eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

17 16 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS The Theory of Everything (detail) 2005 The epigraph above, drawn from Huysmans’s nineteenth-century novel about eccentric aesthete Jean des Esseintes, whose fortune permits him to indulge his every fancy, is a potent allegory for the profligacy of modern life and humanity’s propensity to destroy the natural world, key themes in eX de Medici’s 40-year practice. In this vignette, Des Esseintes is so consumed by the desire to obtain an object that will serve as a foil for the colours in his Persian carpet that he has a tortoise gilded and bejewelled, only to find that the creature has died under the weight of its embellishments. The anecdote’s significance to de Medici is evident in her study Des Esseintes’ Shame 2005 (Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) and the watercolour that it informs, The Theory of Everything 2005. In the latter painting, a tiny, adorned tortoise nestles among other icons of human folly and excess: a notional, diamond-studded poodle — the dog was originally bred as a retriever and clipped, so in freezing waters its thick coat would protect its vital organs and not impede it, however, the grooming took on a purely decorative function in eighteenth-century France, mimicking the preposterous hairstyles of the day; variegated Semper Augustus tulips — a reference to ‘tulipmania’, the earliest documented financial boom and bust, which beset Holland in the mid seventeenth century, when bulbs that the Dutch East India Company imported from the Ottoman Empire were bartered for exorbitant and unsustainable prices; the chandelier from a Tsar candelabrum, designed in 1903 by Compagnie des Cristalleries de Baccarat, the French glassworks synonymous with luxury; a line of cocaine on a Tiffany gift box; and a cut crystal vase of narcissus flowers being sniffed by the ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’ figurine from the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce, to name but a few. 3 Together, these cryptic elements, which traverse cultures and periods, tell a sorry story. It is no coincidence that such symbols of intemperance intermingle with human skulls, exploded ammunition, a Smith &Wesson M&P pistol, and a moth skewered by a hatpin that has caused corrosive verdigris to sprout from its innards. These emblems of death— and the transient paraphernalia that adorn them— are de Medici’s version of a seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas, a form of still-life painting encoded with signs of mortality, such as skulls, hourglasses and flowers in full bloom. Also referred to as memento mori, Latin for ‘remember, you must die', these paintings — both historic and de Medici’s contemporary renderings — are warnings to beware the allure of worldly possessions lest they engender your demise. De Medici’s modern-day fables go further to implicate the human hands at work behind such extravagances, and to prophesy the perils of disregarding the fragility of life and exploiting the environment. The background of The Theory of Everything features the Ranger UraniumMine in the Northern Territory, which de Medici explains: . . . is in the middle of [Kakadu] national park. On traditional lands. And it’s a gigantic, filthy hole, where everything withers and dies. So [it is] the idea of wealth at any cost, and acquisition at any cost. [The tortoise] was still quite motionless and he felt it with his fingers; it was dead. Accustomed, no doubt, to an uneventful existence, to a humble life spent beneath its poor carapace, it had not been able to bear the dazzling splendour thrust upon it, the glittering cope in which it had been garbed, the gems with which its back had been encrusted. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À Rebours) 2