Elil
REFERENCES: (1) For a recent appraisal of the period see Ingrid Periz 'Oh, How Original. .. ' in Australian Art Collector Magazine Issue 53 July -September 2010 page 125 (2) Ernst Diez 'Simultaneity in Islamic Art' in Ars lslamica Vol
(6) Ibid page 117 (Sun citing Hartley 1999. pg 161). See: John Hartley (1999) Uses of Television, London: Routledge (7) An adaptation of what Wanning Sun has described. Ibid page 123. (Sun citing Hartley 1999, op cit)
4 (1937) pp185-189. Published by Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and University of Michigan (3) eX de Medici interview with Paul Flynn Artist Profile magazine Issue 5 2008 p31 (4) The artist quoted in Kelly Gellatly So� Steel - eX de Medici Heide Museum of Modern Art 2003 p5 {5) Wanning Sun (2002) 'Semiotic Over-determination or 'lndoctritainment' in Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis, pg 117, edited by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Michael Keane and Yin Hong (2002), New York: Routledge. (Sun citing Gurevitch 1986). See also: Michael Gurevitch (1986) 'The Globalisation of Electronic Journalism' in Mass Media and Society (eds) J. Curran and M. Gurevitch , London: Arnold Publishing.
Title: ex de Medici THE WORLD Author: SP Wright Published by Griffith Artworks Sewell House, Nathan Campus Griffith University Catalogue designed at Liveworm Studio Designer: Cathrine Andrea Knutsen Creative Director: David Sargent ISBN: 978-1-921760-17-4
RIFFITH UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY 13 AUGUST 26 SEPTEMBER 20 I 0
eX de Medici
THE WORLD QUEENSLAND COLLEGE OF ART 226 GR EY STREET SOUTH BANK BRISBANE QUEENSLAND
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THE WORLD Photo media has always been a central element to the practice of eX de Medici. Her studies at The Australian National University in the early 1980's were formative years, and resonated with the rise of critical national discourse about 'image scavenging'. Its rhetoric upheld that every image came already mediated through various systems of representation, prior to continued co-option by artists. In the art world of the 1980s, all visual material was contested as an equal and legitimate source for contemporary art, especially when the selection of other's images signified a critical stance toward sourced materia1.111 Photomechanical and other reproductive technologies were at the forefront of the subsequently depersonalised, de-territorialised notions put into play by many around her, but seemingly, just as the spectre of appropriation had emerged, eX de Medici abandoned much of the object-centric art world and its ways. Instead, her well honed contrarian point of view, borne out of DIY attitudes associated with punkdom, began to focus on decayable materials, entropy, and things t11at could not be collected as an art object. Forays into performance and tattoos began in earnest. Her
apprenticeship with the American tattooist, Kari Barber, by example, forged a lifelong dedication to the creation of imagery held by the substrate of living/ dying tissue and set her on a unique path, largely outside the mainstream contemporary art scene. A major photographic portrait series, now numbering in the thousands, also began alongside her practice of etching into skin_ It portrayed various sitters raw and strung out in the moments after a freshly sunk tattoo, inked ex-jailbirds sporting homemade signifiers of being 'inside', and military personnel with their own personalised imagery. These aspects of her research and their resultant image bank are still motivated by an investigation into how people project themselves, and complement other strategies that involve wider notions of 'impression'_ Examples of these include various series created and exhibited as photocopy, frottage and monotypes, which also include a large group of medical swabs. The swabs, unique-state rubbings of blood and ink, are the corporeal vestiges of her flesh drawings, lifted as a mono-print in the act of mopping up tattoo work. They remain as a symbol of the collaboration
between artist and subject and speak of a specific 'litany' of signs and signification. Her allied portraits, of cropped tattooed subjects tightly framed into almost life sized photographic vessels, represent much of what has been at stake in the artist's project ever since: the development of personal visual codes of fragility, allure, mortality, potency, power through violence. Through each subsequent series, and alongside an expansion into drawing onto paper and calfskin, eX de Medici has maintained other ways of revealing the potential of photography in relation to the subjects she holds dear.
