Video, 2021
The Transaction
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Before you view the work, lets talk about it in relation to the Pharmacopornographic
Critiquing the Pharmacopornographic, The Transactionexamines the pharmaceutical industry’s exploitation of the post-pornographic body. Inspired by Preciado, the artwork appropriates Testo Junkie’s evaluation of how Pharmacopornism “transforms depression into Prozac, masculinity into testosterone, an erection into Viagra, fertility and sterility into the pill, AIDs into Tritherapy.’ (Preciado, 2013) Thus, the work explores the mechanism of performative feedback integrated within the Pharmacopornographic regime and, ultimately, how science’s hegemonic status in culture plays a role in the third form of capitalism; the ‘Government of the Living.’
“Inspired by Preciado, the artwork appropriates Testo Junkie’s evaluation of how Pharmacopornism “transforms depression into Prozac, masculinity into testosterone, an erection into Viagra, fertility and sterility into the pill, AIDs into Tritherapy.’”
Becoming visible in Fordism’s collapse in the 70s, the Pharmacopornographic had already accomplished 20 years worth of translating our psychological and physical issues into medication. The Pill initiated this medicalisation, foregrounding the translation of gender, sex, sexuality, and sexual identity into objects for political management and Capital. Porn Studies (1994-) underlined that anything can be porn i.e. something to induce some form of fucking, and the Los Angeles Times evaluated that the later innovation of Viagra could be called ‘better porn through chemistry.’ Where world war’s and McCarthyism created oppressive systems that equated psychological and bodily differences as dissent, the Pharmacopornographic offered a false sense of comfort and safety against such. Pharmacopornism enacts the “technoprogressivist fantasies of transcending the limitations of the human body... [as] a transhumanist mission.” (Malatino, 2017) By doing so, it offers love, but conditional love; you can only be happy or be your best or have sex or watch porn if you are on drugs.
Laura Splan's sculpture Prozac, Torazine, Zoloft (2000) embodied this false sense of comfort. Upscaling antipsychotics into pillowed objects, Splan satirises the pharmaceutical industry’s mass invasion within domestic landscapes in it that the image of prescription or illegal drugs become as familiar as furniture in culture. Ultimately, Splan questions whether the rise of medication-consumption is due to de-stigmatisation and thus more diagnoses or simply effective marketing. (Yanofski, 2011) For instance, Jake Gyllenhal in 2010 film Love & Other Drugs plays a pharmaceutical sales representative, visiting various health institutions to sell Prozac and Zoloft for money and sex rather than to promote a better quality of life for others. Rom-coms like this and other mediums of culture underline the exploitation of the post- pornographic body in relation to the Pharmacopornographic. These technologies that promise to usher us toward “a queer, posthuman, post-gender future” ultimately function as “mechanisms of gendered and racialized subjective control, [operating] at the level of the biomolecular.” (Malatino, 2017)
Still from The Transaction
“How does culture deal with bodies that fail to conform to the norms of sexual dimophism?”
“How does culture deal with bodies that fail to conform to the norms of sexual dimophism?” (Dowland, 2011) Capitalism ‘deals’ with these bodies through marrying or ‘fixing’ them with pharmaceuticals, leading us to the overwhelming question: “what is at stake in managing these bodies?” (Dowland, 2011) The Transaction illustrates the corrupt points of sale taken place from a child’s play-till filled with condoms, money, and pills to satirize the Pharmacopornographic’s use of our bodies and finances as their Capitalist ploy-toy. We are made into Capitalism’s raw materials as condoms and pills are exchanged for mass amounts of money. Juxtaposing the false sense of comfort Splan provides, the sterile whiteness of the transaction reveals the pharmaceutical environment as one that is dominated by eurocentric, colonialist, patriarchal ideals - an environment similar to which The Pill was born. The pharmaceutical industry makes it so that “raw sex no longer exists” as “there can be no sexual experience that remains unmediated by social” constructs. (Dean, 2015) A lot of medications, like antidepressants, have an oppositional model of tolerance, in it that their chronic use leads to a decrease in efficacy over time. This tolerance leads to spending more money through upgraded dosage, resulting in dependence and more medications and diagnoses to cope with spiralling side effects.
Ultimately, the exploitative role of medication translates to Pharmakon; a short-term remedy with an underbelly of scapegoat and poison. Now wrapped in damaging pharmaceuticals, it is apparent “that the “rhetoric of ‘safe sex’ is replete with its own paradoxes.” (Dowland, 2011) The Transaction mirrors this corruptly attained customer loyalty through the repeated sequence of this transaction between the body, drugs and the Pharmacopornographic. The resultant ritualised ambience becomes tedious, emblematic of our financial, emotional, physical overwhelm when confronting Capitalism's disregard for the consequences of their ongoing monopolisation of power. Using Monopoly money as an economy, Capitalism’s trivialisation of the finances of those under their power becomes apparent. Shot from the perspective of the pharmaeutical industry, this inhumanity becomes overt through the complete disregard for customer presence. This tyranny and money-mania of the Pharmacopornographic translates in the discordance created through auditory imagery, which defines the proliferation of transactions taking place. The shaky perspective of the camera underlines the self-awareness but total carelessness held by the pharmacopornographic. This, coupled with the sterility of the environment and cacophonous audio elicits a sense of disconcertion within audiences that borders on motion-sickness.
Thus, The Transaction questions the Pharmacopornographic’s role in transforming the post- pornographic body into an object for Capital and political management. Through the lens of Pharmacopornism, our wants, needs, and issues regarding the body, gender, sex and sexuality transform into medication for market; Pharmakons. Ultimately, if and when the body is exposed to all financial exploits of pharmaceutical modification and enhancement, Pharmacopornism leaves us with the question: What will the post-medication, post- pornographic body look like?