On the brink of catastrophe with eX De Medici
From within the catastrophic, cataclysmic car crash of ‘The Wreckers’, eX De Medici unfolds a living nightmare of ruinous violence that teeters between symbolic metaphor and scientific prediction. With deftly honed skill and a touch of beguiling beauty, De Medici drives home a message of the devastating forces of corrupted power and greed, boldly sirening the alarm on the decay of freedom, democracy, global economies and destruction of our planet. The message could not be more timely.
In this interview for Art World Women, eX De Medici speaks candidly with Claire Bridge about what is driving her to do the work she is doing.
Above image credit: eX de Medici, The Wreckers (detail crop), 2019, watercolour on paper, 114 x 590 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore.
CB. You have never shied from speaking truth to power. What is one of the main drivers for you in creating this work right now?
eX. My disgust of the Liberal Party of Australia/ LNP has been a primary motivation since John Howard’s election. I believe that since the 1996 election until now, has been an utter disaster.
The Wreckers is broader reference to an earlier work made for the 2006 Asia Pacific Triennial. A train crash. I felt it was patently clear that after the prodigious indulgences of three terms of the Howard Government that there was only one way things could go. And then the Global Financial Crisis happened.
I could write a list as long as my arm, demonstrating that where we sit now evolves from John Howard’spolicies and methodologies of governance and public discourse. I am open about my perception that the LNP have methodically disintegrated our nation’s moral compass. We were once on the road to becoming a progressive, inclusive society.
“It has been made very clear to the citizenry that neo conservative legislation is a perfect pool of reflection of corporate interests.”
– eX de Medici
CB. In “The Wreckers”, you are talking about decay on so many levels. Not just political corruption, but corporate corruption. I am seeing a collusion between all of these here, including moral corruption. I am seeing images of surveillance, of a blue and white checked tape woven through the rusting carcasses of crashed vehicles and signifiers of military and police entanglement throughout.
eX. It has been made very clear to the citizenry that neo conservative legislation is a perfect pool of reflection of corporate interests. Mining, banking, agriculture, resources, border control, religion etc. Before Howard and subsequent Prime Ministers, the indefinite incarceration of refugees in gulag-like conditions would have been beyond rational and moral consideration. Self-interest, deception and obfuscation is the M.O. of public office.
I don’t engage with the personal in my work, as some artists do very well. I have different drivers.
CB. I would ask how could this not be personal? In terms of how intricately these things interweave with our-selves, with our identities, our values, ethics and integrity on not just a personal but a national and global scale. I appreciate you being so honest and explicit in your telling of how you see things.
eX. By ‘personal’ I mean emotional, abstract introspection. This outward looking strategy has been ongoing for a long time. After the Howard election, I vowed that I would aim my arrows at the wilful disintegration of political process. So, I changed my tactics. I wanted to operate within the style of conservative pictorial space that they could understand without too much trouble. Neo-cons have very little patience with the Arts. I vowed that I would give this tactic up, once they were gone. But they haven’t gone. I’ve been trapped in a vortex of representation since 1996.
CB. In the background I see what looks like a “star spangled banner.” Am I reading a US relationship there?
eX. Where to begin? I have engaged in long-term critique of our historic and ongoing complicity with US policy and war culture. Our subservience to a corrupt state (more corrupt than ours) has been long and ‘productive’.
The first protest I participated in, was as a child (with our father, a political scientist and public administrator) at an Anti-Vietnam moratorium march in Canberra. Australia now has permanent, armed US troops installed in the N.T. (Julia Gillard/Barak Obama agreement).
When a teenager (I’m 60 now), Pine Gap was a blot on our sovereign landscape. The secrecy surrounding the US communications interception facility, along with five other questionable sites, has never abated.
As an adult, the Howard Regime blindly dragged us into an illegal war as ideological stooges for US oil interests with all the atrocious foreseeable consequences that action entailed.
Historically, the US leads us by our submissive nose into endless wars with an equally endless line of suitor-enemies.
CB. Your work is visually enticing, seductive and the viewer can really stay with the imagery because of the intricacy and intensely crafted detail of your work. Some people could just be fascinated with the pictorial imagery, but if they do stay a bit longer they might read the kinds of things you are talking about. For example, I see these colourful little windmills in the foreground which make me think about sustainability, but these are plastic. They are made of fossil fuel materials and they are toys. Is this about the future? Is this about hopelessness? Or is there something here about what we are leaving as a legacy? These are the kinds of questions that come to mind for me.
eX. Seduction on the picture plane has been part of the strategy, delivering a critique with a honeyed spoon. I’m glad you see other cues. Any audience interprets according to their lived experience. If a person just sees a car crash, that’s fine. I’m good with that.
I insert other signifiers designed to expand the primary narrative as we approach the endtime of the science-fuelled combustion era. The Wreckers is the recalcitrant ‘present’. I will add, the presence of Those Who are Named (the human wreckers) at the bottom of the picture, to relocate what the pile-up of machines, on first sight, might mean.