The World is another huge unique, morphing work, made up of thousands of photographic units. It can be shown in various places at once, across vast geographical distance, and has endless variations, never the same as any previous incarnation. For Griffith University Art Gallery, 215 photographs have been selected by the artist from her repository, just as another manifestation of The World takes shape for exhibition in October at The London School of Fashion Gallery. The World is as much a conceptual visual system as it is an art work,
and in Brisbane it has been installed around the gallery as a series of linked glyphs, each in the form of a large lozenge, or diamond shape. Each image, and the repeated lozenge forms that contain them, alludes to a key concept which underpins The World; that of the principle of simultaneity. While the panoramic creep of lozenges around the gallery might remind some viewers of the geometric patterns found at ruins of ancient civilisation, or places of worship, the shape has functioned for centuries as the basis of heraldic coats of arms (particularly for women). It has also, at various times, been adopted during times of warfare as a principle design element of camouflage, firstly on German tanks in WWI, and is still used by the US military for insignia to define high rank in the army and marine corps. Conceptually, the principle of simultaneity has also been the foremost stylistic system deployed over centuries within Islamic ar1.121 As an installation device to deliver and frame eX de Medici's The World, the linked lozenges become an allied 'allover emblem' linked to the images themselves; of power and faith, of colonisation and conflict.
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eX de Medici
M 11 l�l�I ii
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THE WORLD Photo media has always been a central element to the practice of eX de Medici. Her studies at The Australian National University in the early 1980's were formative years, and resonated with the rise of critical national discourse about 'image scavenging'. Its rhetoric upheld that every image came already mediated through various systems of representation, prior to continued co-option by artists. In the art world of the 1980s, all visual material was contested as an equal and legitimate source for contemporary art, especially when the selection of other's images signified a critical stance toward sourced materia1.111 Photomechanical and other reproductive technologies were at the forefront of the subsequently depersonalised, de-territorialised notions put into play by many around her, but seemingly, just as the spectre of appropriation had emerged, eX de Medici abandoned much of the object-centric art world and its ways. Instead, her well honed contrarian point of view, borne out of DIY attitudes associated with punkdom, began to focus on decayable materials, entropy, and things t11at could not be collected as an art object. Forays into performance and tattoos began in earnest. Her
apprenticeship with the American tattooist, Kari Barber, by example, forged a lifelong dedication to the creation of imagery held by the substrate of living/ dying tissue and set her on a unique path, largely outside the mainstream contemporary art scene. A major photographic portrait series, now numbering in the thousands, also began alongside her practice of etching into skin_ It portrayed various sitters raw and strung out in the moments after a freshly sunk tattoo, inked ex-jailbirds sporting homemade signifiers of being 'inside', and military personnel with their own personalised imagery. These aspects of her research and their resultant image bank are still motivated by an investigation into how people project themselves, and complement other strategies that involve wider notions of 'impression'_ Examples of these include various series created and exhibited as photocopy, frottage and monotypes, which also include a large group of medical swabs. The swabs, unique-state rubbings of blood and ink, are the corporeal vestiges of her flesh drawings, lifted as a mono-print in the act of mopping up tattoo work. They remain as a symbol of the collaboration
between artist and subject and speak of a specific 'litany' of signs and signification. Her allied portraits, of cropped tattooed subjects tightly framed into almost life sized photographic vessels, represent much of what has been at stake in the artist's project ever since: the development of personal visual codes of fragility, allure, mortality, potency, power through violence. Through each subsequent series, and alongside an expansion into drawing onto paper and calfskin, eX de Medici has maintained other ways of revealing the potential of photography in relation to the subjects she holds dear.
