THOUGHTS: The Trouble with the Opioid Crisis Lookbook, by Adam Lehrer
Artists Dustin Cauchi and Dasha Zaharova's opioid epidemic stylizing art magazine Opioid Crisis Lookbook gets boosted by 032C, amplifying the flaws in the flaws in the project's logic, finds Adam
My first book, Communions, was released in 2021 (though it feels much longer than that.) During the press junket for that book’s release, I actively sought out platforms that would be most compatible with the content of the novel. The book, if you haven’t read it (you can purchase it here) largely fictionalized the lives of several opiate addicted artists from art history — from Artaud to Modigliani to Dash Snow and onwards — to comment on the romanticization of the drug and contrast that romanticization with the modern day Opioid Epidemic, which unleashed opiate addiction from the dregs of the underworld and druggy Bohemia and onto the American masses. The point of the book was to emphasize that there was NOTHING LEFT to romanticize about these artists’ drug usage anymore. Given that addiction is a plague afflicting people as normal as bricklayers and soccer moms, opiate addiction is not some subversive mythology of creative genius, but an utterly common, daily banality. Sickness, mental slavery, and premature death perverting the once stately image of middle America.
I’d followed artist Dustin Cauchi’s Instagram account Opioid Crisis Lookbook for at least some amount of time by then. Cauchi’s curation of the American drug addled, grotesque and tragic images, stories, memes and myths of the Opioid Epidemic intrigued me. I even detected something of a conceptual kindredness with the platform; it seemed to be stylizing something that cannot and should not be stylized. These were not images of Lou Reed grimacing at the camera with his signature, opiated, vacant stare. No, these were images of ordinary Americans suffering the consequences of a plague inflicted upon them by Pharma corps, bureaucrats and their own fucking doctors! There’s nothing hip or stylish about this epidemic, and yet Dustin’s OCL project managed to find something aesthetically interesting within all that tragedy. I even had to fight the urge to be offended when I first came across it, due to the havoc that the epidemic had wrought upon my hometown of Sandwich, MA (I’ve mentioned it before, but my childhood physician Dr. Michael Brown did a decade in prison for his over-prescribing of OxyContin.) Due to this. I found the project to be audacious and provocative; a European artist turns an American epidemic into an aesthetic, seemingly absent concern of the consequences of condensing such horror and misery into postmodern pastiche. I assumed, probably falsely, that Cauchi was interested in the impossibility of romanticizing a drug problem that had become so common that 1/7 Americans have been afflicted with it or, at least, know someone who has in the same way that I approached Communions.
Nevertheless, Cauchi didn't seem much interested in spotlighting my book. I wasn't upset, and understood full well that working with me might invite political scrutiny that other platforms creators have no responsibility to take on. No hard feelings. I am, however, a bit petty, and ceased paying attention to what OCL was doing in the following years.Flash forward to 2024. Cauchi now credits his wife, Dasha Zaharova, as his co-collaborator on the platform and the magazine. The vaunted German style mag 032C offers a huge chunk of its Summer 2024 issue to the OCL co-creators to have free rein over choosing the magazine’s contents. Naturally, I was intrigued (In all honesty, I once freelanced a stupid piece for E-commerce platform Ssense that at the time was being published and edited by 032C editor Joerg Koch, so someone could easily point this out and call me embittered or whatever but I had barely found my voice as a writer at that point and was flailing, looking for anyone who’d publish me after years of postgrad disappointment, I’m doing just fine now.) Having a huge style magazine co-sign this project could be viewed as an amplification of its provocative concept: misery as aesthetic. Tragedy liberated of its politics, made into fashion, like the time that Galliano took inspiration from the homeless bums he saw jogging La Seine early in the morning and applied their garment affectations to his 2000 Dior couture collection. Or, more directly, a riff on the old “heroin chic” aesthetic during an era where there was no longer anything chic, occult, or uncommon about opiate addiction. A lens into the Opioid Crisis absent political or moral musing.