eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

39 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Scene from an Ivory Tower (Wedding Cake) (detail) 1985 I am sitting at my desk, trying to follow the instructions to run my perfect, high-res image through a ‘Xerox filter’. I am assured that this will ‘punk my graphics’, and recapture the authenticity, combustible energy and anti-Establishment aesthetic of a lost time. 2 The screen-lit YouTubers delivering the Photoshop tutorial relish the anti-consumerist aesthetic, the texture, the disruption, the rough-and-ready quality of the ‘punk’ image. Above all, they value its imperfection, its status as an outsider to the ubiquitous, processed image-making systems that surround us today. Perversely, it requires a certain level of skill to recreate the scratches, ink splats, visual noise and degraded appearance of the ephemeral ‘Xeroxed’ images of the 1980s. It also requires a nuanced understanding of today’s slippery media environment. eX de Medici’s photocopies are the originals that the ‘Xerox filter’ seeks to replicate. In the mid 1980s and early 1990s, she produced an important body of work in response to the barrage of increasingly manipulative imagery being disseminated in society. De Medici’s artworks addressed the politics of power and institutionalised discrimination with a visceral anger that is still difficult to ignore. When asked about this period, she positioned the photocopies as part of a larger, interrelated practice: I was an anarchist and doing photography and performance installations in derelict houses around Canberra and I was big on photocopy art in the early days, which was a way to do large scale photographic work which wasn’t too expensive. 3 While cost was undoubtedly a factor, the potential for impactful, performative disruption was the real allure of this medium. As de Medici described in 1987, the ‘manipulation of images using generational techniques of photocopy causes the decay and recodification of the image’. 4 The photocopier enabled a manipulation of — and resistance to — the insidious pile-up of cumulatively persuasive imagery in our rapidly changing world. This resistance was politically conceived within an anarchic-punk framework and represents a heartfelt critique of late twentieth-century capitalism. Curator Samantha Littley’s observations about de Medici’s watercolours are equally true of the artist’s photocopies: ‘What is alarming, in looking back over works that eX de Medici has made . . . is their continued relevance to contemporary life’. 5 Revisiting de Medici’s early photocopies opens a space to consider some of the factors sustaining her practice. The photocopies of this period demonstrate that installation, performance and process are foundational. 6 The markers have always been hidden in plain sight: her anti-Establishment defiance; the explicit violence; her risk-taking; the diligent marks at the base of each of her monumental watercolours; her famous work ethic; her nom de plume; and, perhaps, most importantly, the collapse of the divide between artist and audience — all are rooted in her photocopies and performance installations of this earlier time. May I say that I approve of a piece that tries to remake the entire puzzle? Garth Nix, Clariel 1