eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

67 66 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS Red (Colony) (detail) 1999–2000 and a rebellious one at that. More dramatically, as a part of Glissant’s own literary strategy for decolonisation, the baroque allowed for a heroic approach to knowledge, and was positioned as a transhistorical concept that radiated well beyond the seventeenth century, in diverse periods and places: All human cultures have experienced a classicism, an age of dogmatic certitude, one that henceforth all must transcend together. And every culture, at one time or another in its development, has contrived Baroque disturbances against this certainty. 3 To align de Medici with the baroque is to recognise in her work this thrumming spirit of rebellion and the intelligence of her social critique. The cultural critic Mieke Bal has argued ‘for an engaged relationship to the past that is one neither of influence nor reconstruction’. 4 Far from being neutral or merely descriptive, de Medici’s highly individualised moths, guns and skulls enact a critical engagement with seventeenth-century art and society as much as our present moment. In the guise of allegory, another hallmark of the Baroque, historical figures and events are evoked — the Elizabethan-era explorer of the Americas Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) as a gun, or a hybrid moth for the East India Trading Company. Baroque traits — such as polyphonic views, breaking of the frame, the grotesque and horror vacui (Latin for ‘fear of empty spaces’) — are markers for the sociopolitical critique of de Medici’s large-scale watercolours. In the presence of these teeming masses and singular things, the networks and relationships that connect and engulf them all demand our attention. The theatre of matter Two of de Medici’s epic watercolours lend themselves especially well to these baroque considerations, the pendants Blue (Bower/Bauer) and Red (Colony) , created between 1998 and 2000. These proliferations of carefully studied and meticulously rendered objects both come with a sense of polycentric claustrophobia and horror vacui , in which the entire surface of the artwork is filled with detail. The objects encroach and seek to exceed the frame, spilling in every direction as a cacophony of symbols of colony and capital. There is the sense that these objects could ceaselessly multiply when out of our view. Bombastic and garish, exaggerated and defiant in their excess, there is even something of the monstrous or grotesque here, as the objects vie for attention and come together in unlikely ways. This is the theatre of matter that the artists of the Baroque thrived on, the fear of empty spaces that could even translate to the perceived fear of silence that pervades our own restless and endlessly connected age. 5 Consider the large-scale watercolour Blue (Bower/Bauer) , which has been described by both the artist and art critics as a condemnation of colonisation. The homophone of the title carries a triple entendre, with potential reference to place, a historical character, and the actions of an aptly named bird. A ‘bower’ is simply defined as a dwelling or rustic retreat. Some viewers might even be prompted to think of the infamous and luxurious ‘bower of bliss’ in Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene (1590–96), an alluring and opulent site of artifice, excess, temptation and consumption, evoked within a colossal poem that was penned as an expression of England’s imperial aspirations. 6 ‘Bauer’ is a reference to Ferdinand Bauer, the botanical and zoological artist who travelled to Australia in 1801, with the British navigator and cartographer Matthew Flinders. Bauer’s multitude of drawings of Australia’s flora and fauna represent an important archive of natural history and its links to colonisation. These drawings are often cited as an early and abiding inspiration for de Medici, who first viewed many of them as part of a 1998 touring exhibition at the National Library of Australia, in Canberra. 7 But perhaps most resonant here is de Medici’s reference to the aptly named satin bowerbird ( Ptilonorhynchus violaceus ), a species native to eastern Australia. The males are known to adorn their nests with all manner of bright blue objects to attract a mate, cluttering the space with organic matter, such as feathers, flowers and shells, as well as artificial finds, including straws, bottle tops and clothes pegs. 8 The bowerbird's diverse and contrary attraction to things is matched by de Medici’s own eager eye. The proliferation of carefully studied things includes more than ten skulls, ceramic and glass dishes, a vase of flowers, statuettes, and a half-peeled orange. Many of these motifs are similar to those found in the seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas tradition, paintings designed to remind viewers of their own mortality. The age of empire is reflected in the multiple Union Jacks, and imperial ambitions are manifest in the blue-and-white patterns decorating the dishes that were appropriated from China by both the English and Dutch. Meanwhile, Red (Colony) has been described by the artist as an indictment of present-day corporate greed and includes objects that are more familiar to our contemporary world. The watercolour is a study in red, the colour of extremes — all fire, heroism, strength and energy —which is subverted here as the colour of plastic trinkets, cheap icons, ashtrays, shotgun shells and gamblers’ tape displaying betting odds. This is a world that haemorrhages, and nature is being pressed, even forced out of it, with pomegranates, red currants, toadstools and flowers spilling out of bulbous artificial vases (flowers that are blooming in spite of their squalid surrounds). Amidst the encroaching artifice, butterflies litter the scene. De Medici’s watercolour brush has captured and inured natural and artificial objects alike, shellacking and glossing the scene for rabid consumption. There is an intimation of hollow forms instead of substance, reminiscent of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s connection between ‘allegory and the fetish character of the commodity’. 9 De Medici’s vignette demands that viewers face these symbols of excess, power and greed, and confront our world of consumption and desire in which moral responsibility is traded for passing fancies. As cultural theorist Mark Fisher argued: