eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

27 26 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Endnotes 1 William Shakespeare, Macbeth , Bernard Lott (ed.), Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1958, p.145; Act IV, Scene I, 45. 2 Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature , trans. Margaret Mauldon, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, p.43; first published as À Rebours, Charpentier et Cie, Paris, 1884. 3 See QAGOMA, ‘APT5 / eX de Medici discusses her art practice and “The Theory of Everything”’ [video], YouTube , <youtube.com/watch?v=3EjQ- R0V1lc>; and ‘A short history of poodle grooming’, Pedigree , <pedigree.com/ article/short-history-poodle-grooming>, both viewed September 2022. ‘Tulipmania’ was a real, though exaggerated, phenomenon that is the subject of a book by Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age , The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. See also Lorraine Boissoneault, ‘There never was a real tulip fever’, Smithsonian Magazine , 18 September 2017, <smithsonianmag.com/history/ there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/>, and Erhan Afyoncu, ‘ Tulip mania: The 17th century bitcoin craze’, Daily Sabah , 2 March 2018, <dailysabah.com/feature/2018/03/02/tulip-mania-the-17th-century-craze> , both viewed October 2022. The striations on the Semper Augustus tulip are caused by a mosaic virus, the Tulip breaking virus (TBV), with the Dutch prizing the flower for its beauty, ‘without knowing it was the result of a viral infection’; see ‘Tulip breaking virus’, ScienceDirect , <sciencedirect. com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/tulip-breaking-virus>, viewed October 2022. The candelabrum depicted in the watercolour is one of a pair manufactured in 1911, Tsar, pair of candelabra (Acc. D22.1-2-1982), now held by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV); telephone conversation with the artist, 14 June 2022. The NGV’s candelabra once graced the proscenium of the auditorium of Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre, which was designed by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. See Christopher Menz, ‘BACCARAT Tsar candelabrum’, in Christopher Menz and Margaret Legge, with contributions by Anna Nieuwenhuysen, Decorative Arts in the International Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p.96. The candelabra take their name from the Russian Tsars Alexander II and Nicholas II, and other members of the Romanov family, who, from 1867, commissioned Baccarat to make chandeliers and other works of decorative art; see ‘A monumental pair of French cut and molded-crystal seventy-nine-light candelabra’, Christie’s , <christies.com/en/lot/lot-5985087 >, and ‘What the expert looks for . . . No.1 – Baccarat chandeliers’, Christie’s , <christies.com/features/Expert-tips- on-Baccarat-chandeliers-9775-1.aspx#:~:text=A%20brief%20history%20 of%20Baccarat&text=In%201764%20King%20Louis%20XV,still%20 are%2C%20synonymous%20with%20luxury>, both viewed September 2022. 4 QAGOMA, ‘APT5 / eX de Medici discusses her art practice and “The Theory of Everything”’, viewed September 2022. In 2009, it was revealed that the mine, owned by ASX-listed Energy Resources of Australia (ERA), which is majority-owned by mining giant Rio Tinto, was leaking contaminated water into a tailings dam and, in 2013, one million litres of radioactive slurry was released by a burst leach tank, leading Mirrar native title holders to insist that mining operations in the area be wound up and that ERA complete remediation of the site by 2026, as well as refraining from reopening operations at nearby Jabiluka. This work has been delayed as the result of various corporate disputes, including Rio Tinto’s attempt to assume more than 95 per cent of the shares in ERA by becoming the sole funder of the remediation work. In October 2022, an update on this commercial wrangling appeared in the Guardian , who reported that ERA’s directors had offered their resignations from the board because Rio Tinto, who now owns 86 per cent of shares in the company, has refused to recommence mining at the Ranger and Jabiluka sites, throwing ‘into limbo efforts to raise up to $2.2bn needed for the remediation of Ranger —work that is already suffering from large cost blowouts and lengthy delays’. See Ben Butler, ‘Directors of firm responsible for clean-up at Kakadu uranium site will resign amid fight with Rio Tinto’, Guardian , 3 October 2022, <theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/03/rio-tinto- calls-for-board-resignation-over-kakadu-uranium-site-clean-up>, viewed October 2022. 