eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

41 40 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS I See, I Keep Quiet (Scenes from the Ivory Tower) 1989, installation view, ‘Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’, Art Gallery of South Australia, 1990 I See, I Keep Quiet (Scenes from the Ivory Tower) (details) 1989 The mid 1980s and early 1990s were the Hawke–Keating years, before the intensification of neoliberalism under John Howard’s prime ministership (1996–2007). Recollecting this time, I am reminded of the requirement to sign my now-husband into the popular Canberra venue Tilley Devine’s Café (Tilley's) — a feminist establishment whose positive discrimination precepts were much stronger at that time — and vouch for his good behaviour. 7 I also recall the frisson of anxiety as I made screenprints at Ainslie Village, and the excitement of making my first art purchase — Godscience #2 , a biro drawing of the AIDS virus from de Medici’s first show at Helen Maxwell’s australian Girls Own Gallery (aGOG), which spoke to me because the virus had taken an early toll on my family. 8 And, of course, I recall sitting in the sun on the steps of Bitumen River Gallery, taking part in the interminable debates about art and craft, centre and periphery, the hollowness of dominant aesthetic tropes, and the hopelessness of employment prospects generally, as well as in the arts specifically. De Medici arrived at the then Canberra School of Art (CSA, now Australian National University School of Art and Design) in mid 1982, in the backwash of ‘ACT 3’, the third performance festival organised by Ingo and Sylvia Kleinert for CSA, which was described by artist and historian of Australian performance Neil Howe as the last of the great performance festivals of the era. 9 Stelarc hung suspended by his fishhooks in the bush, and there were performances by Mike Parr and Dale Frank, amongst many others. 10 Punk, anarchy, collaboration, political activism, feminism, performance and process were the currencies of the time. In 1984, de Medici took time out from formal study, spending the year travelling between Canberra and the Shoalhaven for informal artist residencies at Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd’s properties (‘Eearie Park’ and ‘Bundanon’, near Nowra), supporting her family during a health crisis, and learning from Boyd and Nolan what dedicated commitment to artistic practice meant as a way of life. She returned to Canberra in early 1985 for a final year of study under David Worrall at the Canberra School of Music, where she developed an interest in sampling and associated ethical practices, which would inform the processes she would later adopt to compose the ornate and decorative schemes of her watercolours. It is useful to see this early period of de Medici’s career as a time of invention and play, testing the limits of established art practice, looking for gaps open to exploitation. But it was serious play. This was an extraordinarily creative time in an environment where the inherent value of working towards positive change was assumed by a community of politically engaged peers. This time and place saw the productive convergence of many artists, authors and performers including Neil Roberts, Tony Ayres, Ingo and Sylvia Kleinert, Paul McDermott, Anne Virgo, Alison Alder, Chris Denton, Colin Russell, Stephanie Radok, Gordon Hookey, Udo Sellbach, Vivienne Binns, Julie Ewington and many others too numerous to mention, who have variously left their mark on Australia's cultural psyche. 11 In the early 1980s, the photocopier came into its own as a black-and-white reproduction technology that larger tertiary art institutions made available to their staff and students. In 1985, de Medici first approached Canon for in-kind support to use their new black-and-white prototype copiers. 12 She had worked with photocopiers since 1982, drawn to the machines for their anti-aesthetic rejection of the object, their fugitive anonymity and ubiquity. 13 The technology also enabled the artist to take risks and work at scale without invoking disabling financial outlays. The new prototype enabled gridding at a 1:400 ratio for the first time. This was the beginning of a series of residencies with Canon that would continue until 1996, in which she worked with dedicated technicians to push the technology to its limits. 14 The works that came from this early collaboration in 1985 were Scene from an Ivory Tower (Wedding Cake) and Scene from an Ivory Tower (Pistol) , both 16-piece grids, printed at 164.7 x 117.2cm and 115.8 x 164.5cm (overall), respectively. The photocopier made the scale and impact of de Medici’s work possible. (Pistol) and (Wedding Cake) establish a pattern where violence is communicated at scale in a brutal fashion. The approach is muscular and forceful with no holds barred. We feel the artist’s visceral horror of violence in any form, even as she replicates it, making our own bodies resonate with its deferred impact. Despite the scratched and degraded data, the images are overwhelming. (Wedding Cake) commands attention — those manicured nails and clenched fist around that enormous carving knife are hard to forget. The work represents an early engagement with the theme of domestic violence that anticipates later installations such as I See, I Keep Quiet 1989 and Shotgun Wedding Dress/Cleave 2015, as well as the related series I Won Her with My Heart 2018, I Married Her with My Diamond 2018, I Killed her with My Club 2017, and I Buried Her with My Spade 2018, together with The Seat of Love and Hate 2017–18. (Wedding Cake) was pasted almost immediately onto the main road shopfront of a Queanbeyan solicitor’s office, bringing the normally hidden conversation about domestic