eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

81 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS 80 eX  Marianne There is something to be said for the randomness of life and things. To be open to random selection is risky. Life is full of entrances, each one a specialised universe replete with every aspect from thought to production to ‘object’ to ‘consumer’. I knocked on the scientist’s door and it opened for me. The door opened to a large room with a dense, invisible cloud of naphthalene, row after row of metal cabinets stacked on top of each other containing millions of animals, a map of the insect world of Australia and the islands surrounding her — and there stood taxonomist Dr Marianne Horak and field scientist Dr Ted Edwards. Behind this doorway was a world of specialised rules, methodologies and systems of proof, a doorway whose gaze is fixed on the others who share this planet with us. A random knock was the beginning of a complex, long-term symbiotic relationship, just like the one insects share with their world. The relationship between art and science is apparently a mutually exclusive one in Australia, reflected in changing values of governance and public administration, with education, by necessity, adapting to different funding models in an endless and dull repetition of the same old trope — that the twain shall never meet. Historically, artists have had, and continue to have, meaningful and productive relationships with scientists across diverse fields of research. Culturally, Europeans see a closer bond between art and science, which is encoded in language itself. In German, Naturwissenschaften refers to the sciences of nature, while Geisteswissenschaften pertains to the sciences of the mind; this language connects scientist and artist, reason and imagination. A metaphysical symbiosis exists between us, the curiosity of difference and mutual benefit. A biologist knows that without variation and diversity, we are doomed. A scientist sees the biological truth of our ever-precarious future. The long, imploring predictions of climate scientists of catastrophic global warming are now being experienced after decades of unfettered population growth, political deafness and corporate profligacy, and the scientific community is under increasing pressure to do something about it; an impossible ask, as the fundamental causation continues to escalate. The funding model has shifted — and so must our collective gaze. Paradoxically, we — as participants in the experiment of globalisation (the trickle-up economic theory) and war economies — operate within a mass global culture at the same time that we dissolve into our mirrors/screens, tribal camps, echo chambers and polarised corners, while outside Paradise herself burns. eX de Medici, Canberra, November 2022 Endnotes 1 The CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC), in Canberra, is recognised both nationally and internationally as a major research collection. It is the world’s largest collection of Australian insects and related groups, such as mites, spiders, nematodes and centipedes. 2 These works were exhibited in ‘Double Double Crossed’, at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney, 19 May – 11 June 2022. The exhibition name refers to the act of combining two moth species from Australia and New Guinea that are genetically related, but have different pelts. 3 eX de Medici’s first engagement with the CSIRO/ANIC was in 2000, with the research for the exhibition ‘sp.’ taking place during a six-month residency commencing in February 2001; see sp. [room brochure], Helen Maxwell Gallery, Braddon, ACT, 2001, unpaginated, and ANIC News , no.17, June 2002, p.15.