eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

43 42 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS The artist performing her photocopy installation Scenes from the Ivory Tower at ‘ARX '87: Australia and Regions Artists’ Exchange’, Fremantle City Council building, 1987 violence into the public domain. 15 Samantha Littley writes elegantly in this volume of (Pistol) , announcing the other significant theme in the artist’s work, the gun as a signifier of power. 16 The banal source imagery of (Pistol) and (Wedding Cake) is recodified through the photocopier’s machined processes and, in doing so, reveals and amplifies atrocities we complicitly ignore. 17 Kate Eichhorn’s fascinating history of photocopying in the United States connects the medium with activist politics surrounding AIDS and queer rights in the 1980s and 1990s. For Eichhorn, ‘xerography ultimately would become most synonymous with forms of expression best described as anti-establishment, punk and DIY . . . gritty, spontaneous, and with little regard for markets or censors’. 18 While (Pistol) and (Wedding Cake) are not political posters in the context described by Eichhorn, they are activist to their core, operating within the raw and loud emotional register associated with punk. They take full advantage of the technology’s ability to produce multiples unmediated by editorial oversight. For Eichhorn and de Medici, the photocopy enabled a new and more immediate relationship with its audience, built around passionate authenticity and a DIY-style personal responsibility for effecting change, closing the distance between maker and viewer. In retrospect, the photocopier was a natural choice for de Medici, both because of its relationship with the dissemination of data in the corridors of power, and for its metaphoric capacity to change information through repetition. It is the conceptual framework of process art that underpins the idea of entering data into a machine and allowing the technology to both degrade and enhance the result. In this sense, de Medici’s photocopies rub shoulders with the processes and aesthetics that defined the ‘ACT 3’ performance festival, and this approach only becomes more obvious in the artist’s performance installations. Instead of unleashing natural forces on materials, de Medici employed a machine and exhibited the results. The erratic outcomes of a perishable medium document a process set in motion by the artist, which was ultimately out of her control. The hand of the artist was erased, Warhol-like, and a debased medium became the ‘art object’ in defiance of art industry expectations. The raw, improvised quality of the image is an act of resistance to the Establishment, intentionally disruptive in its purposeful rejection of style. Unframed, comprising fugitive inks and spat out of a machine, these images revelled in an anti-consumerist aesthetic. Such artworks had no place in the white cube of the gallery space and, importantly, they were never intended to last. Process as an operating principle also underpins a performance that de Medici enacted on Sydney’s Cahill Expressway — the same year that the artist produced (Pistol) and (Wedding Cake) — in which, over a two-hour period, she crossed the freeway some 27 times, drawing a chalk line across the road each time. 19 It was an engagement with extreme risk and repetition, but fortunately, in this instance, not with a disintegration of materials (except, of course, for the chalk lines). The following year, her performance installation Work Saints at Bitumen River Gallery explored expectations of labour value by positioning the artist as being of equal importance to any tradesperson, professional or public servant in the work economy. 20 For five days, within the standard office hours of 9am to 5pm, the artist laboured to produce a series of huge charcoal drawings. The substance of the performance was the physical labour involved, together with the strict tally of hours — the investment of time that characterises a dedicated arts practice. 21 Echoes of this performance can be seen at the base of each of de Medici’s watercolours, where she tallies the days of labour invested in each work. De Medici exhibited (Pistol) in 1987 at Brisbane’s experimental artist-run gallery THAT Contemporary Art Space, as part of the Bitumen River Gallery Collective exchange exhibition, ‘Nowhere Utopia: Uto (No) Topo (Place)’. This early exhibition by the Collective explored the disruptive potential of the photocopy as a medium. At the time, de Medici described the exhibition as addressing ‘the concept of machine-generated, rather than handmade products’. 22 Supplementary images displayed above (Pistol) reinforce its undercurrent of power and control. 23 The same year, de Medici made a series of screenprints with Neil Roberts, under the name ‘Club Asbestos’, at Megalo International Screenprinting Collective, including EXTERMINATE CRIME OF THE STATE 1987. These screenprints incorporated the photocopied image into a medium more commonly associated with the politics of 1970s’ feminism, the political poster. The posters were also produced as ‘paste-ups’, using the streetscape as their platform, and testing the boundaries between art and politics. Later in 1987, de Medici was invited to participate in the inaugural ‘ARX '87: Australia and Regions Artists’ Exchange’ in Perth, where her durational photocopy installation, Scenes from the Ivory Tower , was produced through further residencies with Canon. 24 Performed over five days, the work involved the installation of a series of paired gridded photocopies on the south facade of the Fremantle City Council building. They were accompanied by texts sampled from the fictional poet Ern Malley that together read: ‘We have lived as ectoplasm, frightful spasm, hysterical vision strikes the façade of an era’. 25 The work was intended to be read over time, as each day’s paste-ups were ghosted with overlays that obscured the previous day’s images and text. Consecutively, de Medici installed alternate portrait or horizontally oriented paste-ups in monochrome or colour. Images of the Catholic Church and coercive control, portraits of strong and abused women, homoerotic and homophobic images, and representations of violence chased each other across the building. This performance-based installation of photocopies produced a pile-up of juxtaposed images from which the viewer was asked to create meaning. 26