5 In 2006, these artworks featured in ‘The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art' (APT5), the first Triennial that spanned both the Queensland Art Gallery and the newly built Gallery of Modern Art. 6 For a discussion of humanity’s predisposition towards violence, see David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War , St Martin’s Press, New York, 2007; for example, Livingstone Smith suggests that ‘violence has followed our species every step of the way in its long journey through time. From the scalped bodies of ancient warriors to the suicide bombers in today’s newspaper headlines, history is drenched in human blood’, p.8. 7 eX de Medici, ‘APT5 / eX de Medici discusses her art practice and The Theory of Everything ’, viewed September 2022. For an exposé on the AR-15, see Ali Watkins, John Ismay and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, ‘Once banned, now loved and loathed: How the AR-15 became “America’s Rifle”’, New York Times , 3 March 2018, <nytimes.com/2018/03/03/us/politics/ar-15-americas-rifle.html >, viewed October 2022. 8 Leigh Sales and James Elton, ‘Afghanistan not entirely a failure, says John Howard, who first committed Australian troops’, ABC News , 18 August 2021, <abc.net.au/news/2021-08-18/john-howard-afghanistan-war-not-a-failure- 730-interview/100388644>; Ben Doherty, ‘John Howard defends Iraq war, saying it was “justified at the time”’, Guardian , 7 July 2016, <theguardian. com/uk-news/2016/jul/07/john-howard-chilcot-sending-troops-iraq-war- justified-at-the-time->, both viewed November 2022. 9 Dr Jenny McFarlane brought the ‘big pictures’ — Blue (Bauer/Bower) 1998–2000, Red (Colony) 1999–2000, Gun(n)s ’n Styx 2005 , The Theory of Everything 2005 and Live the (Big Black) Dream 2006 — together for the major survey ‘Cold Blooded: eX de Medici’, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra (28 June – 11 August 2013). For McFarlane’s discussion of this series, see Jenny McFarlane, ‘Relaxed and comfortable’, in Cold Blooded: eX de Medici [exhibition catalogue], Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, 2013, pp.28–9. 10 An example is Hogarth’s print Celebrating an Act of Parliament Favourable to Engravers 1754, in which the artist hails the British Parliament’s passing on 25 June 1735 of the petition that Hogarth raised with six other engravers, ‘An Act for the encouragement of the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints, by vesting the properties thereof in the inventors and engravers’. Known colloquially as ‘Hogarth’s Act’, the bill was designed to prevent publishers and print-sellers profiting illegally from the work of artists, ratifying their rights to their work. The print itself is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, both in terms of its imagery and text, which gently mock the hierarchical structure of the British Parliament, with the Crown at its head, and the largesse of the State. In making this point, I acknowledge curator Ellie Buttrose’s research for the exhibition ‘Cut It: Collage to Meme’, GOMA (7 August 2020 – 28 March 2021). 11 Craig Owens, ‘The allegorical impulse: Toward a theory of Postmodernism’, October , vol.12, spring 1980, p.69. In the same text, Owens valorises Benjamin’s insight into the allegorical instincts of the great modernist poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821–67), ‘effectively [situating] an allegorical impulse at the origins of modernism in the arts’, and poses the rhetorical question ‘does not collage, or the manipulation and consequent transformation of highly significant fragments, also exploit the atomizing, disjunctive principle which lies at the heart of allegory?’, a methodology that aptly describes de Medici’s eclectic practice; see Owens, p.79. In my discussion of allegory, I acknowledge the scholarship of Kelly Gellatly, ‘eX de Medici: Signs of mortality’, Artlink , vol.26. no.3, 2006, pp.16–21; Francis E Parker, ‘My eye, a flaying instrument: eX de Medici’, in Lynne Seear and Suhanya Raffel (eds), The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, 2006, pp.74–7; Roger Leong, ‘eX de Medici’, in Charles Green, 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, pp.92–3; and Doug Hall, ‘Beautiful, beautiful violence: It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain . . .’, in eX de Medici: Sweet Complicity [exhibition catalogue], Karen Woodbury Gallery, Richmond, Vic., 2009, unpaginated. 12 In formulating these ideas, I acknowledge the insights Dr Jenny McFarlane has shared with me during our conversations about eX de Medici and this exhibition. 13 Henry M Levin, ‘Youth unemployment and its educational consequences', Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis , summer, vol.5, no.2, 1983, p.231. 