eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

19 18 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Des Esseintes’ Shame 2005 At the cost of the future, at the cost of the land, at the cost of human and animal and plant health . . . it’s a hideous critique of what’s going on. 4 The watercolour is a microcosm of all that has driven the artist’s diverse and far-reaching practice. Its companion piece, Live the (Big Black) Dream 2006, represents the culmination of the intemperate appetites that the earlier artwork decries — a train wreck waiting to happen, which, in an irony that the artist has lamented, foretold the Global Financial Crisis that unfolded from mid 2007. 5 ‘Big Black’ sees the capitalist system derailed in a pile-up of grand proportions and, like many of de Medici’s artworks, is laden with coded symbolism, including menacing motifs that signify the base impulses to which humanity is prone. 6 The detritus includes skulls that the artist, who is also a veteran tattooist, regards as ‘the best memento mori image there is’; a bottle of poison; the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in a snow dome; an AR-15 machine gun — discomfortingly referred to as ‘America’s rifle’; and a miniaturised image of the atomic bomb that the United States (US) dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki to end World War Two, being towed by a weevil, a tiny but destructive insect that executes its invasive behaviours by stealth. 7 The idea of clandestine acts hiding in plain sight is underscored by the presence of a CCTV camera, a reference to the surveillance that we are increasingly and, often, willingly subjected to in this networked age, and a twin motif to the satellite in The Theory of Everything . The deputy sheriff’s badge plunged into a skull in the foreground of ‘Big Black’ is a veiled reference to then Prime Minister John Howard and his eagerness to follow US President George W Bush down the road of fiscal recklessness and into unwinnable wars. 8 These two watercolours form part of a series of ‘big pictures’ that paint a bleak vision of our world and include Blue (Bower/Bauer) 1998–2000, which condemns colonisation; Red (Colony) 1999–2000, an indictment of corporations; and the most recent example, The Wreckers 2018–19. De Medici began making this panoramic watercolour of a multi-vehicle crash in response to an overwhelming dread that ‘something bad’s going to happen’, and completed the painting just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. 9 Together, these artworks represent an extended metaphor through which she dissects the mess that humanity — and, in particular, human industry — has made of the planet, denouncing the devastating effects of the Anthropocene, the geological age in which our species has impacted itself and the Earth. De Medici’s allegorical approach reveals her influences, which she enumerates as illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, the late Baroque — the subject of Dr Andrea Bubenik’s essay in this volume — and the artworks of eighteenth-century English artist and satirist William Hogarth (1697–1764), which offer scornful commentaries on society’s foibles, and advocate for the rights of artists. 10 Art theorist Craig Owens’s articulation and championing of the allegorical impulse in contemporary art, published in the academic journal October in 1980 and informed by Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), is prescient here, given that de Medici began making art in the 1980s. In Owens’s two-part treatise, ‘The allegorical impulse: Toward a theory of Postmodernism’, he argues: . . . allegory becomes the model of all commentary, all critique, insofar as these are involved in rewriting a primary text in terms of its figural meaning . . . the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them. [She] lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in [her] hands the image becomes something other. 11 To appreciate how de Medici came to make such aesthetically and ideologically complex work, we must return to the artworks that mark the start of her career — ephemeral and rudimentary statements that seem worlds away from the irresistible, yet intractable, watercolours for which she is now known. And we must also consider her mercurial nature. As an artist, she has repeatedly taken paths less followed. A voracious reader engaged by art, science and politics, she is versed in the concerns of the world in a deep, reflective and reactive way. She is someone who loves people and harbours an abiding mistrust of humanity. She is provocative and diplomatic, both uncompromising and compassionate. 12 Yet these inherent tensions follow a certain logic. De Medici grew up in Canberra as the daughter of a political scientist who taught her to question everything. She came of age in the 1980s and was part of the national capital’s bolshie punk scene, embracing the movement’s irreverent attitude to authority. Punk’s anarchic leanings struck a particular chord with de Medici and her peers, a disenfranchised generation who had reached adulthood during the Liberal leadership of Malcolm Fraser, whose term as Prime Minister (1975–83) had seen youth unemployment skyrocket nationally, and neoliberal politics rise in the international arena through the ascension of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. 13 As Craig O’Hara wrote in his chapter ‘Anarchism’ in The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise! (first published in 1992): The faith that Punks and other activists place in anarchy stems from a belief in the equality and rights of all people. This view of equality is explicitly clear in Punks’ [ sic ] visible reaction to sexism, homophobia, racism, and even speciesism. This reaction is to condemn them as being harmful, irrational, and intolerable. 14 Punk’s suspicion of authority, its ethos of political activism and its disrespect for capitalism, consumerism and mass culture runs like a lightning rod through de Medici’s practice, which is as consistent as it is confounding. The abrupt turns that the artist has taken make sense in this context. From the outset, she has trained her sights on the violent impulses of humanity, explaining: ‘I find the whole premise of power and violence utterly overwhelming; I think that’s why I’m obsessed with it’. 15 This will to uncloak the wickedness that our species is capable of is her raison d’être. Underneath the beauty that defines her work is a compulsion to unmask the inequities and imbalances of power that have come to define our world — a world in which corporate profit-making influences government policy and drives decisions about social justice, the economy, and the environment. As de Medici explained in an interview with Paul Flynn for Artist Profile , in 2008: