eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

21 20 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS The power work has been going on for a long time, the power of authority. And maybe the authority issue started from ‘punkdom’ — you always question authority, always, always, never trust authority because . . . it’s corruptible. I learnt that very young and it still works to this very day — [the John Howard] government proved that power corrupts. 16 An early poster that de Medici made with then partner Neil Roberts under the moniker Club Asbestos, ALEXIS SAYS DESIRE DRULES, O.K. 1989, features the anarchist symbol — a capital ‘A’ in a circle — and critiques the duplicitous corporate world of the American soap opera Dynasty (1981–89), and materialism generally. The ‘paste-up’ is representative of the ‘decayable materials’ that formed part of de Medici’s nascent artistic arsenal, mediums explored in greater depth by Dr Jenny McFarlane later in this volume. 17 Noteworthy here is de Medici’s photocopy Scene from an Ivory Tower (Pistol) 1985, which she made during the first of several residencies with Canon Australia and showed in the group exhibition ‘Nowhere Utopia: Uto (No) Topo (Place)’ at THAT Contemporary Art Space (THAT Space), Brisbane, in 1987. 18 The ‘exhibition in a suitcase’ comprised photocopies by 15 artists from Bitumen River Gallery, Canberra, and was part of an artist exchange with THAT Space, one of Brisbane’s earliest artist-run spaces. 19 The gallery occupied the rear of a warehouse at 20 Charlotte Street, in what was then arguably a police state run by Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s corrupt conservative government, and provided a space to exercise freedom of expression and dissent. 20 Reflecting on her work from the exhibition and this period, de Medici has explained: I worked a lot in disintegration — disintegration of the image that would be pasted up and disintegrate and have no record. I guess in the beginning the artworld thought it was rubbish, so we just kept going . . . We made zines, photocopied zines — all disposable. They were very ‘punkster’. [It was] much more in line with punk theory and anarchist theory than it was with art theory. 21 Beyond the significance of (Pistol) as an early example of the ephemeral artforms that de Medici and her cohort produced during the 1980s, the artwork introduced a trope that the artist has continued to mine: the flower as a male signifier. The audacious composite image, which de Medici copied from an illustrated dictionary and obfuscated by enlarging it repeatedly, also features the definition for the word that appeared above it, ‘pistil’, the female sexual organ of a flower. 22 The quirk piqued de Medici’s interest and led her to explore the martial and masculine associations of flowers; for example, the chrysanthemum and the cherry blossom as emblems of the Japanese empire, with the cherry blossom historically used to decorate the swords and scabbards of Japanese army officers, in deference to the Samurai; the tulip as an Iranian signifier for male martyrdom; and the poppy as a symbol commemorating the Allied soldiers who died on the Western Front during World War One. 23 Such complex allegorical associations would become fertile ground for the artist in the decades to come. De Medici’s transition from these ‘low-tech’ aesthetics and impermanent materials to the fugitive, yet fixable, medium of watercolour occurred in response to a series of personal and political drivers. The first of these was her growing disillusionment with the Australian art world and its unwillingness to engage with the ‘debates going on around us’. 24 As the artist has described, ‘I read a lot of [postmodernist theory and] I thought it was a privileged debate that didn’t have any roots in [our] reality . . . because they were French theorists'. 25 Her disenchantment led her to consider alternative mediums and, in 1988, following a disastrous tattoo inked by a drunk, male tattooist in Melbourne, de Medici decided on the direction that would map out the next ten years of her life. 26 After researching tattoo studios in Australia and eschewing the male-dominated scene, she elected to apply for Australia Council funding to undertake an apprenticeship with American tattooist Kari Barba, who owned and operated Twilight Fantasy in Anaheim, just outside Los Angeles. Revisiting this decision, de Medici recalls: . . . the more I saw how conservative the art world was, the more interested I was in tattooing. A few people had said ‘oh, don’t do that — that is art world suicide’ . . . And so my contrary nature powered me on . . . There was an excitement quotient and a verboten quotient. I’d been working in decayable materials and the human is the most decayable of all things — it couldn’t be collected as an art object. 27 For the next decade, de Medici navigated parallel careers as an artist and a tattooist. The Ilfochrome photographs from her ‘60 Heads’ series, discussed by Dr Jenny McFarlane and Dr Ted Gott later in this volume, were one of the few instances where de Medici’s dual practices coalesced, recording the euphoric faces of her clients, post-tattoo. Meanwhile, she continued to make and exhibit photocopies of ‘60 Heads’ and other imagery, regarding the works as a form of photography, despite pushback from other artists and curators. Not so Mary Eagle, then Curator of Australian Art at the Australian National Gallery. In 1990, as guest curator of the inaugural 'Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art' at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Eagle chose de Medici’s series of 44 colour photocopies I See, I Keep Quiet (Scenes from the Ivory Tower) 1989 for display alongside work by artists including Gordon Bennett, Janet Burchill, Anne Ferran, Fiona Hall, Narelle Jubelin, Bea Maddock, Howard Taylor, Bernhard Sachs and Rover Thomas, among others. 28 As Eagle articulated in her catalogue essay: The Biennial describes a trend in Australian art now, relevant to the times, and signalled by work of high quality. Notably, the art did not arise out of art theory, or the art journals, but from a broader social experience. 29 Around this time, a shift in Australia’s political landscape engendered another volte-face for de Medici that has continued to define her practice. On 2 March 1996, on the same evening that her Ilfochrome tattoo portraits debuted at the 1996 Adelaide Biennial, Liberal leader John Howard was elected Prime Minister of Australia. The artist’s choice to pursue conservative visual idioms, and subsequently to begin working in watercolour, was made in direct response to her alarm at the economic and social policies that she predicted Howard would enact: Scene from an Ivory Tower (Pistol) 1985