eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

53 52 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS exploring tattooing as a practice, the more she thought: ‘“if you’re saying that, it must be really interesting” . . . plus I thought it was really sexy and art didn’t seem very sexy to me’. 7 Always attracted to ‘the Pandora’s boxes I have continued to open’, from this point on, eX’s life was to be increasingly informed by both blood and queer politics. 8 Back in Canberra, she worked with Peter Rowland and the AIDS Action Council of the ACT on the development of posters, handbills and other materials for their winter AIDS-preventative advertising campaign. In her new attraction to tattooing, eX now faced a dilemma, as she was confronted with the fact that the industry in Australia was then still: Wild West territory . . . utter lawlessness, very little discourse, almost one hundred percent men, and pretty rugged men at that, which was the driving reason why I decided I would not do an apprenticeship in Australia. 9 eX’s mother Noreen had found a survey of tattooing published in 1985, The Sign Upon Cain by Gippi Rondinella, in which eX discovered the work of Kari Barba, a woman tattooist working in the Los Angeles area. 10 This book contained a profile of Barba and a photograph of her at work, as well as her studio address in California. Barba stood out in the field at the time for her commitment to creating painstakingly detailed colour tattoos in a style she termed ‘illustrative realism’. 11 eX’s attraction to the idea of being mentored by Barba was Barba’s defiance in ‘trudging through the misogynistic muck that was the tattoo world of the 1980s and 1990s’, when ‘the scarcity of women in the tattoo industry sat somewhere between Halley’s Comet and Bigfoot sightings’. 12 Informed by feminist ideas since her teenage years, eX framed her application to the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council to fund a tattoo apprenticeship in terms of working with and for women under the guidance of Barba, adapting the medium to the female body and crafting a new aesthetic for it. Her application was successful and, in June 1989, eX moved to California to study with Barba. It was through tattooing that eX developed a fresh and deep appreciation for the premise of skill in art, something not emphasised during her art school training at the modernist-led Canberra School of Art. The portfolio of drawings she brought with her to Los Angeles had to be put to one side though, as Barba required her to rethink her drawing practice in an entirely new medium— breathing, and bleeding, human skin. Barba taught her the hard truth: Tattoo techniques are very difficult, as an artist it was almost like learning everything all over again. One of the hardest problems in tattooing is making the tattoo stay inside the body and for it to end up looking how you wanted it to. 13 From Barba, eX learned ‘all aspects of the form (pigment chemistry, machine and needle construction, techniques and hygiene) with the guidance and supervision of a professional’. 14 The prejudice and indifference that eX had already seen directed towards Canberra’s queer and other marginal communities in no way prepared her for the full horror of what she was to experience during her apprenticeship at Twilight Fantasy, Barba’s first tattoo business, which she opened in 1983 in Anaheim, Orange County, just south of Los Angeles. Shortly before she arrived in California, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times had lamented how the local health care system ‘has yet to comprehensively address the AIDS epidemic in a medically sound, fiscally responsible and compassionate manner’, such that ‘As a result, people are dying in unnecessary pain and emotional agony’. 15 eX still vividly remembers the many homeless and ill HIV-positive people who knocked daily on the door of Barba’s tattoo parlour, ‘begging for water and food. They couldn’t come in because they had open wounds, and our clients inside the parlour also had open wounds as we tattooed them’. 16 Some of the ballpoint-pen drawings that she began making in Los Angeles, with their imagery of skulls and crutches display ‘A new kind of line, finer finish and a new obsessively slow process’ used to ‘perversely produce beautiful surfaces with low, trashy, disposable biro pens’, and seem to echo her confronting experiences with the new outcasts produced by the AIDS crisis in the US. 17 The appalling hatred and deliberate neglect levelled at queer and HIV-infected citizens under Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s presidencies would leave the artist determined never to return to the United States after her 18-month apprenticeship ended in January 1991. eX’s mentor Kari Barba recalled how when she first started tattooing in 1979, ‘We tattooed bare-handed and then didn’t have many standards for cleanliness’. A pioneer in the use of sterilised needles, gloves and other hygiene procedures, Barba set an example for the industry, and her care in this regard meant that ‘I was pretty much meticulous with my crew about each keeping their station neat and clean’. 18 eX brought back to Canberra a commitment to state-of-the-art hygienic tattoo practices, a discipline instilled in her by Barba and vital to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS through blood contamination. This had become a health issue in unregulated parlours, such that even the navy, a sector traditionally associated with the industry, had been advising that ‘Tattooing should be avoided’. 19 After eX's return to Australia, she worked part-time with Wayne Hunt at what was then Canberra’s only tattoo shop, Canberra City Tattoos in Civic, before opening her own studio, Deus eX Machina, in Lyneham. 20 Her new skills were recognised immediately by the Professional Tattoo Association of Australia in Sydney, which awarded her their inaugural prize for tattooing in 1991. 21 As an adviser to the ACT Department of Health from 1992 onwards, eX contributed to the drafting of the Skin Penetration Procedures Act 1994 , which established standards for infection control in the tattooing industry, and she was the first to obtain an operator’s licence under its terms. In the Deus eX Machina studio, everything was white, from the walls and floors to the leather chairs in which clients sat to have their skin inscribed with their personal ‘litany of signs and icons’, as she put it. The minutest speck of blood announced its presence for cleaning in this bleached studio interior; there was nothing else like it in Australia. eX returned to a Canberra that mirrored her experiences in California, where she had found that ‘in 1989, being queer wasn’t a good social tool within the culture’. 22 In February 1990, the Canberra Times had reported: A Swiss doctor has proposed that people known to be infected with the AIDS virus be stamped with a warning tattoo in the groin area to alert sexual partners to their condition. 23 In May 1991, the Canberra Times documented an upsurge in homophobic violence in the capital: Within three weeks of four teenagers being convicted for the murder of a gay man in Sydney, 12 bashings of gay men were reported to the AIDS Action Council in Canberra, and last week Roxus, a gay night club, was vandalised in an apparent attempt to stop it opening. 24 These gay bashings were perpetrated by groups of teenagers armed with baseball bats, and what would have been the national capital’s only gay bar at the time was daubed with ‘anti-gay graffiti’ in ‘a deliberate act by an anti-gay gang’. 25 At the same time, Tilley Devine’s Café (Tilley’s) — a popular venue for lesbian women where eX frequently temped as a ‘door bitch’ on band nights —was subjected to regular attacks from homophobes, who sought to invade its premises by smashing windows, punching patrons and assaulting clients with eggs in the carpark. 26 In 1993, the editor of the Daily Advertiser in Wagga Wagga (where eX had studied art briefly in 1978), Michael McCormack (future Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, 2018–21), penned a notorious editorial headed ‘Sordid homosexuality — it’s becoming more entrenched’, in which he lamented: Unfortunately gays are here and, if the disease their unnatural acts helped spread doesn’t wipe out humanity, they’re here to stay . . . How can these people call for rights when they’re responsible for the greatest medical dilemma known to man —Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome? AIDS shows no discrimination. It claims thousands upon thousands of innocent people’s lives every year. 27