“I see our free trade capitalist system as a whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones and rottenness …” – eX de Medici
CB: Skilful crafting and symbolic narrative have been somewhat sidelined by the Art World, dismissed as archaic or denigrated as ‘feminine’ techniques or materials. Yet you embrace both with vigour!
eX. Symbolic narrative stealthily crept into my exhibition work during the years I practiced in the tattoo, a medium with a vast history of reductive symbolism. Two divergent worlds merged. Like poetry, much can be said with few words. This is a small aspect of the potency of the tattoo; the cipher of intent within a semiotic strata.
Collection of Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
CB. Some people might describe water-colour as a delicate medium. I see water-colour as an incredibly decisive medium. It is the same with tattooing. You really need to be decisive. You need to know what you are doing. You don’t have second chances. From my own perspective as an Iaido practitioner, it’s somewhat akin to the nature of the Samurai sword, “one stroke, one cut”. Is that part of the appeal for you in the way that you like to work, that this is decisive, that “This is my hand”?
eX. Haha. The Sword! The Head that doesn’t know it’s been cut off until it falls to the ground, so clean is the action…
Watercolour is intrinsically irreparable, that is, it must be very deliberately and painstakingly constructed when working at large scale. As you mentioned, the form has historically been sidelined as a ‘feminine pastime’ and therefore not applicable for consideration in heroic hierarchical connoisseurship. When I became interested in learning how to use water-colour, my inquiry was side-eyed by both peers and former teachers. I treat water-colour more brutally than its historic construct of feminine delicacy, transparency and wistfulness. I work in a very intensive methodology to achieve as much saturation as possible. It requires a lot of patience and skill development (like any medium, or martial form) and has taken years to understand its properties and limits.
I have consistently engaged in forms that are perceived as tasteless or inferior/unworthy of examination … Tattooing, Natural history/scientific illustration, drawing, representation …
CB: In this capitalist environment that we currently exist in, is there an element of hope or a way through? In contrast to the current “car crash’ trajectory that we are on, what do you want changed, what do you want to see differently? I know these are big questions.
eX. I see our free trade capitalist system as a whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones and rottenness (Matthew 23:27). I like the system imagined by the writers of Star Trek’s Next Generation, where Captain Picard explains to a freshly-wakened cryogenically suspended earthman from the dark ages of Capitalism, that the concept of money no longer exists, and that the system supports, educates and provides equally to all.
I am excited by the activist generation coming to voting age, who see outright corruption and inertia as it actually is, without the opaque rhetoric it uses to its own shrouded ends. I think that young people are waking up again. If there is any hope, it is with them. That they will pursue a different future to the outdated trajectory we trapped in, and that includes in economic terms. The economic paradigm of exponential growth in resources, wealth and population is fatal. I do not see anything to do with the old world or the perpetuation of old ideas having anything to do with the future.
The Wreckers is about Now.
“There is an infection in political and corporate spheres. I am compelled to continue to discuss it. The climate debate has been going with ever-mounting proof for thirty years, and to this day, successive governance’s epic fail of inaction on advice provided by evidence-based science, in favour of class-driven, rapacious economic harvest is driving us head-on into catastrophe.”
– eX de Medici
CB. This work, depicting a devastating car crash, is not just a metaphor then but also a prediction?
eX. Geo-economics is my hobby. There is the smoke of another global economic crash on the horizon. It is not a magical prediction. International discussion of the shaky global system has been vigorous for some time. Most recently, I listened to the senior economist of Allianz (Swiss banking and insurance) a reliable analyst/predictor for over forty years. He stated another GFC would happen somewhere within two months to two years.
The previous train crash picture, Live the Big Black Dream, was purely observation, listening to economic analysis over a period of time, of multitudes of signs seemingly unrelated, (and vehemently refuted by our erstwhile Treasurer).
I was driven to make The Wreckers and nothing else for the last year, just as I was in 2005-6 to make the train wreck.
“There is the smoke of another global economic crash on the horizon.
It is not a magical prediction.”
– eX de Medici
CB. A car crash and a train crash describe it and more they grab attention. The news cycle thrives on crisis. These are the things that people pay attention to.
eX. The last crash was predicated by 18 months of warnings. Everyone acted shocked. No one did anything and then got shocked. The warnings were clear and precise. No one chose to read or listen or notice.
Image credit: eX De Medici, Spectre # 2 (Triskele) 1996, Blue spectre. Work made up of 9 sheets forming a single image, from Spectre series. Image courtesy of the artist.
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia.
