eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

25 24 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Significantly, Red (Colony) incorporates several small and seemingly inconsequential motifs: the winged insects that would become fundamental aspects of the artist’s practice in the coming decades. They include de Medici’s study of the lemon tree butterfly ( Papilio aegeus , also known as the orchard swallowtail butterfly), which she first encountered when she peeled several dead specimens from her car grill following a trip to Albury. 44 The chance encounter led the artist to seek Australia Council funding for another residency, which she commenced in 2001 at the CSIRO-managed Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC). The placement was the first of many she would undertake with entomologists Dr Marianne Horak (who has written for this volume), Dr Ted Edwards and Dr Ebbe Nielsen, experts in the Organisation’s collection of microlepidoptera, or small moths, which have wingspans of no more than 14 millimetres and, as Horak has described, are ‘so small that [their colours and patterns] are revealed only under a microscope’. 45 In 2001, de Medici showed the resulting ‘CSIRO/ANIC studies’ in a sold-out solo show, simply titled ‘sp.’, the scientific abbreviation for species. 46 From this early foray into natural history illustration, the artist developed the concept of parallel ecologies: the moth — a symbol of nature that has evolved over millennia to survive; and the weapon — the arrowhead formed by the insect’s forewings, representing the military and other technologies humans have evolved that are sowing the seeds of our destruction. As de Medici has explained, the moths are ‘one of the earliest creatures [that] date back to the conifer’, and the gun, which she studies with taxonomic and ‘species’-specific verve, is ‘a construct of human-driven extinction’ and an ‘unmistakable device to discuss . . . fascism and discussion-free power structures . . . The gun is the signature of the bully in the world’. 47 Pertinently, she saw ‘close ties’ between her watercolours of moths and her tattoos, noting that ‘both require time, manual skill, patience and a collaborative arrangement to exist’. 48 De Medici would expand the iconography of her moths as her grasp of their anatomy grew. In 2001, she realised their intricate patterns as tattoos on the necks of Midnight Oil band members in her commissioned portrait Nothing’s as Precious as a Hole in the Ground 2001, painted on vellum (calfskin), again in a nod to her tattoo practice. She titled the painting with a line from the group’s anthem ‘Blue sky mine’ (1990), and portrayed them at the Ranger UraniumMine to highlight the ecological issues that the band championed. 49 The following year, de Medici cloaked a pistol in the ‘pelt’ of a moth from the Tortricidae family in her watercolour Hate Machine, Mindless Virtuosity [Brown Luger] 2002, also on vellum, signalling the imbalance of power that struck at the heart of the nature–culture divide she sought to address in her practice. This concept evolved into larger artworks in which moth and weapon collide, with warheads colonising the space where the insects’ abdomens and reproductive organs should reside. 50 Pure Impulse Control 2008, for example, includes the schematic from the atomic bomb that the US dropped on Nagasaki, foregrounding the devastating effects of nuclear warfare on our fragile planet. In 2009, de Medici was given the opportunity to explore firsthand her compulsion to disentangle Australia’s relationship with war when the Australian War Memorial appointed her as an Official War Artist to observe the peacekeeping activities of Australian Defence Force personnel deployed with the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands. 51 She chronicled her experiences in the watercolours she made for her commission and extrapolated on them in Cure for Pain 2010–11, which features helmets from a range of countries and conflicts from the colonial period to the present, including Afghanistan and Iraq. The artwork — in which the helmet, or ‘brain bucket’, serves as a metaphor for the human skull — denounces our predisposition for violence and the futility of armed conflict, while also functioning as a lament for lives lost. The artworks that de Medici has made in subsequent years further this discourse and underscore her cynicism for US military strategies, and for Australia’s complicity in the wars the superpower has waged. That's a Good Dog 2013, for instance, is an indictment of Australian involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the pretext that President Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. The spectacular watercolour was informed by the artist’s engagement with politics in the region, developed during several trips to Iran, the first in 2010. The artwork depicts a Steyr rifle, the standard military weapon issued to members of the Australian armed forces, which de Medici has embellished with Australian desert camouflage and the Southern Cross constellation. The grip features the stripes from the American flag, and the weapon is entwined with verdigris, the corrosive crystals that form when an insect specimen is fixed with a nickel or copper pin. While de Medici has made a forensic and, metaphorically speaking, taxonomic study of weaponry to expose its destructive and pervasive power, she is similarly alarmed by the threats posed by technology — and the abuses of power that are executed under its seemingly benign banner — both by governments and corporations. Her concerns are voiced in her resolutely analogue language of pigment on paper, not via the machinery she critiques. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the panoramic and, one might say, operatic denunciation of the ubiquity of surveillance technology in Spies Like Us 2016, as well as in other artworks from the 2017 exhibition of that name, including Asleep While Awake 2016–17 and The Great Acceleration 2017. Around this time, de Medici addressed the National Visual Arts Education Conference, expanding on themes explored in her video The World 2004–14, which features stills from the nightly news: We live in an era of . . . the masked terrorist and tactical police alike, of confessional, anonymous Facebook life . . . I’ve collected these images [of barbarism] since the global news broadcast of a phone video showing the [2006] lynching of Saddam Hussein by an hysterical, screaming, and chaotic gang of hooded men . . . I knew instantly from that moment, everything had changed about how the screen, instead of entertaining us, was shaping a new code of values . . . The new screen life hunts everything down . . . Technology is terraforming the global landscape, a vast and exponential Earth-shaping web of insider-trading, corruption, and distractions. Technology is terraforming the hive mind. 52 These ideas continue to preoccupy de Medici as her watercolours evince. In her two most recent series, ‘Double Crossed’ (2021) and ‘Double Double Crossed’ (2022), the moths the artist has studied for more than two decades are entangled, in the first group, with chemical and nuclear weapons and, in the second, with more subtle forms of corporate and technological warfare. 53 As she said in a recent interview discussing these collisions, the unexpected and ostensibly paradoxical pairings make sense if they are seen as part of a broader discussion about humankind’s irreversible impact on our world: Whether or not the abdomen [of the moth] is the molecular description of Oxycodone or Xanax . . . a weapon of the pharmaceutical industry, or whether it’s . . . Elon Musk’s . . . subsidiary company of SpaceX called Swarm Technologies, their logo, which is the company that’s going to cover our planet with satellites . . . a giant net of satellites . . . what is weaponised now is not just a gun . . . Together as a group, they form a debate about the abdomen being the place of that animal’s reproduction [which] is replaced with something that is an agent of destruction. It operates in [an] opposing sort of [way] but [fits] the evidence. 54 Present, too, are the guns that de Medici has studied relentlessly and unflinchingly, seeking to shine a light on machinery that has become so ubiquitous it almost eludes notice, except when it gains exposure in yet another school shooting or in the brutal suppression of civilian protesters by ‘arms of the state’. Examples include the guns that flank the moth in the triptych Walter Raleigh x Ned (We Come in Peace) , East India Trading Co. , and Elizabeth x Han Solo (Shoot to Kill) , all 2021. Replete with myriad references harking back to the ideas that de Medici explored in her earliest watercolours — specifically the origins and acquisitive instincts of the first corporate and colonial powers — the artworks are seductive, though damning, indictments of the systems that govern our lives. To conclude, then, let us return to the idea of allegory that has epitomised the artist’s approach over the course of her singular career. The narrative revealed through her considered and incisive practice has seen humans pitted metaphorically against each other, and the most vulnerable creatures on this planet. In eX de Medici’s cautionary tale, the moths win.