eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

59 58 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Installation view of ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS’ featuring eX de Medici’s Godscience V (Stars) and Godscience VI , both 1994, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994 A number of these swabs were photographed before the blood had completely dried. They were then processed as large-scale Ilfochrome prints using a dye-destruction method (which is no longer readily available) that attains vivid colour saturation. These Godscience photographs allow the viewer to experience something of the intimacy with the tattoo subjects that the artist herself encountered when etching the original tattoos onto their skin. When exhibited in 1994 in the survey exhibition ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS’ at the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra, the Godscience photographs spoke to the human body’s simultaneous resilience and vulnerability at a time of global pandemic. eX’s Godscience images were viewed by 140 000 visitors to this groundbreaking show. 41 Photography was fused with photocopy in eX’s ‘60 Heads’ exhibition, which opened at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in March 1996, before travelling to other venues in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin. ‘Intentionally egalitarian . . . cheap and practical to travel and uncomplicated to install’, ‘60 Heads’ actually presented 74 images of freshly tattooed subjects, not all of them clients of the artist herself. 42 Enlarged and laminated colour photocopies of photographs that the artist had snapped over decades — a mix of high- and low-tech media that echoed the manner in which freshly etched tattoos are covered with protective plastic wrap — these images defied categorisation, being ‘neither the straightforward showing of individual tattoos . . . nor a fetishistic display of the artist’s work’, focusing on ‘neither the tattoo nor the person’, but rather offering ‘a serious theoretical contemplation of tattooing and its relation to contemporary art practice’. 43 For eX, one of her objectives for the exhibition was that it would redirect emphasis away from herself, for, in her eyes: ‘The radical difference between an art practice and tattooing is that it’s not for you. It’s gotta be about them. You’re an agent for their change’. 44 eX loved that whether she had tattooed them herself or not, the people imaged in ‘60 Heads’ shared the experience that ‘directly after the tattooing process, they’re dishevelled, they’re bursting with endorphins, they’re kind of not there — I find they’re post-coital or something — you know, post-pain’. 45 Above all, ‘60 Heads’ was a celebratory incursion of the ‘Other’ into the mainstream art world. In this regard, it was hugely successful, as the exhibition’s co-curator Jane Barney recalled: Every tattooed person in Canberra and the surrounding region visited that show. We had truckies, bus drivers, bikers . . . not our normal clientele, but our normal clientele were there too because some of our regular clientele were in the photos. 46 When ‘60 Heads’ travelled to Melbourne, it was described as ‘a most unconventional exhibition, which is causing a lot of excitement and attracting a new crowd to ACCA [Australian Centre for Contemporary Art]’. 47 The euphoria of the public success of ‘60 Heads’ was tragically undercut when, on 25 June 1996, eX’s physician and close friend Dr Peter Rowland was the victim of an appalling gay hate crime, being slain, along with his Great Dane dog, by multiple shotgun blasts as he slept in his bed. 48 Understandably, eX was profoundly shocked by his murder, which was widely perceived at the time by Canberra’s queer residents to have been motivated by homophobia and AIDS-phobia. When police questioned one of two brothers later arrested for Dr Rowland’s slaying about his motive for the crime, he replied simply: ‘He was a fag’. 49 It is no surprise then, when looking back over her career as an artist, and as a tattooist —working very much against the grain in both professions during difficult times — that eX de Medici has reflected upon how ‘the scales have continued with alarming regularity to be scraped from my eyes’, leading her to conclude that ‘my work has a bitter taste’. 50 It is also fair to say that eX’s art, especially her tattooing, has been a gift of light to many in a time of darkness.