CB: And that is the kind of corruption you are speaking to. The science is there. The evidence is there and yet continually, corporations and politicians keep embedding themselves deeper into the causations of these crises; environmental and economic.
eX. There is an infection in political and corporate spheres. I am compelled to continue to discuss it. The climate debate has been going with ever-mounting proof for thirty years, and to this day, successive governance’s epic fail of inaction on advice provided by evidence-based science, in favour of class-driven, rapacious economic harvest is driving us head-on into catastrophe.
I recall being dumbfounded by the then-LNP Treasurer Joe Hockey, denouncing the wind turbines on the shores of Lake George as an insult of ugliness, an offense, a blight on the landscape (not beautiful friends like coal and uranium mines) as he lounged in the back seat of his chauffer-driven luxury commcar making its way from his home town of Sydney to Canberra for Parliamentary sittings. I wondered if Joe Hockey was in fact, a deranged Borg Drone disguised as a human. Funny, when I see that same windfarm, I feel elated. There is a future in those turning blades.
CB. Are we seeing that symbol again in these toy windmills, wind turbines in the foreground? Are you are talking about the white supremacy and erosion of freedoms?
eX. I hadn’t equated the turbine blades to the swastika/new right!
I feel driven that this is where the work must be. I follow my instincts. The first work I produced after the 1996 Howard election win, literally the following day, was a giant pair of swastikas, one being the obvious nazi fascist version (in red) and the other the newly minted three pronged version (in corporate blue). The stench of a rising New Right movement, came with Howard, as Pauline Hansen threw petrol on the fire.
The legislative noose has, by increment, relentlessly tightened. Bill of law follows bill of law. We can now see the complex legal architecture of an unvarnished authoritarian kleptocracy.
CB. You have spoken about the anaesthetics of entertainment. Recently, we had PM Scott Morrison suggesting that going to the cricket could be fun for the firefighters who have been working tirelessly fighting the most catastrophic fires which are still burning. He recently stated, “Going to be a great summer of cricket, and for our firefighters and fire-impacted communities, I’m sure our boys will give them something to cheer for.”
In response to school children striking for action on climate change, he told them not to have “needless anxiety” about climate change and as if to imply that a thriving economy and responsible sustainable environmental policy can’t coexist, emphasised with cold comfort reassurance that they will have an “have an economy to live in as well’.
eX. Scott Morrison makes my stomach tighten. When I first started researching the fascist imagination in1996, a salient quote from the Third Reich archive noted Hitler to Goebbels, “It’s lucky for us that the people do not think”.
I subsequently produced a body of work, Masters and Slaves (subtitled Nazi Flowerbeds) which examined how the toxic seeds that the Nazi’s planted in the 1930’s -1940’s were germinating nicely in the modern world.
So yes children, sit back, stream your Netflix, we will take care of everything (do we really need elections?) Don’t think. Stay entertained. Behave. Pray to an imaginary god.
CB. You are also exhibiting a collaboration between yourself and Wu Wei Rong. Can you tell us about the work?
eX. Wei is a Daoist. I won’t begin to explain that philosophy, suffice it to say that the Daoist operate within the constructs of nature and harmony. She wanted to show me her Daoist China, and I asked, “Where is the electrical grid?” she laughed and said, “You look for things and I look for other things.”
You need to be sensitive to other people when you are working with them.
Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore.
CB. That seems like a beautiful complement or proposition next to your work The Wreckers.
eX. Yes! We started that work in China and executed over a third of that work there in situ. When we got back we tidied it all up. They are two very distinctly different voices and we have treated them with a bit of separation. I have collaborated with other artists my entire life. It’s always an experiment. It is always an unknown as to how the final object might turn out.
CB. Do you have a final message? What is next for you?
eX. The Australian people voted for these reptiles. I sincerely hope the voting public wake up from their entertainment induced, diesel-loving torpor.
I will continue my work in nominating the machinations of criminal Authoritarianism, corporate corruption, cronie-ism and environmental vandalism by those exercising power over our country.
A new exhibition by Australian artist eX de Medici, The Wreckers + Wu Rong Wei Collaboration is currently showing at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney, to 20 December 2019.
Editor’s note: In the days immediately prior to and following speaking with eX De Medici about her work “The Wreckers”, we have seen the LNP undertake to undermine democracy and legislate anti-protest laws specifically targeting environmental protestors, to dismantle the rights of Unions to represent workers and do secret deals that repeal Medevac laws. In Australia, where gendered violence against women is epidemic, (65 women and 24 children have been violently killed this year, the majority by partners or family members) and when Indigenous women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised and 10 times more likely to be murdered from violent assault, the government has removed funding from Indigenous domestic violence services. Further, in moves that echo the strategies of authoritarian regimes, they have abolished the Department of Communications and the Arts, rolling it into a new Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. In line with a platform of pro fossil-fuel and climate-change-denial, and whilst Australia is being devastated by catastrophic, unprecedented fire conditions currently affecting NSW and Queensland that have been aggravated by climate change, the government has removed the Department of Environment and dissolved it within the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.