eX de Medici: Hollywood, the patriarchy & political power

eX de Medici’s The System 2023 (dressmaker: Michael Marendy) is based on her three-panel watercolour System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) 2023 (illustrated). It is the second garment the artist has collaborated on, the first being Shotgun Wedding Dress/Cleave 2015 (dressmaker: Gloria Grady Design (illustrated).

Julie Andrews in the wedding gown from ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965) | eX de Medici ‘Shotgun Wedding Dress/Cleave’ 2015

Installation view ‘eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness’, Gallery of Modern Art, 2023 / (Watercolour) eX de Medici, Australia b.1959 / System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) 2022 / Watercolour and tempera with gold leaf on paper / Three panels; two panels: 114 x 115cm; one panel: 114 x 145cm; 114 x 375cm (overall) / Collection: eX de Medici / © eX de Medici / (Dress) eX de Medici (Artist); Yianni Liangis (Collaborator); Gloria Grady Design (Dressmaker); RLDI (Rob Little Digital Images) (Photographer and digitisation); Think Positive Prints (Printer) / Shotgun Wedding Dress/Cleave 2015 / Digitally printed silk / 240 x 48 x 237cm / Purchased 2015 / Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra / © eX de Medici

Installation view ‘eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness’, Gallery of Modern Art, 2023 / (Watercolour) eX de Medici, Australia b.1959 / System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) 2022 / Watercolour and tempera with gold leaf on paper / Three panels; two panels: 114 x 115cm; one panel: 114 x 145cm; 114 x 375cm (overall) / Collection: eX de Medici / © eX de Medici / (Dress) eX de Medici (Artist); Yianni Liangis (Collaborator); Gloria Grady Design (Dressmaker); RLDI (Rob Little Digital Images) (Photographer and digitisation); Think Positive Prints (Printer) / Shotgun Wedding Dress/Cleave 2015 / Digitally printed silk / 240 x 48 x 237cm / Purchased 2015 / Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra / © eX de Medici / View full image

Both dresses were inspired by ‘costumes for Hollywood’ — the latter, the wedding gown that Julie Andrews wore as Maria in the perennially popular screen musical The Sound of Music (1965); the former, a figure-hugging silk crepe shift (illustrated) that Marilyn Monroe wore in her last, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give! (1962), just prior to her untimely death.

Marilyn Monroe in ‘Something’s Got to Give!’ (1962)

Silk crepe shift Marilyn Monroe wore in her last, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give! (1962) / Courtesy: Julien’s Auctions https://www.julienslive.com/lot-details/index/catalog/157/lot/66432

Silk crepe shift Marilyn Monroe wore in her last, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give! (1962) / Courtesy: Julien’s Auctions https://www.julienslive.com/lot-details/index/catalog/157/lot/66432 / View full image

Something’s Got to Give! (1962) Trailer

The System expands on de Medici’s dissection of toxic masculinity and patriarchal power structures, including the Hollywood system that has exploited a succession of talented and vulnerable women, and, in Monroe’s case, contributed to her demise. The gun that dominates the front of the dress points upwards, its barrel targeting an assumed female subject. The hands that are depicted crossed and metaphorically tied beneath the cowl on the back of the dress imply captivity and coercive control.

Samantha Littley, Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA, and curator of ‘eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness’ taking a tour of the exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2023, wearing The System 2023 / Artist: eX de Medici; Collaborator: Samantha Littley; Dressmaker: Michael Marendy; Photographer and digitisation: RLDI (Rob Little Digital Images); Printer: Think Positive Prints / © eX de Medici / Photograph: Joe Ruckli © QAGOMA

Samantha Littley, Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA, and curator of ‘eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness’ taking a tour of the exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2023, wearing The System 2023 / Artist: eX de Medici; Collaborator: Samantha Littley; Dressmaker: Michael Marendy; Photographer and digitisation: RLDI (Rob Little Digital Images); Printer: Think Positive Prints / © eX de Medici / Photograph: Joe Ruckli © QAGOMA / View full image

The iconography in The System also explores political power, something that is more apparent in the related watercolour System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow). Both artworks feature the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle that United States (US) forces used to fire on unarmed civilians from an aerial gunship in Baghdad in 2007, wrongly assuming they were insurgents. Iraqi Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh and nine others were killed in the attack, while two children were seriously injured. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later released footage of the atrocity online, intensifying attempts by the US to extradite him on charges of espionage.

eX de Medici ‘System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow)‘ (details) 2022

eX de Medici, Australia b.1959 / System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) (detail) 2022 / Watercolour and tempera with gold leaf on paper / Three panels; two panels: 114 x 115cm; one panel: 114 x 145cm; 114 x 375cm (overall) / Collection: eX de Medici / © eX de Medici

eX de Medici, Australia b.1959 / System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) (detail) 2022 / Watercolour and tempera with gold leaf on paper / Three panels; two panels: 114 x 115cm; one panel: 114 x 145cm; 114 x 375cm (overall) / Collection: eX de Medici / © eX de Medici / View full image

eX de Medici, Australia b.1959 / System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) (detail) 2022 / Watercolour and tempera with gold leaf on paper / Three panels; two panels: 114 x 115cm; one panel: 114 x 145cm; 114 x 375cm (overall) / Collection: eX de Medici / © eX de Medici / Photograph: Rob Little Digital Images

eX de Medici, Australia b.1959 / System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) (detail) 2022 / Watercolour and tempera with gold leaf on paper / Three panels; two panels: 114 x 115cm; one panel: 114 x 145cm; 114 x 375cm (overall) / Collection: eX de Medici / © eX de Medici / Photograph: Rob Little Digital Images / View full image

