The tagline for the new and completely non-existent drug, Havidol, says it all. Go ahead, have a fine time (avafynetyme). You deserve it, don’t you? You deserve all the good things life has to offer. Increasingly, prescription drugs are developed and sold that may be more about enhancing lifestyles than about saving lives. With the objective of calling the marketing and advertising tactics of the pharmaceutical industry to task, Australian interdisciplinary artist Justine Cooper, now based in Brooklyn, NY, created a fictional marketing campaign for Havidol, an equally fictional, magic-bullet, lifestyle pharmaceutical, launched for the treatment of the imaginary dysphoric social attention consumption deficit anxiety disorder (DSACDAD).
Havidol is a frightening approximation of the real thing. Parody gives way to possibility with Cooper’s re-creation of the drug marketing process, from the invention of a new disorder, wherein a need is identified and a disorder created to fit it, to the branding process, the creation of a pill, logo and promotional materials, the website design and finally, TV and print advertising.
While tapping into our collective desire for and expectation that there is always room for improvement, the marketing strategy for Havidol walks the line between poking fun at us and making some of us wonder how to obtain a prescription. The underlying message leaves us with the sense that we are never good enough and will never have enough. Havidol is an artful spoof of a new type of gold rush heralding an era in which pharmaceutical companies mine psycho-chemicals for a public who is ready to swallow almost anything in the pursuit of a life without pain – only gain.
Cooper’s exhibits comment on our temperamental relationship with western medicine, which has been built upon the idea of a malfunctioning body or mind, and the yearning to believe that everyday life can be remedied. The artist’s work has been internationally reviewed and exhibited and she is the recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship, a two-year, once in a lifetime prize awarded to an artist of outstanding achievement and potential.

Visit www.havidol.com and www.justinecooper.com