that appeared as graphic footnotes in Generation X. Rendered in black type on coloured backgrounds, the best of these, THE FUTURE LOVES YOU BUT IT DOESN'T NEED YOU; THE INTERNET IS THE REAL WORLD; and BEING MIDDLE CLASS WAS FUN, show that Coupland still has a gift for reflecting the anxieties of the age in a way that is both funny and terrifying.

Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything book's cover.

As suggested by the book's title, Everywhere is Anywhere is Anything is Everything, place, as well as time, is crucial to Coupland's work. In one of the book's essays, its editor Daina Augaitis identifies Canada's West Coast (particularly Vancouver where Coupland has lived most of his life), as the locus of his artistic world-view. She writes: 'Coupland recalls that growing up in Vancouver in the 1960s and 70s had elements of living in an experiment.'

One such experiment was the utopian ideals of post-war housing. According to Augaitis, Coupland was aware of some of the architectural and environmental innovators -- 'from Arthur Erickson to Greenpeace' -- and even, as a schoolboy, attended the 1976 global gathering on housing, Habitat. These interests have found their way into the art, particularly in his work 345 Modern House (2014), a model made out of a Lego kit of the same name and depicting row upon row of identical houses revealing, in the words of Bjarke Ingels, 'the relentless monotony of the perfectly realised modern utopia'.

Much of the work takes the form of large-scale installations, including the interior of a house in Canada, which he filled with uniquely Canadian furniture and consumer goods. Obviously these are best experienced first hand, but what the book does give you is a fascinating insight into Coupland's artistic practice.

Coupland's novels could be called 'pop-literature' and his art, whether it is sculpture made out of familiar childhood toys or product packaging or digital collages of ubiquitous brand logos and electronic products, owes much to the Pop Art movement, particularly Roy Lichtenstein. This lineage, as well as Coupland's other myriad influences, from the literature of William Gibson to his fascination with military iconography, is satisfyingly explored both visually and in the book's texts.

For the most part, Coupland's art is inclusive rather than exclusive: it's about 'us' rather than him. This is refreshing in an age when many of our most famous contemporary artists seem satisfied with documenting only their own (far from typical) experiences of life.

In our post-banking crisis, post-9/11, post-NSA-scandal world, his themes of social anxiety, first-world guilt and ambivalence towards technology seem more relevant than ever; however much we think we want to slow down, our culture is still accelerating. Like his novels, Coupland's art doesn't offer any solutions, but there's comfort in knowing that most of us share the same problems. Perhaps anxiety shared is anxiety halved? So, put down the internet, take a break from celebrity schadenfreude and pick up this book: it's a fascinating journey into the world of a contemporary pop-artist who really has something to say about our culture.