I’m not sure if it was watching the Joe Strummer doc The Future is Unwritten, or that time I heard E=MC squared in a Trader Joe’s last winter that put Mick Jones back into my rotation, but I’ve been stuck on Big Audio Dynamite’s song The Medicine Show lately. (sidenote:For whatever reason, I can’t embed this video. Perhaps BMG doesn’t have the rights to Hang ‘em high or whatever Spaghetti Western is so heavily sampled in the song. Maybe its for the best, its a pretty terrible video.)
Anyway, listening to this song in the car last week it got me thinking about the last time (2002) I was at the Tate. Damien Hirst has (had?) a room there that he has styled like a drugstore. The walls are lined with glass cases. Inside the cases are boxes of every kind of drug you’d find in your corner pharmacy in the UK. That’s the whole piece.
According to a bunch of google searches that yielded absolutely no usable images, the piece is called ‘God’. (Also, The Tate doesn’t allow photography.) I remember that the artist statement talking about how we put faith in modern medicine, specifically pharmaceuticals, as the new path to immortality. So yeah, God.
I walked around the room with the guys from Mazarin, picking out drug names and cracking jokes.
It occured to me that their is alot of overlap betwee Medicine Show and Hirst’s God. Both are clever statements about the promise of pharma. In the case of Hirst’s piece, the intent seems to be to show the parrellel between the pursuit of immortality thru the consumption of religion vs the pursuit of immortality via the consumption of state approved drugs.
The Medicine Show is about the promise, not of immortality, but a product so wonderful that it’ll fix any problem you might have.
With the chorus showing what happens when the promise (inevitably) goes undelivered:
It was really vile weather
When we got to tarred and feathered
You could hear the six guns sound
As they chased us out of town
A little rougher then say, The Clash’s Lost in the SuperMarket, where you just can’t shop happily after you can’t find the special offer that you came in for.
So anyway, The Medicine Show. Lost in the Apothecary. Here are the Lyrics.
4 Comments
If Damian Hirst took the inspiration (or even the contents) for that exhibition from his old bar Pharmacy on Holland Park Avenue, you might try googling Damian Hirst pharmacy to get some images.
Hope that helps!
Andre
Check out Mick’s new band Carbon silicon, saw them at the world cafe, they rocked. http://www.carbonsiliconinc.com/
@scribe. Well, Doesn’t that figure? DH’s wikipedia entry refers to that piece as ‘God’. Googling “Damien Hirst Pharma God” gives you lots of pictures of his diamond encrusted skull and sharks in Phemaldehyde.
Wonder when the Tate website will be back online though.
:)
@dlowe. Was Lost in the SuperMarket a Mick song or a Joe song?
Mick of course.
Post a Comment