PHARMA
Painting | Alexander Tochilovsky
Pharma To The People
Saturday Night Live loves to poke fun at TV drug advertisements. They are pretty funny. They're also so ubiquitous, it's hard to remember a time they didn't exist, although it was only 1983 when the Food and Drug Administration lifted the ban on direct-to-consumer advertising. Before that drug manufacturers had no choice but to spend their marketing dollars on world-class designers to help transform chemical pellets into works of high culture for their extremely sophisticated niche market, doctors. PHARMA, a survey of graphic design in the pharmaceutical industry since the 1940s, paints a clear picture of what that looked like: masterful Suprematist composition, Constructivist uses of negative space and heavy doses of Bauhaus color theory. It was definitely tasteful. That is, unless you consider that some of these artists had brushes with state propaganda, like Alexander Ross, who spent his early years in the United States Office of War Information, or Will Burtin, who left Germany to escape working for the Nazis and ended up designing gunnery manuals for the US Army. Like everything else in capitalism, the selling of healthcare is a sleight of hand, and although they are FDA approved, these graphic wonders are still tainted by subtext.
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