Vernon Ah Kee: Belief Suspension

On Vernon Ah Kee's Belief Suspension at Artspace, Sydney, 8 February to 1 March 2008, from Column, issue 2, 2008, pp. 106-10. 

Vernon Ah Kee, Belief Suspension, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

The odd angry shot

A shotgun blast is the first you know of it, before you even open the door. Then comes a low, metallic scraping. Finally inside, an uncanny doubling: in a darkened corner, the bleak image of a lynched ‘dead board’, bound in barbed wire, hung like a violated corpse from a tree, peppered with bullet and shot holes, all this projected onto multi-planed screen made up of six ghostly white surfboards suspended in space. As the projector light plays across their irregular surfaces, now and again bringing the brutally ravaged dead board and the central board of the arrangement into perfect alignment — oddly satisfying in its geometrical congruity, like slotting in the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle — it casts impressive shadows from the sleek forms of the six makeshift screens onto the wall behind them. Any sense of edification, formal or otherwise, is short lived, undercut by the morbid buzzing of flies, those blasts come without warning, causing the board to pitch violently on its barbed wire axis as surface fragments explode into nothing, and that persistent scraping.

Down a wall off to the side are two imposing printed slogans, ‘We grew here’ the more familiar, one half of a glib rhyming couplet popularised during the casual racism that run unchecked during the Howard years, ‘Not a willing participant’ equally blunt but more obscure — participant in what, exactly? These are punctuated by an arrangement, pointedly elegant, of three more boards, which, unlike their solemn counterparts in the last room, are animated by vibrant designs in red, black and yellow, their undersides revealing hand-drawn close-up portraits of two older Aboriginal men and a boy, deftly executed in black, white and grey, their expressions, their gaze, blank and yet pregnant with meaning, or the potential for meaning, the potential to mean. The energy of these surfaces is underlined by traces of wax smeared across one of the surfboards — it has actually already been used. 

Vernon Ah Kee, Belief Suspension, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

In the next space, the tone lifts again, stereo speakers belting out the Warumpi Band’s anthemic Stompin Ground as the soundtrack to two right-angled wall-to-ceiling projections of images collectively titled Cantchant II. If the imagery in the first room seemed to emerge from the murky depths of the popular imagination, the narratives in these videos run curiously counter to it, professionally shot and edited footage of a young man surfing on the waxed board filling one wall, while all three boards appear in the other channel, brandished somewhat awkwardly by Aboriginal men in garish surf-wear, who, importantly, never enter the water as they pose on and around a Gold Coast beach. If the imagery of the young surfer is hypnotic and that of the men humorous, both ultimately read as statements of defiance, assertions of a certain sovereignty in the face of a beach culture whose implicit racial codification has gone unremarked until very recently. This becomes especially apparent as the music fades out and the three men occupy the beach in silent dignity with their boards held upright, like shields in an ethnographic photograph. All the while, the lynched board from the first video, or what’s left of it, hangs in the corner like a presence, low spotlight seeping through the gaping holes left by gunshot.

Vernon Ah Kee, Belief Suspension, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

The shifting emotional responses elicited across this installation, cutting seamlessly from confrontation to meditation to exaltation, from bluntness to elegance, from overload to restraint, are the unmistakable hallmarks of the work of Vernon Ah Kee, the products of whose artistic practice depart from and beautifully, disturbingly, problematise the tensions and contradictions of Australian society. A development of his Institute of Modern Art project Cantchant, Belief Suspension presents an Indigenous perspective on the role of the beach in the construction of Australian identity, and its recent emergence as a contested space, a site of racial and social tensions played out most dramatically between surf communities during the Cronulla riots.

Vernon Ah Kee, Belief Suspension, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

On the beach

For a nation without land borders, it is certainly notable that Australia so often defines itself by its limits. Seemingly endless drought, a recessional agricultural sector and the implacable withdrawal of services, both public and private, from rural communities have seen ‘the man on the land’, for so long the emblematic figure of Australian culture, lose its luster, replaced in the popular imagination by a bikini clad Anglo-Celtic model, swearing casually and coquettishly on an empty beach. The shift is not unreflective of social and economic reality, of course — more than ninety per cent of Australians live in urban centres dotted along the continents vast coastline, clustering in its temperate south-east, while agriculture now accounts for less than four per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. But the significance of this symbolic shift to Australian society’s conception of itself, to its very behaviour and to its organisation of space, cannot be discounted.

