Finding The Warrior Self
Vernon Ah Kee’s art and voice are vital to understanding the reality of life for Aboriginal people in Australia now. His recent survey show entitled Not an Animal or a Plant shows something of the diversity of Aboriginal culture, encouraging us to engage with his experience.
On May 27, 1967, the referendum that granted Aboriginal people Australian citizenship and the right to vote took place. The 50th anniversary of this significant event did not go unnoticed. Earlier in the year of the referendum, Indigenous artist Vernon Ah Kee was born in Innisfail, a small town in far north Queensland. At that time, he was effectively a non-person in the eyes of the Australian state. This reality has informed Vernon Ah Kee’s entire life and art practice. “I was born a ‘non-citizen,’” he says. “I was a property of the State.” Ah Kee marked this anniversary with a powerful survey exhibition, from January through March 2017, at the National Art School, Sydney, in conjunction with the Sydney Festival.
Giving a talk at the National Art School Gallery in March, Ah Kee discussed the importance of the referendum.
“Before that, blackfellas would joke among ourselves—we’re not animals; not plants. It just means that, if we’re not that, then we don’t exist at all. We existed as a kind of property of the government. When I was born, I was born not as a fully realized person … Not even a ward of the state, but as a kind of property. I’m not trying to be political, but that’s my life and my family history. It’s the life of every indigenous person in this country. So this year, being the fiftieth anniversary of the referendum, this has a lot of meaning for me, given that I am also fifty. And this is a really significant year for Aborigines.”
Vernon Ah Kee is a descendant of the Kuku Yalandji, Yidinji, and Gugu Yimithirr peoples of north Queensland, but he describes himself simply as a “rainforest aborigine.” Growing up Ah Kee knew no artists and copied whatever illustrated books he could find to learn how to draw. He confesses that he first learned to sketch as a child by copying children’s comics. “I taught myself to draw from Spiderman comics. I remain still a big fan of Spiderman.”
Since moving to Brisbane as a young man and studying at the Queensland College of Art, Ah Kee has built up an art practice that he refers to as “protest art,” addressing the history of black and white relations in Australia. At art school, he was influenced by the writings of Malcolm X and James Baldwin, who fought for civil rights in the United States, as well as Aboriginal activist Kevin Gilbert.
Alongside artists such as Richard Bell and Gordon Bennett, he became part of the Indigenous activist group proppaNOW. Their catch cry “Aboriginal art is a white thing” referred to their conviction that much traditional ‘dot’ painting serves the interests of white collectors and dealers rather than Indigenous people. Their urban-based art collective defied this remote desert art tradition.
In recent years, Vernon Ah Kee has built up a multi-faceted art practice that includes painting, photography, video, digital design, installation, and printmaking. Yet, he is probably best known for the fine draughtsmanship of his monumental portrait drawings. His art has now been shown at many international exhibitions from the 53rd Venice Biennale (in the group show Once Removed in 2009) to Australia at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2013) and the 14th Istanbul Biennale (2015). He is a major figure in Indigenous contemporary art in Australia, with work held in most State galleries and in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The artist completed his Doctorate of Visual Arts in 2007 and currently teaches Indigenous art studies at Griffith University, Brisbane.
In light of this then, it is surprising to learn that Not an Animal or a Plant is his first major survey show in Australia. The title comes from the pre-referendum era, in which Aboriginal Australian had no official human status. His large-scale, full-frontal portraits possess a commanding presence in the downstairs section of the exhibition. The faces, executed in fine charcoal, are all of Ah Kee’s descendants and family. He was inspired by his discovery of anthropologist Norman Tindale’s 1930s’ photographic portraits of individuals on a mission on Queensland’s Palm Island. Treated as ethnographic subjects, they were seen as part of a ‘dying breed’ that required documentation before their extinction. Ah Kee portrays their faces with wisdom and tenderness; with their epic dimensions, these family members are finally given back the respect and importance that they deserve. It is akin to reclaiming his ancestors and ‘singing’ them back to life. He expands his study to include living relatives from his own photographs; their direct gaze deliberately replicates that of the earlier scientific portraits, demonstrating the unbroken family lineage.
Describing the work he says,
“The downstairs room is an introduction, not just to the theme of the show, but an introduction to me …. I make political art, but most of the art I make is not political … It’s about my family and the current and historic events that directly inform my family and my family’s history. And it’s all personal to me …. I actually don’t know how to exist on my own. So I’m standing here in front of you in the context of being part of this family.”