The weapon symbolises what de Medici regards as the US government’s ‘moral hypocrisy’ on war crimes, a position that is emphasised by the tulips that adorn the rifle (illustrated). They are a symbol of male martyrdom in Iran and other parts of West Asia and continue the artist’s exploration of the flower as a masculine signifier. De Medici borrowed the image of the handshake that appears in the watercolour from the logo for the US Agency for International Development, while the two hands, one above the other (illustrated), represent money being exchanged in secretive deals, expanding on her interest in exposing ‘systems . . . that nobody seems to be able to escape from’.

De Medici adapted the vignette of two men locked in a sword fight with their severed heads kissing (illustrated) from a scene of bare-knuckled boxers in a book of nineteenth-century prints. The imagery expands on her scrutiny of male violence and the futility of armed combat.

eX de Medici, Australia b.1959 / System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) (detail) 2022 / Watercolour and tempera with gold leaf on paper / Three panels; two panels: 114 x 115cm; one panel: 114 x 145cm; 114 x 375cm (overall) / Collection: eX de Medici / © eX de Medici

eX de Medici, Australia b.1959 / System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) (detail) 2022 / Watercolour and tempera with gold leaf on paper / Three panels; two panels: 114 x 115cm; one panel: 114 x 145cm; 114 x 375cm (overall) / Collection: eX de Medici / © eX de Medici / View full image

Watch | eX de Medici discusses her work

Samantha Littley is Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA.

‘eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness’ in 1.2 and 1.3 (Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery) was at GOMA from 24 June until 2 October 2023. ‘Beautiful Wickedness’ offered opportunities for dialogue with ‘Michael Zavros: The Favourite‘ presented in the adjacent gallery 1.1 (The Fairfax Gallery) and 1.2.

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    eX de Medici: Technology & surveillance

    eX de Medici has been a strident and consistent critic of humanity’s relentless quest to dominate the natural world, and the technologies that have enabled this behaviour. Her unremitting and ‘forensic’ exploration of the weapon has developed alongside her morbid fascination with the long reach of digital technology. For instance, her watercolours The Theory of Everything 2005 (illustrated) and Live the (Big Black) Dream 2006 (illustrated) include a satellite and a CCTV camera, respectively, hidden among other human-generated detritus, in reference to government- and corporate-sponsored surveillance and control. ‘The theory of everything’ 2005 ‘Live the (Big Black) Dream’ 2006 With the rise of the internet and social media, de Medici has become increasingly alarmed at the prevalence and sophistication of the telecommunication systems that have infiltrated our lives, leading her to conclude that: We live in an era of . . . the masked terrorist and tactical police alike, of confessional, anonymous Facebook life . . . I’ve collected these images [of barbarism] since the global news broadcast of a phone video showing the [2006] lynching of Saddam Hussein by an hysterical, screaming, and chaotic gang of hooded men . . . I knew instantly from that moment, everything had changed about how the screen, instead of entertaining us, was shaping a new code of values . . . The new screen life hunts everything down . . . Technology is terraforming the global landscape, a vast and exponential Earth-shaping web of insider-trading, corruption, and distractions. Technology is terraforming the hive mind. De Medici has persistently voiced these concerns in artworks such as the panoramic Spies Like Us 2016 (illustrated) and other watercolours from the exhibition of that name, including Asleep While Awake 2016–17 (illustrated) and The Great Acceleration 2017 (illustrated), employing the analogue language of pigment on paper, rather than the machinery she critiques. ‘Spies Like Us’ 2016 ‘Asleep While Awake’ 2016–17 ‘The Great Acceleration’ 2017 ‘The Law (Ops)’ 2013–14 ‘Protecting Your Insecurity’ 2018 ‘Big Spies’ 2014–15 ‘eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness’ in 1.2 and 1.3 (Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery) was at GOMA from 24 June until 2 October 2023. ‘Beautiful Wickedness’ offered opportunities for dialogue with ‘Michael Zavros: The Favourite‘ presented in the adjacent gallery 1.1 (The Fairfax Gallery) and 1.2.
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    eX de Medici: Symbolism

