eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

23 22 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Red (Colony) (detail) 1999–2000 After . . . Howard . . . came to power I was angry for so many reasons — refugee issues, law and order, degradation of parliamentary processes — so I decided to do the most conservative work I could think of so [the politicians] could understand what I was saying. Also at the time the art world considered [traditional media such as drawing and] watercolour puerile, feminine, hobbyist, super conservative . . . I just chose a whole lot of things the art world would slam . . . [National Gallery of Victoria curator] Ted Gott got it and said ‘what are you doing?’ . . . and I said [grinning] ‘I’m about to subvert’. 30 The first artwork de Medici made in which she employed this strategy was the intricate, multi-panelled drawing Spectre #1 (Swastika) 1996 (Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), which she began on election night to protest what she anticipated would be the opening of the floodgates to the far right under Howard’s watch. Dismayed by the number of would-be clients she began turning away after they requested tattoos of the ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis, she resolved on her course. She subsequently completed Spectre #2 (Triskele) 1996 (Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), which features the triskelion — a medieval motif symbolising ‘sin, guilt and punishment’, commandeered by the right-wing organisation known as Afrikaner Broederbond in South Africa — ornamented with acanthus leaves. These drawings became the first of her ‘beautiful pictures for ugly people’ and would lead Ted Gott to remark on the links between them and de Medici’s tattoo practice in a 2002 article for Art and Australia : . . . the dichotomy of these signs . . . parallel the dichotomy of the blood given off during tattooing — a substance once viewed as friendly, but now [in the ‘Age of AIDS’] regarded as evil, and always potentially contaminated. 31 Having wrestled and reconciled with the ‘skill debate’ as a tattooist working meticulously and in miniature, de Medici was poised to tackle the concept that most outraged her: the abuses of power that, as a long-term, politically engaged resident of the national capital, she saw playing out around her, and on the international stage. 32 Around this time, she saw an exhibition of watercolours by Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826), the Austrian botanical artist who accompanied British navigator and cartographer Matthew Flinders (1774–1814) on his voyage to circumnavigate Australia in 1801–03. 33 The Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales’ survey ‘An Exquisite Eye: The Australian Flora and Fauna Drawings 1801–1820 of Ferdinand Bauer’, which de Medici saw in 1998 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, was a revelation. 34 Apart from being in awe of Bauer’s technical and creative brilliance, de Medici found his profession itself an enticement. In typically subversive style, she observed: ‘In art, [botanical illustration] is not considered art, which is always an attractive reason to get curious’. 35 Her assertion reveals both her steadfastly analogue brain, and her resistance to a view that she once heard a curator of contemporary art express, that ‘those who worked in traditional forms [were] dead, buried, and cremated’. 36 Moreover, it was the associations that the tradition of botanical illustration shared with colonisation that made it an ideal vehicle for de Medici. The natural history illustrators who accompanied European voyagers on their exploration and conquest of the ‘NewWorld’ were, through the taxonomic process, conscripted into the colonial project to record, name and claim these lands. Intrinsic to this process were the water-based pigments in which the naturalists worked, easily transportable and well respected, having found new status during the High Enlightenment (1730–80) as a means of classifying and controlling knowledge, and through the work of artists such as the English Romantic painter JMW Turner (1775–1851). The medium became the perfect instrument through which de Medici could tackle the inequities of current-day political systems, attracting the conservative audiences that she sought to provoke, and avoiding the trap of art-world exclusivity, being, in her words, ‘open to people who don’t “get” art’. 37 As noted, de Medici’s first major watercolours were Blue (Bower/Bauer) 1998–2000 and Red (Colony) 1999–2000. The first was titled after Bauer himself who spent eight months recording specimens — including the satin bowerbird who hoards and adorns its nest with blue objects — on the penal colony of Norfolk Island while de Medici’s convict ancestors were interned there. Created over several years as she worked to master her new medium, the paintings’ lush surfaces set the compass for future work in which she condemned the commodification of culture at the cost of humanity and the environment. As curator Kelly Gellatly has described, ‘Big Blue . . . is a seething mass of highly codified objects that assault the eye (like each of the works in the resulting series) with an anxious crush of stuff’. 38 Significant are the Union Jack and leg-irons (symbols of the British Empire), and the broken willow-pattern serving platter, which implies ‘the colonisation not just of land or peoples but of a colour and pattern’, in reference to Britain’s appropriation of Chinese blue-and-white ware and its distinguishing cobalt-oxide glaze, imported from Iran from the fourteenth century. 39 In a reference that crosses both species and eras, the artist included a bloom from the Banksia menziesii shrub ‘to evoke John Howard’s view of himself as a new [Robert] Menzies’. 40 Red (Colony) , as the artist has explained, is ‘about the corporation, so as a pair . . . how the colony becomes the corporation’. 41 On first glance, the artwork looks like a collection of sumptuous objects, but closer inspection reveals a more concerning picture: a Pokémon toy and second-hand vases sit among bookmakers’ tape and overtly sinister objects, including the Monsanto Corporation’s weedkiller Roundup, containing the company’s patented glyphosate molecule; a .22 Beretta pistol; and the fox, which British colonisers introduced (the latter motif additionally alluding to Foxtel and the reach of global media magnates — the new colonial powers). More sinister still is the gene that appears in the vial to the left of, and behind, the gun, which was engineered by Monsanto, a producer of genetically modified crops whose record of genetic pollution and market monopoly is notorious. 42 Plants grafted with the company’s so-called ‘Terminator’ gene become sterile once reaching maturity, indicating they will eventually enjoy a stranglehold on a range of food crops, and farming more broadly. In a worst-case scenario, the plants would cross-pollinate with wild species, meaning that, as journalist and author Jeffrey Kluger has documented, ‘flora [from] around the world [would be] suddenly and irreversibly sterilized’. 43 Bringing these disparate elements together in an unrestrained jumble, de Medici’s aimwas to expose the far-reaching influence that corporations have on every aspect of our lives — from the food we eat, to the environment we inhabit and the weapons and wars that our taxes finance — and to shake audiences out of their collective stupor and into action.