14 Craig O’Hara, ‘Anarchism’, in The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise! , 2nd edn, AK Press, Edinburgh, 1999, p.100. In my discussion of punk, I follow the distinction that O’Hara makes between ‘punks’, ‘straight-edge punks’ and ‘skinheads’, with de Medici being part of the ‘punk’ scene, and specifically an ‘anarchist punk’; see O’Hara, p.18. O’Hara notes that ‘Anarchist Punks appear to hold many beliefs that agree with what can be termed the radical, liberal or far left wings of democracy. Beliefs in defending women’s rights, racial equality, and gay rights are involved in the platforms of both the liberal and the anarchist. These similarities, however, are not enough to keep the anarchist from condemning the Left as much . . . as the Right’. O’Hara goes on to quote from the Maximum RockNRoll fanzine and its declaration that is the Left’s ‘unwillingness to “take a principled stand in favor of radical egalitarianism”' and its resistance to ‘doing anything “that might bring it into direct confrontation with the State”', which causes the rift; see ‘New world order’, Maximum RockNRoll , no.99, August 1991, quoted in O’Hara, p.78. 15 eX de Medici, quoted in Paul Flynn, ‘X’, Artist Profile , issue 5, 2008, <sullivanstrumpf.com/assets/Uploads/Flynn-Paul.pdf> , viewed September 2022. 16 eX de Medici, quoted in Flynn. 17 eX de Medici, quoted in Nicola Teffer, ‘Know My Name: eX de Medici’, National Gallery of Australia , <nga.gov.au/knowmyname/artists/ex-de- medici/> viewed September 2022. 18 De Medici began working in photocopy in 1982 while studying at the Canberra School of Art. With fellow student representatives, Elena Gallegos (a Chilean ‘refugee from the pogroms that Pinochet enacted’), Andy Hurle and Fergus Armstrong, she ‘made zines, photocopied zines — all disposable — they were very “punkster”’. In 1985, de Medici became the first artist in Australia to approach Canon, 'a corporation who welcomed artists’, and had a long history of working ‘with artists using their cameras. It was a very good relationship that I developed with them over the years’. Telephone conversation with the author, 19 August 2022. 19 eX de Medici, conversation with the author, Canberra, 30 May 2021. The exhibition included artworks by Gaynor Cardew, Empire Circuit, Paul Costigan, eX de Medici, Christine Goodwin, Erica Green, Stephen Hall, Trish Holleley, Cherylynn Holmes, Monica Luff, Christine Olson, Stephanie Radok, Neil Roberts, Veet Sandeha (Norman Ainsworth) and Anthony Worrall. The room brochure included a sentence constructed from individual words that each artist chose to describe Canberra: ‘UTOPIA: CLEAN SCULPTURED VEILING OF IDENTITY, INSULATED IN CEREBRAL COLONISATION. CLOSE MYOPIC POWER STRATUM ZERO POINT THE CAPITAL’, which was ‘faxed instantly from Bitumen River Gallery in Canberra to THAT Contemporary Art Space in Brisbane’. In Sylvia Kleinert’s catalogue essay ‘Under the umbrella’, she addresses the issue of regionalism, identifying the problems faced by artists from Queensland and Canberra who ‘choose to live outside the traditional cultural centres of Sydney and Melbourne’ and find ‘their art denigrated as provincial’. Kleinert went on to invoke Walter Benjamin’s description of the storyteller and his affirmation of both the ‘resident tiller’ and the ‘trading seaman’, and, in relation to the photocopy medium, Benjamin’s seminal text of 1935, ‘The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility’. Channelling Benjamin, Kleinert notes that ‘the hierarchy [of] all cultural centres is structured upon an art industry which gives economic value and critical and curatorial attention to the unique work of art. The mechanically reproduced works subvert the aura and value associated with the hand generated image’; see Sylvia Kleinert, ‘Under the umbrella’, in Nowhere Utopia , available via The Ari Remix Living Archives , <remix.org.au/RemixPDFPublications/NowhereUtopiaCat.pdf> , viewed September 2022. ‘Nowhere Utopia’ was subsequently shown at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka, 31 October – 22 November 1987, which had that year assumed the constitution of the Bitumen River Gallery. 20 As the late artist and art historian Peter Anderson has documented, the THAT Contemporary Art Space collective included ‘artists such as Paul Andrew, Dale Chapman, Jane Richens, John Waller and Jay Younger’; see Peter Anderson, ‘The catalogue essay’, in ephemeral traces: Brisbane’s artist- run scene in the 1980s [exhibition catalogue], The University of Queensland Art Museum, St Lucia, Qld, 2016, p.10; available via <allconference.org.au/ content/1-library/63-ephemeral-traces-brisbanes-artist-run-scene-in-the- 1980s/ephemeral-traces-catalogue-essay-final-2.pdf>, viewed September