    Despite eX de Medici’s proclivity for privacy, she is no shrinking violet. In lieu of a conspicuous public profile, she is content to let her artworks proclaim her outrage at the endemic violence and political hypocrisy she sees unfolding around her. As an artist and tattooist who began studying in the early 1980s, and whose early practice encompassed photocopy and performance, she has consistently stormed the barricades of art and used it to challenge the status quo. What, then, should we make of the work she has made since 1998, when she began to step back from professional tattooing — a skill she acquired through an Australia Council-funded apprenticeship in Los Angeles — and particularly of the watercolours that have been the mainstay of her practice for over 20 years? The iconography in artworks such the beguiling and unsettling Eutelsat Has Turned You Off 2013 (detail illustrated, published in the exhibition catalogue and on view in ‘Beautiful Wickedness’) points us in numerous directions. If we begin with the symbolism of the flowers and their counterpart, the machine gun, we might legitimately consider a feminist interpretation in which the gendered associations of these motifs could be considered part of de Medici’s critique of patriarchal power structures. Equally, the artist’s methods, approaches and declarations reveal her socialist stance. As she has stated publicly, I have, in my work, tried to examine the pernicious forces at work within the human hegemony — the fetishistic allure of power over the macro and the micro, the human and the non-human. The agents of that impulse: geo-economies, the law, the military and science, to achieve [. . .] control of the larger discourse. The centralisation of the means of production fascinates me like no other. eX de Medici ‘Eutelsat Has Turned You Off’ (detail) 2013 The former reading speaks of a clash between the ‘feminine’ forms of the peonies and cherry blossom (illustrated) and the ‘masculine’ imagery of the gun. These binaries extend throughout both the watercolour and de Medici’s practice: soft/hard, pretty/powerful, fragile/strong and so on. Implicit here is a criticism of male dominance, and at the same time, the cultural systems through which gendered constructs are perpetuated. In adopting the language of flower painting, de Medici is a knowing participant in these debates. The biased associations between women and flower painting have been well‑documented by feminist art historians since the 1970s. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock made the case convincingly arguing that, despite flower painting’s origins in Europe in the sixteenth century as a respected branch of still-life painting that reached its peak in Holland in the seventeenth century, the genre acquired a distinctly gendered and marginalised standing from the eighteenth century onwards. As they contend: Paintings of flowers and the women who painted them became mere reflections of each other. Fused into the prevailing notions of femininity, the painting[s] become… solely an extension of womanliness and the artist becomes a woman . . . fulfilling her nature. Parker and Pollock challenged this canon, documenting the achievements of artists such as Maria van Oosterwijck (1630–93), an esteemed Dutch painter whose Vanitas 1668 epitomises that tradition. Van Oosterwijck’s ‘vanity’ painting expresses the idea that worldly possessions are fleeting fancies best avoided. The skull, the hourglass, the flowers in full bloom and the butterflies that hover around them embody life’s transience, our own mortality, and a moral directive to shun earthly delights. The co-authors also foregrounded the practice of the German entomologist and illustrator who de Medici cites as an influence, Maria Sybilla Merian (1647–1717), the first person to record the metamorphosis of the butterfly. Notably, they acknowledge Merian’s three-volume catalogue The Wonderful Transformation of Caterpillars and [their] Singular Plant Nourishment, published between 1679 and 1717, and quote Linda Nochlin and Sutherland Harris’s argument that Merian ‘revolutionized the sciences of zoology and botany and laid the foundation for the classification of plant and animal species made by Charles [sic] Linnaeus [1707–78] in the eighteenth century’. De Medici acknowledges this history in Eutelsat Has Turned You Off while adding decidedly contemporary twists, scale being the most obvious. The work’s physicality and symbolism are confronting, and intrinsic to her project to condemn the weapon. Here, the ‘worldly possession’ is the AK-47, an emblem of death that epitomises global grabs for power and the technologies that enable them. The fragile flowers remain with a sting in the tail — cherry blossom contains coumarin, which is toxic if ingested in large quantities — and the butterflies have morphed into moths. eX de Medici ‘Eutelsat Has Turned You Off’ (detail) 2013 eX de Medici ‘CSIRO/ANIC Study’ #5 2001 The scales that cover the rifle’s magazine are, as de Medici has described, from ‘an unnamed micro moth from the Tortricidae family’ (illustrated), which she painted during one of the many residencies she has undertaken at the CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC). Her meeting at ANIC in 2000 with taxonomist and evolutionist Dr Marianne Horak proved formative and engendered an ongoing partnership. As the artist has explained: ‘I have . . . a strong interest in science that has been developed through my work with the CSIRO. I listen to a lot and read a lot about science’. Ferdinand Bauer ‘Stewartia Serrata’ c. early 1800s eX de Medici ‘Untitled (Banksia Serrata)’ 1998 De Medici’s fascination with natural-history illustration also stems from her infatuation with the watercolours of Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826), the botanical artist who accompanied Mathew Flinders (1774–1814) on his 1801–03 voyage to circumnavigate Australia (illustrated Stewartia Serrata). Bauer’s work came to de Medici’s attention in 1998 in the exhibition ‘An Exquisite Eye: The Australian Flora and Fauna Drawings 1801–1820 of Ferdinand Bauer’. Apart from being in awe of Bauer’s technical and creative brilliance, his profession itself was an enticement. In her typically subversive style, de Medici has explained that ‘In art, [botanical illustration] is not considered art, which is always an attractive reason to get...
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