“The portraits all sit very comfortably together and they have a kind of meditative effect, on me anyway. There’s an element of protest there; an element of fierceness there. When you look at their gaze, you can see persistence and endurance. They’re not about sadness; they’re not even about frustration. They’re absolutely about endurance. Like all of us black fellas, it’s about picking up and … not going away. We’re still here.
“I believe I’m an aboriginal artist but I don’t know how aboriginal I am. None of us do; we only exist in context of our families. If I wanted to get an accurate representation of who I am, about my identity, I would look to three or four hundred people in my family and ask who I am and pull that together. I think that’s what my practice is; trying to get an idea [of] who I am. Now that kind of thinking doesn’t sit very well with Australian art or the national narrative. Australian art is about individuals.”
The artist’s political views are sometimes controversial. He rejects traditional “benign and decorative” aboriginal art and the homogenization of Indigenous art; instead he wants to describe aboriginal life and history in a contemporary way. “We are not a Stone Age people,” he remarked in the Sydney Festival catalogue.
“When black fellas make art outside of that very narrow band of what makes white people comfortable, it then gets called political. You have white artists who make work about their family and their history and they don’t get called political. “However, nearly all of my work is protest art. When you protest against something, you have something to say that needs to be said. You have a voice. You are also protesting for people who have been silenced; for people who are too shy or too weak or too damaged. That’s why my work can more accurately be described as protest art. As Aborigines, we live lives of protest. We have to. We have no choice.”
Vernon Ah Kee’s installations and conceptual text works featured in the upstairs section of his survey show and these challenge the viewer more directly. Ah Kee interprets recent political events such as the race riots that took place in Cronulla (an outer beach suburb of Sydney) in 2005 to shed light on the racism that is still prevalent in Australian society. In his digital-text-based works, the artist plays with language: Austracism (2003), a pun on ‘ostracism’ and ‘abhor-iginal’ (2011), to reveal these undercurrents. He uses derogatory racist terms that have been used against Aboriginals, such as ‘abo boong coon’ (2011).
In the installation CantChant (2009), he addresses white Australian beach culture. The work includes surfboards, hung as sculptures and painted with North Queensland Indigenous rainforest shield designs. The surfboards have thus been transformed into ‘warrior’ shields. “I was growing a bit tired of seeing rainforest shields and aboriginal shields in general being shown in galleries and museums passively. You hear comments like ‘they’re beautiful.’ Now these are objects of war. They’re meant to be fierce; to be seen in combat and action. And so I wanted to make a film that showed rainforest shields to be about action and show a warrior and I wanted for him to be fierce.”
Accompanying the piece is a surf video, featuring an aboriginal surfer, Dale Richards. He gracefully rides these ‘warrior’ surfboards at a popular beach resort, Surfers Paradise, in Queensland. The artwork emphasizes how much the iconic beach culture in Australia is the domain of White Australians.
“Some people are welcome in some spaces and unwelcome in others. The place where we see this most clearly played out is the beach. It’s very clear that the beach is a white preserve. And it’s aggressively maintained. The current psychology around the beach; particularly how the beach plays out in the national narrative, is very clearly designed to exclude people of color. Advertising we see around the beach and all the tourism we see around the beach doesn’t show people of color. Needless to say, the largest race riot that took place in this country happened around the beach.”
Through his work Ah Kee invites the viewer to perceive ‘a black man’s world.’ In his 2002 collection of text works If I was White, he makes blunt statements that make the viewer stop in their tracks, such as: If I was White, I could buy bandaids the same color as my skin; If I was White, I could go to church and Jesus Christ would look like me; If I was White, I could say my father worked hard to buy this land.
In his set of etchings, unwritten (2011), his portraiture has been reduced into dark formless faces, looking as if they are just emerging from the picture surface. In a 2012 interview for MONA museum in Hobart, he said that his intention with these works was to point out that before 1967, Aboriginals were not seen as fully human. “The history of Aboriginal people in this country, Australia, has been a history of always becoming human. We were written out of the Constitution when it was written. There’s the doctrine of terra nullius, which wrote us out of existence. So that’s why these drawings are unwritten.” Ah Kee’s artistic modus operandi is then to bring Aborigines out of invisibility and to fully honor their humanity and dignity, whilst never allowing the pain of Australia’s dark colonial history to be forgotten.
Vernon Ah Kee’s survey show Not an Animal or a Plant reveals the diversity of Aboriginal culture, encouraging the viewer into a full engagement with his experience rather than in a simplistic appreciation of Indigenous art. His art and voice are a vital contribution to our understanding of what it means to be Aboriginal in Australia now.
