eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

65 64 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Blue (Bower/Bauer) (detail) 1998–2000 The art of eX de Medici revels in extremes — swarm and void, violence and pacifism, life and death. In her practice, both the multitude and singular strive, at times suspended in creative tension. Crowded constellations of objects are in contrast with minute creatures that are magnified in their isolation, a practice that demands both the telescopic and microscopic as ways of seeing. Look closely at the teeming yet organised chaos of Blue (Bower/Bauer) 1998–2000 and Red (Colony) 1999–2000, and then shift to the sharp focus of large-scale and individual folios of moths, plants, skulls and guns. Your eyes must adapt, from steady absorption of the many to intense fixation on one solitary thing. Touchstones emerge, including the traditions of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life and vanitas paintings, and early modern natural history illustration — sensibilities and genres that fall under the rubric of the Baroque. The assemblage of objects depicted in Blue (Bower/Bauer) and Red (Colony) are also reminiscent of the Kunst and Wunderkammer , or ‘cabinets of curiosities’, that were ubiquitous at early modern European courts, collections that were designed to represent and contain the world at large and which existed as metaphors for a collector’s mastery over nature. In these collections, objects were classified as artificial, natural, exotic or scientific, with works of art, such as paintings and sculptures, drawn into rapport with shells, skeletons, preserved plants and animals, and a host of other things. Does describing de Medici’s art as ‘Baroque’ or even ‘Neo-Baroque’ enable us to think about her images differently? Perhaps only with the caveat that the Baroque is much more than just a style or a trend among contemporary artists. 1 While the term ‘baroque’ is often used to connote exaggeration, high drama, extravagance and excess, its associations with the society and politics of the time are equally relevant here. Baroque art came of age in the seventeenth century, concurrent with relentless mercantile activities, the incessant pursuit of luxury goods, and far-flung and global projects of exploration and expansion. A responsible contemplation of the art of the Baroque today must recognise the dynamics of colonisation and consumption at work, and the redrawing of the map of the world in an age of empire. Perceived in dialogue with early modern art and science, as much as its culture and political machinations, de Medici’s art allows us to consider the continued resonance of such themes in our present. The critical discourse around the Neo-Baroque includes discussion of the work of Caribbean poet, dramatist and theorist Édouard Glissant (1928–2011). In his essay ‘Concerning a baroque abroad in the world’, Glissant described how Baroque art ‘mustered bypasses, proliferation, spatial redundancy, anything that flouted the alleged unicity of the thing known and the knowing of it, anything exalting quantity infinitely resumed and totality infinitely ongoing’. 2 In other words, the baroque was not just an art, but a way of ‘being-in the world’, Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations, whose sweeping progress cannot be guaranteed to continue as it has . . . Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (Les Trois Écologies)