eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

55 54 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS ‘60 Heads’, a Canberra Contemporary Art Space travelling exhibition, installation view at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1997 Four portraits from ‘60 Heads’; from left: Lyn, Charlie, Paddy and Zoc In McCormack’s view, gays and lesbians did not fit the definition of ‘innocent’ lives. As if this wasn’t confronting enough, eX’s Visual Arts/Craft Board grant to study tattooing was now the crux of an acrimonious debate between Liberal Senator Bronwyn Bishop and then Federal Treasurer Paul Keating during a Senate Estimates Committee sitting. As eX recalls: Ms Bishop demanded the repatriation of the residential funding, honest taxpayers’ money, as tattooing was a filthy and obscene practice which had no relationship with culture or refinement. Paul [Keating] responded in his withering best, in defence. 28 For Bishop, eX felt: . . . tattooing represented the working and criminal classes and had to be kept out of the elite art world. The attack failed. I got to keep the grant as an extension of my practice. 29 Despite being faced with political, personal and blood prejudice, over the next decade, eX became known as the go-to tattooist for queer and counterculture communities; she attracted numerous clients who were forest defenders and natural habitat protectors, drawn to her through her brother Hawke, a fierce environmental warrior. As Wicked Women magazine put it in 1995: Mention the name eX de Medici to lesbian and gay tattoo lovers and you will see their faces light up with an awe and admiration which is rare. Almost unanimously they will agree that her work is simply extraordinary. Many lesbians will not be tattooed by anyone else, waiting for over a month for an appointment with her and travelling to Canberra to have their tattoos done. 30 The same was true for countless gay men who made their way to eX’s studio in a new era in which they defiantly and publicly displayed their sexual orientation. In 1994, journalist Kerry Bashford wrote: Tattooing and body art hold a unique fascination for gay men. While straight men might wear their designs as a badge of masculinity, it is this that gay men can find particularly tantalising. Tattooing has this century largely been the preserve of the working class and many of the situations that encourage wearing body art such as the prison, the army and the navy are heavily loaded with gay eroticism. When a gay man takes on a tattoo, he himself embraces, and literally imbibes, this erotic potential. 31 When I asked eX in 1996 about the sudden rise in queer tattooing, especially in the age of AIDS, she responded: I think that any right-wing group perceives that Queerness is an aberration of human nature . . . I guess the last 5 or 6 years have proved to be explosive years for those who have been suppressed for so long, and reviled. I think reviled is probably a better word, because tattooing is reviled also. Events like Mardi Gras have made radical changes to how the general population perceives Queerness — that it’s not a dreadful threat. So many queers are now very, very proud to be tattooed with their signs, such as the signifying Rainbow Flag. And I remember tattooing a black triangle on a woman a few months ago. Something big is happening when people are prepared to wear these symbols indelibly, despite the looming cloud of fascism in our country. I think this reiterates some deep commitment to being OUT, and not allowing that whole mentality and politic of the family to suppress queers. A sign etched in our very flesh. Never forgotten . . . Tattooing is inscribing blood — it’s a pact. A blood rite that has immense psychological value. The fact that a Queer symbol is inscribed and engraved in blood is also a sign of a much deeper kind of commitment to those kinds of ideals. We could probably have a Rainbow Flag sticker on our car, but that is removable; if things get hot, then you can take that one off. 32