School Spirit

by Douglas Coupland, Pierre Huyghe

Dis Voir’s Encounters series invites a well-known contemporary artist to choose a subject for a book. The artist also selects a person with "elective affinities"--someone with whom he or she would like to share this exchange. The resulting collaborative volumes serve as an artistic and political laboratory of the present. For this first installment, French artist Pierre Huyghe choose Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X , for the influence that Coupland has had on his generation, and on Huyghe's own work. Using a high school yearbook as scaffolding for their meditations, they discuss the construction of character, narrative techniques based on chance and the political dimensions of Coupland's work--themes that are also fundamental questions for Huyghe's projects.

Genres: Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2002

About the author

Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan. His first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages and most countries on earth. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and in 2001 resumed his practice as a visual artist, with exhibitions in spaces in North America, Europe and Asia. 2006 marks the premiere of the feature film Everything's Gone Green, his first story written specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work. A TV series (13 one-hour episodes) based on his novel, jPod premieres on the CBC in January, 2008.

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Retrieved 07:55, May 15, 2008, from http://www.coupland.com/coupland_bio....

Reviews

[Addie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up in the Guggenheim library at random, mainly because it was thinner than the other tomes and I felt I could make a dent in it in the short time I had there. I went in not knowing what to expect but I was still sort of taken aback by what I found.
School Spirit is a collection of scraps from year books along with some brief narrative by a (I presumed anyway) fictious girl who died during cheer leading practice and is trapped on this earth.

It was an interesting piece and I would like to buy it some day because I feel like I didn't quite absorb it all the first time around.
As a high school student, it was also comforting knowing that no matter what my parents have said next teenagers were no different 20 years ago.

The story of the dead girl is pretty interesting too.

I want to put "hipsters" in "I would reccomend this book to" column, since this is the sort of thing they would eat up, but I don't mean to cheapen the book. It's artsy and some people mightn't take too well to that aspect.

All in all, short read, artsy, worth a look.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. School year book with 70s high school photos. Comments from students are typed in upper case. Interspersed is the occasional blank page written posthumously but a girl who has recently died. Whereas Coupland usually takes such wonderful snapshots of contemporary culture or takes me back to my own childhood in the 60s and Lego and just a few TV channels this just leaves me with depressing images of he 70s.
Perhaps a warm up/introduction to Hey Nostrodamus! but definitely only for die hard Coupland fans if you are compulsive enough not to be able to cope with one missing book from the collection :-) Perhaps that is the point. It is supposed to be an art book. A bizarre cross section of society actually buy the book and read it or something.