The World is another huge unique, morphing work, made up of thousands of photographic units. It can be shown in various places at once, across vast geographical distance, and has endless variations, never the same as any previous incarnation. For Griffith University Art Gallery, 215 photographs have been selected by the artist from her repository, just as another manifestation of The World takes shape for exhibition in October at The London School of Fashion Gallery. The World is as much a conceptual visual system as it is an art work,
and in Brisbane it has been installed around the gallery as a series of linked glyphs, each in the form of a large lozenge, or diamond shape. Each image, and the repeated lozenge forms that contain them, alludes to a key concept which underpins The World; that of the principle of simultaneity. While the panoramic creep of lozenges around the gallery might remind some viewers of the geometric patterns found at ruins of ancient civilisation, or places of worship, the shape has functioned for centuries as the basis of heraldic coats of arms (particularly for women). It has also, at various times, been adopted during times of warfare as a principle design element of camouflage, firstly on German tanks in WWI, and is still used by the US military for insignia to define high rank in the army and marine corps. Conceptually, the principle of simultaneity has also been the foremost stylistic system deployed over centuries within Islamic ar1.121 As an installation device to deliver and frame eX de Medici's The World, the linked lozenges become an allied 'allover emblem' linked to the images themselves; of power and faith, of colonisation and conflict.
I
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For many years, from her lounge room in the political
of these processes, in relation to her practice, at
They are 'true' photographs of screens only, rigidly
television, where decay, imperfection, light imbalances,
capital of Canberra, ex de Medici has photographed
a time when almost all commercial and political
formatted into landscape readymades, which also pick
pixilation, flaring and bad definition are all accentuated
news images taken off TV screens as they circulate
imperatives seek to 'colonise' the minds of recipients:
the globe, morphing between information, propaganda and advertising. Look into The World, and you will see immediately a visualisation of the centrifugal power of televisuality in the 21st century. You will register also how the language of the camera also alludes to the pull of a trigger, the shooting of an image, the taking and capture of something. As part of a relentless global mediascape, the screen has become that point of arbitrage where an image, taken elsewhere, is trafficked into our lounge room, often with added new(s) value via interpretive reportage. The World comprises images that employ specific visual languages which, by now, have come to be the basic currency of global news and media outlets. Where once they may have been individually confronting, each image seems vaguely familiar, even strangely comfor ting in its everydayness. There is an addictive impulse in the barrage of transmission and reception, complicit with serial patterns of delivery, sheer repetition of volume, and other methods of reinforcement. The artist has spoken
I find the whole premise of power and violence utterly overwhelming; I think that's why I am obsessed with it. ... You need to be a blunt edged instrument. If people are so desensitised to everything then a mild clobbering by me is going to look subtle. 131 Promotional collateral for The World billed it as 'leaving no stone unturned, no image censored, no spectre hidden, no gaping jaw un-drooled', in order to co-opt the language of spectacle associated with newspeak. Gratuitous access to violence, catastrophe and terror are the big ticket images, and while they sell 'news' they also carry coded information for use at various points of reception. The conceit of the show should be readily apparent. No matter the content, every image taken by the artist in the exhibition was first mediated; passed by governmental agencies, approved for use by militar y interests, selected by mass· media companies.
up the slight variances between the various screen
in their printing. In themselves, these are equally
technologies of interface, analogue and digital. They
important ideas for The World - related to corruption.
capture the idea of 'screening' and mediation through
Her conceptual focus, rather than material limits,
a filter, and speak to the motivational impulses
define The World, as it moves us toward potential
behind dissemination. If these are the fleeting,
for symbolic agency; an enquiry into insecurity.
transient units of currency in cyber world - free access source images trafficked in the promotion of news services, infotainment and advertising - what is the price to pay in their reception?
