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Vernon Ah Kee - Sovereign Warrior

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Vernon Ah Kee - Sovereign Warrior University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 2010 Vernon Ah Kee - sovereign warrior Garry Jones University of Wollongong, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/creartspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Jones, Garry: Vernon Ah Kee - sovereign warrior 2010, 46-53. https://ro.uow.edu.au/creartspapers/216 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Vernon Ah Kee whitefellanormal, 30 second video work for ArtTV in 2002. Vernon Ah Kee SOVEREIGN WARRIOR Garry Jones If I didn’t have art as an outlet, I would be angry, really Queensland. While he may not have the street fighter angry, and frustrated. Aboriginal people in this country reputation of his compatriot Richard Bell, Moreton-Robinson’s are angry to varying degrees. Some are very, very angry; ‘warrior’ appellation is appropriate. Ah Kee possesses no some have it on a low simmer; some hardly sense it at all. At less a fighting spirit; one that appears to be driven by different times, I experience all those things.1 deep resentment, and determined to disrupt notions of Aboriginal identity and the classification of Aboriginal art ndigenous academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson has more specifically. However, the relationship between Ah Kee’s referred to Vernon Ah Kee as a ‘sovereign warrior’: practice and Indigenous sovereignty is far more ambiguous, an Aboriginal artist at war in the ‘white postcolonial particularly in his rhetorical pronouncements on the relative borderzone’ that is contemporary Aboriginal art.2 authenticity of ‘remote’ versus ‘urban’ Aboriginal people and art. A contemporary artist of national and international A founding member of the Brisbane-based proppaNOW artists distinction, Ah Kee’s practice is underpinned by his collective, Ah Kee identifies strongly as an ‘urban Aboriginal Ipersonal experience as an Aboriginal person from North 46 | vol 30 # 1 < www.artlink.com.au Vernon Ah Kee does not assimilate 2007, cut vinyl / digital image, dimensions variable. Vernon Ah Kee hang ten/cantchant 2007/9, installation view, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. www.artlink.com.au > vol 30 # 1 | 47 artist’. As observed by Robert Leonard3, superficially he the late premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, his staunchness was no appears compelled to broadcast basic, clear, political doubt forged through an acute awareness of the corruption messages about the Aboriginal experience. However, a more of political institutions and the overtly paternalistic and critical reading of his practice reveals that the power of his discriminatory treatment of Indigenous people in that state. art lies in the way it negotiates ambiguities, double-binds, He arrived at art school inspired by the race politics and and catch 22s, and by the way it shifts the onus back to the activism of Malcolm X, the 1960s separatist African American (presumably white) viewer, implicating them in its inquiry. For leader. He read X’s contemporary, James Baldwin, who was Indigenous audiences, Ah Kee’s practice can be seen to offer also an ‘angry, intelligent black man’ at war with white an example of a strong and self-confident artist, unrestrained (American) society. Inspiration closer to home was found in in terms of technique and medium, while being inherently the writings of the Wiradjuri/Gamilaroi artist and activist contemporary and uncompromisingly political.4 Yet, Ah Kee Kevin Gilbert. Gilbert’s 1973 text Because A White Man’ll presents challenges to Indigenous audiences also, demanding Never Do It provided Ah Kee with a clear and unapologetic that they realise and declare their own authenticity rather summation of the Aboriginal position, politically, historically than playing out roles he argues are determined by the art and socially.8 market – a market dominated by non-Indigenous (white) He began to develop and hone his life drawing skills, drawing interests. in pencil and charcoal, and experimenting with pastels as well Ah Kee has only been exhibiting for a decade now and in some as pen and ink. However, he was inspired and influenced by circles is still regarded as an emerging artist. Yet he is possibly other established Queensland Indigenous artists, particularly one of the country’s most controversial contemporary artists. Richard Bell and Gordon Bennett, whose work incorporated Initially known for his direct and combatant neo–conceptual text and images advancing uncompromisingly political ‘text works’, he soon established his credentials as an attacks on colonial racism and abuse. artist’s artist, and a capacity to work across a broad range of Art school introduced him to the history of poster art and mediums and styles, with his elegantly detailed large-scale Russian Constructivism in which he became fascinated