The side effects associated with the consumption of prescription drugs is of interest not only to social historians of medicine; it is a subject that has also been taken up by artists. In an unpublished magazine piece from 1966, Side Effects/Common Drugs, Dan Graham charted the secondary problems caused by frequently used drugs. Although the pill-popping culture of the 1960’s referred to by Graham may seem remote, the reality is that medicine today still focuses on surface remedies to fundamental health issues.
The electoral processes in contemporary democracies promote the same kinds of short-term solutions to socio-economic problems. With Side Effects/The True North Strong and Free, we decided to design an analytical device that draws attention to this fact. Inspired by the work of Wassily Leontief, an economist who campaigned against theoretical assumptions and non-observed facts, we used an input-output matrix to evaluate the unintended consequences associated with the Conservative Party of Canada’s 2008 election platform.
The correspondence between the state or society and the human body has often been employed in Western political discourse. Corporeal analogies, such as Plato’s psycho-centric polis, Aristotle’s organic state, and John of Salisbury’s vision of the kingdom as a physical and spiritual being, have all influenced the development of political thought. Our model follows a similar a set of figural dispositions which link the relative health or sickness of the social body to certain political structures or actions. The advantage of using an input-output matrix is that it dramatizes the gap between the ideal of the common good, suggested by the metaphor of the body politic, and the actual imbalances or internal conflicts inherent in a political party’s proposed line of action.
Side Effects / The True North Strong and Free (2009)