Photography has played a crucial role in what we might identify as the ultimate contemporary spectre of power, the Global Insecurity Event (GIE). Among other fragments of the GIE, header issues
The photograph is a celibate thing- it can't get
in 2010 are a conflagration of topics including:
up and shoot you - but its impression inside
national and border security, asylum seekers and
the paper can. It's about that sense that once
'illegal' immigration; food, water and bio-security;
something has 'turned a corner', what does it
religious and cultural tolerance, maintenance and
become after that when it does express itself as a will to some kind of power? 141
ups, defence forces, peace keeping programs and
A certain trash aesthetic underpins the way eX de Medici has conceptualised the 'quality' of her images, as each is affected adversely by the act of transmission and re-transmission. There is a continual degradation of imagery, an awareness of entropy, caught by the idea of taking TV photographs from
assimilation; weapons development and arms build global warming. GIE images are tied up as much with its description, as with its manufacture, propulsion and simultaneity. Photo media has become, by example, inseparable from iconic moments in covering 21st century insecurity, and a crucial recruitment tool for those who desire to become the GIE's
I
■
I 1• 15' lftl 111111naa1 11 wIll I
��. 'r._. •·ii(.:,
I •·
■
•11
!II
Eia"''
._.... ; i;.�� .•
For many years, from her lounge room in the political
of these processes, in relation to her practice, at
They are 'true' photographs of screens only, rigidly
television, where decay, imperfection, light imbalances,
capital of Canberra, ex de Medici has photographed
a time when almost all commercial and political
formatted into landscape readymades, which also pick
pixilation, flaring and bad definition are all accentuated
news images taken off TV screens as they circulate
imperatives seek to 'colonise' the minds of recipients:
the globe, morphing between information, propaganda and advertising. Look into The World, and you will see immediately a visualisation of the centrifugal power of televisuality in the 21st century. You will register also how the language of the camera also alludes to the pull of a trigger, the shooting of an image, the taking and capture of something. As part of a relentless global mediascape, the screen has become that point of arbitrage where an image, taken elsewhere, is trafficked into our lounge room, often with added new(s) value via interpretive reportage. The World comprises images that employ specific visual languages which, by now, have come to be the basic currency of global news and media outlets. Where once they may have been individually confronting, each image seems vaguely familiar, even strangely comfor ting in its everydayness. There is an addictive impulse in the barrage of transmission and reception, complicit with serial patterns of delivery, sheer repetition of volume, and other methods of reinforcement. The artist has spoken
I find the whole premise of power and violence utterly overwhelming; I think that's why I am obsessed with it. ... You need to be a blunt edged instrument. If people are so desensitised to everything then a mild clobbering by me is going to look subtle. 131 Promotional collateral for The World billed it as 'leaving no stone unturned, no image censored, no spectre hidden, no gaping jaw un-drooled', in order to co-opt the language of spectacle associated with newspeak. Gratuitous access to violence, catastrophe and terror are the big ticket images, and while they sell 'news' they also carry coded information for use at various points of reception. The conceit of the show should be readily apparent. No matter the content, every image taken by the artist in the exhibition was first mediated; passed by governmental agencies, approved for use by militar y interests, selected by mass· media companies.
up the slight variances between the various screen
in their printing. In themselves, these are equally
technologies of interface, analogue and digital. They
important ideas for The World - related to corruption.
capture the idea of 'screening' and mediation through
Her conceptual focus, rather than material limits,
a filter, and speak to the motivational impulses
define The World, as it moves us toward potential
behind dissemination. If these are the fleeting,
for symbolic agency; an enquiry into insecurity.
transient units of currency in cyber world - free access source images trafficked in the promotion of news services, infotainment and advertising - what is the price to pay in their reception?
Photography has played a crucial role in what we might identify as the ultimate contemporary spectre of power, the Global Insecurity Event (GIE). Among other fragments of the GIE, header issues
The photograph is a celibate thing- it can't get
in 2010 are a conflagration of topics including:
up and shoot you - but its impression inside
national and border security, asylum seekers and
the paper can. It's about that sense that once
'illegal' immigration; food, water and bio-security;
something has 'turned a corner', what does it
religious and cultural tolerance, maintenance and
become after that when it does express itself as a will to some kind of power? 141
ups, defence forces, peace keeping programs and
A certain trash aesthetic underpins the way eX de Medici has conceptualised the 'quality' of her images, as each is affected adversely by the act of transmission and re-transmission. There is a continual degradation of imagery, an awareness of entropy, caught by the idea of taking TV photographs from
assimilation; weapons development and arms build global warming. GIE images are tied up as much with its description, as with its manufacture, propulsion and simultaneity. Photo media has become, by example, inseparable from iconic moments in covering 21st century insecurity, and a crucial recruitment tool for those who desire to become the GIE's
next infamous defender, protector, campaigner or
of cultural citizenship back onto itself , and suggests
celebrity, for enlistment into militia or martyrdom.
