BEVERLY FISHMAN | ART SPIEL

We are living in an epoch where the greatest emergencies are the ones we do not confront. This does not mean that a crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic is not a fundamental emergency we must confront at all levels. It simply suggests the greatest emergencies are the silent existential ones hidden behind the churn of ongoing crises. These include, among others, economic inequality, refugee crises, and climate change. Despite the warnings of scientists and activists since the 1970s, climate change is responsible for the deaths of seven million human beings every year because of air pollution. Yet every year, once again, nothing meaningful is done to stop it or the extractive capitalism that sustains it. What is dramatic about COVID-19 is that it was an “absent” or “great” emergency for many years; sociologists, such as Mike Davis, scientists, such as David Quammen, and international organizations, such as the WHO, have been warning for decades of the threat of pandemic influenzas. This novel coronavirus was an absent emergency that turned into an emergency—though it is easy to point out that its underlying cause may be the same as that of climate change, the world-altering forces of extractive capitalism. Fishman thrusts us into a different absent emergency: our addiction to pharmaceutical drugs.

The recent HBO documentary The Crime of the Century and the HULU TV series Dopesick on the opioid epidemic and how the U.S government permitted the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma to get Oxycontin approved for wider use is a good example of how the widespread addiction to pharmaceutical drugs occurs: through the actions of the capitalist class protecting its interests no matter the cost. Although this documentary and TV series focus only on a specific drug, it is easy to imagine that a similar process describes the relationships of other pharmaceutical corporations and governments. According to Nora D. Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), in 2021, “drug overdose deaths in the U.S. surpass an unthinkable milestone: 100,000 deaths in a year.” When we learn that for every dollar pharmaceutical companies spend on the research and development of a new drug, they spend nineteen on its advertisement, it is clear we have become their target primarily as medicated consumers. Fishman’s works of art aim to disclose this second category of targeted medicated consumers.

If we agree with the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin when he states that “where the danger is, also grows the saving power” and accept that Fishman’s works thrust us into one of the greatest emergencies of our time, then her art is also meant to save us. According to Heidegger, “Usually we think that it means only to seize hold of a thing threatened by ruin, in order to secure it in its former continuance. But the verb ‘to save’ says more. ‘To save’ is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing.” Fishman manages to disclose the danger of pharmaceutical drugs by creating works of art where this “genuine appearance” manifests itself through the different tablets and pills that constitute her works.

Fishman’s work continues a long tradition of art related to pharmaceuticals that can be found both in the works of Marcel Duchamp and, more recently, Damien Hirst. While both titled a ready-made and installation Pharmacy, Fishman uses a variety of titles for her exhibits and works—In Sickness and in Health (2015-2016), I Dream of Sleep (2020), and The Promise of Happiness (2021)—that immediately invite us to acknowledge the true function of their subjects. The most significant difference between the work of these artists and Fishman’s lies in the significance we attribute to pharmaceuticals. The glowing forms of the tablets and pills not only turn them into something to treasure but also distract us from their inevitable side effects. In this dangerous distraction, we can acknowledge why Fishman’s work exemplifies salvation through art.