by portraits of past and present relatives (What is an Aborigine). composition, structure of fonts and text spacing. He also His inspired appropriation of a disused industrial toilet block became interested in the more contemporary American for the 2008 Sydney Biennale (Born in this Skin), and more neo-conceptual artists who drew on the techniques of the recently his inclusion in the 2009 Venice Biennale (CantChant), Constructivist movement, in particular Barbara Kruger.9 demonstrate the breadth of Ah Kee’s creative potential and These influences would inspire him to turn away from life the depth of his political convictions. drawing and to experiment solely with text compositions. Vernon Ah Kee is of the Kuku Yalanji, Yidindji and Gugu He even started working with a signwriter, which he saw as Yimidhirr peoples of the Innisfail, Cairns and rainforest a logical step in developing his skills in this area10 leading regions of North Queensland. He was born in Innisfail where him to produce two works which signalled an important he lived until Eighth Grade, when his family moved to Cairns. development in his practice, sustained to this day: This Man Is He recognised that he had an ability to draw from a young … This Woman Is (1999) and He Said - She Said (1999). age, and used to lock himself away in his room to practice. He This Man Is … This Woman Is …, while superficially building had no real teacher in this area and was largely self-taught – on Richard Bell’s Pigeon Holed (1992), introduces key themes he remembers trawling through bookshops in Innisfail and and devices that continue to mark Ah Kee’s practice. The work Cairns as a boy, desperate to find books that would help him consists of sixty panels repeating six mug shots, three each of learn to draw.5 a young Aboriginal woman and a young Aboriginal man (Ah He says that he found inspiration and an opportunity to hone Kee himself), the same image of each repeated but cropped his budding skills in studying and reproducing Spiderman differently. Both characters stare back expressionlessly at comic illustrations. The association between text and image the camera, and under each frame is a brief text recalling may not have manifested until years later in art school, something of the lives of historical Aboriginal characters however, Ah Kee believes that the study of comic book and events, although some describe the lives of the subjects characters fed directly into his interest in the body and life themselves. The text references the abuses Aboriginal people drawing in particular.6 have suffered since colonisation.11 Ah Kee’s formal artistic training began in 1986 when he Ah Kee’s 1999 debut solo exhibition ifiwaswhite loudly enrolled in a screen-printing course at Cairns TAFE, which declared the artist’s polemic: to challenge racism in Australia led to him being employed as a commercial screen-printer by drawing attention to the unquestioned normativeness where he had access to all aspects of the trade from design of whiteness. Some of the propositions were: ‘If I was white I to production, and of course the clean up. After four years in could buy a bandaid the colour of my own skin. If I was white the trade the business went bust, which became the driving I could identify with the characters on Neighbours.’ By turning force for him to move away from his community to study art the tables on his audiences and switching the subjective in Brisbane.7 positions between the viewer and viewed, Ah Kee seeks to make the ‘coloniser’ feel colonised. In the late 1990s Ah Kee undertook formal studies at the Since graduating from art school Ah Kee has continued to Queensland College of Art. As a North Queensland Aboriginal develop and refine his text work practice. He consistently person having spent most of his life under the police-state of uses Universal font, bolded and in lower case. What is equally 48 | vol 30 # 1 < www.artlink.com.au Vernon Ah Kee imnotracistbut 2003, cut vinyl / digital image, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Vernon Ah Kee wegrewhere/cantchant 2007/9, installation view, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. www.artlink.com.au > vol 30 # 1 | 49 signature about his practice is his consistency in constructing his grandfather as a young man, so producing these large- passages of text where words and lines of text run together, scale drawings was a journey of personal discovery as well. rejecting conventions of leading and kerning, but nevertheless The initial project led directly on to an expanded study leaving nothing to chance. The impact is at times dizzying, of living male relatives from his own photos, in which Ah requiring a double-take to ensure that you’ve read it correctly. Kee required his sitters to replicate the intense gaze of the In many instances the possibility for parallel readings provides subjects in Tindale’s original images, a gaze the artist sees the poignancy of the work.
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