that although news images are disseminated globally, image-based materials become 'open texts' subject to local and regional treatment. 15,
eX de Medici's focus in this complex realm is to balance a concern with the content and flow of news and images, with concern over the activity of constructing local meaning from globalised events. Her lounge room, as with ours, is a typical site of reception, and images beamed into it are where most Australians experience the power plays attached to the construction of meaning, to apply locally from global events. Let us take The World as a photographic microcosm. In it there emerges a perceived relationship between power relations allied to various ideas of 'state' (from governmental to states of mind) and the local construction of global media events. If, as we posit, the GIE is recognised universally, simultaneously, and yet the imagery and symbolism deployed by media coverage is almost always culture and place specific, the artist's investigation centres on how images and narratives are constructed for, and consumed by, national audiences in various nations. Far from providing a definitive answer, The World folds issues related to the constructive forces
Power dynamics around images evolve, aimed at shaping 'public opinion', or winning votes, for injection into the service of ideology and policy debate. The incredible authority of 'image' used in political debate, from the grooming of the user, to the actual depiction of something (a chart showing a market crash graph, a sinking 'suspected illegal entry vessel' etc) is readily deployed to apply political advantage by conveyance of fear, loathing, self preservation, individual gain, security. It follows that in the masking of rational discussion and factual exchange, alarmist nationalist sentiments can arise, often based on xenophobia, stereotype qnd caricature. The artist uses the media tools of cropping, production and select editing to present / transmit a picture that does not seek a multitude of ways of interactivity with spectators, but to posit a fundamental tenet: 'be afraid'. Despite these images being open to polysemous interpretation, where a
multitude of nuance and complexity is in constant oscillation, the meaning of these images, once relayed into the realm of what Hartley calls 'national semiosis' can become over-determined, rather than self-determined. 1,, In The World, over determination, or what theorist Wanning Sun calls 'indoctritainment', lay in the endless linking of individual moments with that of a GIE. Under such conditions there can arise a collective desire to read all events as both metaphors and metonyms of that cause's greatness (effect) in an international context. 17, Depth of nuance and complexity, which might not conveniently relate cause with effect, is flattened into a spectre of unity, a pure force of heightened intensity. It is in eX de Medici's version of The World that viewers might agree there exists an argument in relation to the manipulation of power via the televisual medium. It is the semiotic over determination applied to these images in Australia as representing simplistic binary opposite possibilities that we need to account for. It is the artist's prescience in noting the erased, corrupted complexities we need to cite.
The precise problem of a GIE aesthetic has emerged through the full spectrum of deregulated and regulated airwaves, various forms of private and state media ownership, shades of journalistic independence, language barriers (it does not need textual narrative accompaniment to speak of GIE) and PR spin. If, as media academic John Hartley put it, television has the pedagogic function of teaching the population who we are, then ex de Medici's image of The World speaks to the Australian variant of the commoditisation and packaging of a will, via the agency of televisual images, in the shaping of cultural citizenship. Be afraid, indeed.
next infamous defender, protector, campaigner or
of cultural citizenship back onto itself , and suggests
celebrity, for enlistment into militia or martyrdom.
