eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

71 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS 70 Endnotes 1 Examples include Lisa G Corrin and Joaneath Spicer, Going for Baroque: 18 Contemporary Artists Fascinated with the Baroque and Rococo [exhibition catalogue], The Walters, Baltimore, Md, 1995; Edwina Bartlem, Chaos and Revelry: Neo-Baroque and Camp Aesthetics [exhibition catalogue], Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, Vic., 2008; Micaela Giovannotti and Joyce B Korotkin, Neo-Baroque! [exhibition catalogue], Charta, Milan, 2005; Andrea Bubenik, Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond [exhibition catalogue], The University of Queensland Art Museum, St Lucia, 2017. 2 Édouard Glissant, ‘Concerning a Baroque abroad in the world’, in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (eds), Baroque NewWorlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest , Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2010, p.624. 3 Glissant, p.625. 4 Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing , University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999, p.88. 5 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque , trans. Tom Conley, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, p.11; first published as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque , Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1988. 6 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene , Penguin Classics, London, 1978; Books I–III were originally published in 1590; Books I–III, together with Books IV–VI were published in 1596. 7 Samantha Littley, ‘Something wicked this way comes’, in eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, South Brisbane, 2023, p.23. 8 ‘Satin bowerbird', Birdlife Australia , 1 November 2017, <birdlife.org.au/bird- profiles/satin-bowerbird/>, viewed November 2022. 9 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002, p.207; first published as Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Das Passagen-Werk , Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 1982. 10 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? , Zer0 Books, Winchester, UK, 2009, p.4. 11 eX de Medici, telephone conversation with Samantha Littley, 5 May 2022, eX de Medici Artist File [transcription], QAGOMA Research Library. 12 Georges Didi-Huberman, Being a Skull: Site, Contact, Thought, Sculpture , trans. Drew S Burk, Univocal, Minneapolis, 2016, p.38; also published as Être crâne: Lieu, Contact, Pensée, Sculpture , Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 2000. 13 See GER Lloyd and GEL Owen (eds), Aristotle on Mind and the Senses: Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium Aristotelicum , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2007. 14 Paul Flynn, ‘X’, Artist Profile, issue 5, 2008, pp.28–35. 15 Edward Payne and Xavier Bray, Ribera: Art of Violence [exhibition catalogue], D Giles, Lewes, UK, 2018, p.76. 16 For background on Rachel Ruysch and Maria Sibylla Merian, see Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, ‘Crafty women and the hierarchy of the arts’, in Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology , Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2020, pp.50–81, especially footnotes 32 through 35. Merian’s work on the metamorphosis of the butterfly laid the foundation for the Linnaean classification of plants and animals, while Ruysch spent her infancy in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as her father was employed by the Romanov family. It is important to note, in 1997 and 1998, de Medici visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to see Ruysch’s work. De Medici curated an exhibition for the National Library of Australia, Canberra, in 2004, called ‘The Theatre of Insects’, which brought to light the CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) and the work of Harriet and Helena Scott, whose work followed on fromMaria Sibylla Merian. The Scott sisters were responsible for the first depictions of insects in Australian art following colonisation. I acknowledge the research of exhibition curator Samantha Littley for this fascinating context. 17 Janice Neri, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011. 18 eX de Medici, quoted in Flynn. 19 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies , trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2014, p.33; first published as Les Trois Écologies , Éditions Galilée, Paris, 1989. 20 Guattari, p.33. 21 Guattari, p.35. 22 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics , trans. Gabriel Rockhill, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2019, p.47; first published as Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique , La Fabrique Éditions, Paris, 2012. dating back to the late fourth millennium BCE in Europe. 15 As an art form, nothing could be more tactile, given that skin is a multisensory organ, and the tattooist’s needle injects ink beneath the epidermis to make images visible on its surface. There is an analogy to be made here between the needle and the watercolour brush, the skin and the paper (or vellum) support: the surfaces are ruptured and new ‘skins’ emerge. Appreciating the many pricks that the tattooist’s needle must make to create an image also helps us to understand the precision of de Medici’s watercolour practice, another medium in which erasure is problematic, if not impossible. With her oeuvre of moths and flowers, de Medici can be positioned as drawing from a long line of important artists who pioneered botanical art, including German–Swiss naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), Dutch still-life painter Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), and the Scott sisters, Harriet (1830–1907) and Helena (1832–1910), in Australia. 16 The insect emerged as an independent subject for these artists, moving beyond the confines of cabinets of curiosities, illuminated manuscripts and still-life paintings into natural history collections and botanical illustration. 17 In like fashion, de Medici has freed her moths from her epic gatherings and given them life as individuals in the void. The swarm of radical ecologies Pulsations of the human and non-human alike come together in de Medici’s worlds. Her recurring motifs are barometers for the effects of unseen but ubiquitous forces. Metamorphoses take place, not only for organic moths, but also for apparently immutable things, most especially skulls and guns. Environmental consciousness is heightened through rapt attention to insects and flowers, at the same time they are intertwined with, or even become, symbols of colonial violence and capitalist wealth and consumption. As the artist herself has stated: ‘I find the whole premise of power and violence overwhelming; I think that’s why I’m obsessed with it’. 18 De Medici has been overt about her critical engagement with present-day power structures, including how colonialism and corporations are inextricable from capitalism. Here, she has something in common with the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1930–92). In The Three Ecologies (1989), Guattari argued that capitalist power had become ‘delocalized and deterritorialized' and had extended its influence ‘over the whole social, economic and cultural life of the planet . . . by infiltrating the most unconscious subjective strata’. 19 Taking a radical position, Guattari proposed that it was ‘imperative to confront capitalism’s effect in the domain of mental ecology in everyday life: individual, domestic, material, neighbourly, creative or one’s personal ethics’. 20 Let us pause for a moment to further consider Guattari’s use of the term 'ecology': 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 for the past decade. 21 Through her practice, de Medici embodies Guattari’s urgent imperative and positions art as a potent force in both scrutinising and then rebuilding human relationships. As an agent of metamorphosis and a diligent observer of, and commentator on, power, the artist deploys watercolour painting as an unlikely, yet effective, force to critique a dominant global culture and a technocratic and ever-expanding capitalist system that is irreparably harming our environment. As French philosopher Jacques Rancière stated: ‘Art and politics are contingent notions’. 22 De Medici’s artworks are inherently and insistently political — if not a call to action, then at the very least they insist on critical looking and reflection. Like the baroque itself, eX de Medici’s art evokes a cultural context in which insects are politicised, and guns are aestheticised. What happens next is up to us.