that although news images are disseminated globally, image-based materials become 'open texts' subject to local and regional treatment. 15,
eX de Medici's focus in this complex realm is to balance a concern with the content and flow of news and images, with concern over the activity of constructing local meaning from globalised events. Her lounge room, as with ours, is a typical site of reception, and images beamed into it are where most Australians experience the power plays attached to the construction of meaning, to apply locally from global events. Let us take The World as a photographic microcosm. In it there emerges a perceived relationship between power relations allied to various ideas of 'state' (from governmental to states of mind) and the local construction of global media events. If, as we posit, the GIE is recognised universally, simultaneously, and yet the imagery and symbolism deployed by media coverage is almost always culture and place specific, the artist's investigation centres on how images and narratives are constructed for, and consumed by, national audiences in various nations. Far from providing a definitive answer, The World folds issues related to the constructive forces
Power dynamics around images evolve, aimed at shaping 'public opinion', or winning votes, for injection into the service of ideology and policy debate. The incredible authority of 'image' used in political debate, from the grooming of the user, to the actual depiction of something (a chart showing a market crash graph, a sinking 'suspected illegal entry vessel' etc) is readily deployed to apply political advantage by conveyance of fear, loathing, self preservation, individual gain, security. It follows that in the masking of rational discussion and factual exchange, alarmist nationalist sentiments can arise, often based on xenophobia, stereotype qnd caricature. The artist uses the media tools of cropping, production and select editing to present / transmit a picture that does not seek a multitude of ways of interactivity with spectators, but to posit a fundamental tenet: 'be afraid'. Despite these images being open to polysemous interpretation, where a
multitude of nuance and complexity is in constant oscillation, the meaning of these images, once relayed into the realm of what Hartley calls 'national semiosis' can become over-determined, rather than self-determined. 1,, In The World, over determination, or what theorist Wanning Sun calls 'indoctritainment', lay in the endless linking of individual moments with that of a GIE. Under such conditions there can arise a collective desire to read all events as both metaphors and metonyms of that cause's greatness (effect) in an international context. 17, Depth of nuance and complexity, which might not conveniently relate cause with effect, is flattened into a spectre of unity, a pure force of heightened intensity. It is in eX de Medici's version of The World that viewers might agree there exists an argument in relation to the manipulation of power via the televisual medium. It is the semiotic over determination applied to these images in Australia as representing simplistic binary opposite possibilities that we need to account for. It is the artist's prescience in noting the erased, corrupted complexities we need to cite.
The precise problem of a GIE aesthetic has emerged through the full spectrum of deregulated and regulated airwaves, various forms of private and state media ownership, shades of journalistic independence, language barriers (it does not need textual narrative accompaniment to speak of GIE) and PR spin. If, as media academic John Hartley put it, television has the pedagogic function of teaching the population who we are, then ex de Medici's image of The World speaks to the Australian variant of the commoditisation and packaging of a will, via the agency of televisual images, in the shaping of cultural citizenship. Be afraid, indeed.
Elil
REFERENCES: (1) For a recent appraisal of the period see Ingrid Periz 'Oh, How Original. .. ' in Australian Art Collector Magazine Issue 53 July -September 2010 page 125 (2) Ernst Diez 'Simultaneity in Islamic Art' in Ars lslamica Vol
(6) Ibid page 117 (Sun citing Hartley 1999. pg 161). See: John Hartley (1999) Uses of Television, London: Routledge (7) An adaptation of what Wanning Sun has described. Ibid page 123. (Sun citing Hartley 1999, op cit)
4 (1937) pp185-189. Published by Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and University of Michigan (3) eX de Medici interview with Paul Flynn Artist Profile magazine Issue 5 2008 p31 (4) The artist quoted in Kelly Gellatly So� Steel - eX de Medici Heide Museum of Modern Art 2003 p5 {5) Wanning Sun (2002) 'Semiotic Over-determination or 'lndoctritainment' in Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis, pg 117, edited by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Michael Keane and Yin Hong (2002), New York: Routledge. (Sun citing Gurevitch 1986). See also: Michael Gurevitch (1986) 'The Globalisation of Electronic Journalism' in Mass Media and Society (eds) J. Curran and M. Gurevitch , London: Arnold Publishing.
Title: ex de Medici THE WORLD Author: SP Wright Published by Griffith Artworks Sewell House, Nathan Campus Griffith University Catalogue designed at Liveworm Studio Designer: Cathrine Andrea Knutsen Creative Director: David Sargent ISBN: 978-1-921760-17-4
RIFFITH UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY 13 AUGUST 26 SEPTEMBER 20 I 0
eX de Medici
THE WORLD QUEENSLAND COLLEGE OF ART 226 GR EY STREET SOUTH BANK BRISBANE QUEENSLAND