In the honeymoon period of its first six months in office, it seemed that the most sustained criticism Kevin Rudd’s federal Labor government could attract was that it dealt largely in the purely symbolic. Ratifying the Kyoto protocol on climate change, convening a summit on ideas for Australia’s future and, most pertinently with regard to Vernon Ah Kee’s work, issuing an official apology to the Stolen Generations were perceived by many commentators to be gestures directed toward establishing in the public eye the new government’s social democratic credentials, which required little in the way of actual policy commitment. But then Rudd was only continuing a strategy employed, to slightly different ends, of course, but to quite extraordinary effect by his predecessor. If John Howard’s frequent invocation, in person and through governmental decree, of ‘traditional’ Australian symbols — the flag, the national anthem, the Australian cricket team, the nation’s garish sporting colours — was understood by certain sectors of society to be twee or even comical, it had a profound effect on the nation’s self-image. And this image, more than simply projecting a representation of selfhood, served in many ways to constitute that very selfhood, to establish the nation as nation, to define its points of difference from other nations, to define itself by its limits, at its limits, limits to be defended absolutely. 

During Howard’s tenure, the physical limits of the nation became the locus of national identity, of national self-imaging and imagining, the leisure, body and surf cultures attendant to the notion of what we might facetiously call ‘coastality’ fueling an unsustainable property bubble. Water, whose very scarcity contributed so heavily to Australia’s turn away from its dead heart, was recast as an urban amenity, ‘the central article of faith’, as David Teh has put it, ‘in Sydney’s real estate ecstasy’ — evangelised nationwide from Perth to Port Douglas — ‘and the international propagation of Brand Australia’ (cue bikini model).

Not surprisingly for a commodity, there is a duality to this limit. As the point of contact between the interior and the exterior, the cradle of Australia’s identity and the identity projected to the world, a cyclical representation, the beach also has a historically imbued use-value as the first point of resistance to invasion, maintaining a sense of contestation. Which is to say that the country’s most idealised space is also its most contested, ever in need of vigilince. Witness the border panic of the Howard years, the fact that a television network could even consider airing a program called Border Patrol, the fact that anyone would even watch it — such was Howard’s mastery of the aesthetic dimension. Witness the brutal organisation of space in the state of exception imposed on harbourside Sydney during APEC. Witness Cronulla, not a boil-over of frustration at police harassment and social exclusion as in Redfern and Macquarie Fields, but the very act of exclusion itself, perpetrated by a White Australia fearing for its purity, its sovereignty, its place on the beach, in the face of migrant miscegenation and, by association, Indigenous peoples themselves in search of sovereignty. There was a certain symmetry to it all: occurring in the last term of Howard’s eleven-year tenure, it bookended nicely with the Hansonite paranoia of the first, both drawing their rallying points, their very language, from the aesthetic order Howard himself had constructed.

The last wave

Invaders know the necessity of defense only too well. Thus rejoinder Ah Kee’s extra-bold wall text offers to the strategic disingenuousness of ‘We grew here, you flew here’: actually, we grew here. The fundamental veridicality of this statement is conveyed in the matter-of-factness with which the comic trio from Cantchant (we grew here) 2, the two-channel video in the adjoining space, stare into the camera as they stand their ground on the beach, a gesture echoing the gaze of faces on the boards they carry.

This kind of picturing constitutes a rich strand within Ah Kee’s practice, beginning with the suite of drawings he titled, after Australia’s somewhat erroneous conception of its own virtue, Fantasies of the Good (2005). These images were based on, and in some cases drawn directly from, the typographical photographs taken by Norman Tindale in his famous attempt to ‘map’ Aboriginal Australia, among which Ah Kee had actually found two of his ancestors. Tindale’s undertaking was among the first to establish notions of territory among Aboriginal people, helping to dispel the notion of Terra Nullius that had been used to justify European land claims. But at the same time, as Ah Kee has observed, Tindale’s methodology of framing each subject squarely and ‘objectively’, to the point of dressing them clean white shirts, constituted an act of assimilation. With its slightly off-centre figures and focus on the proud, questioning or probing gaze — depending on your point of view — Fantasies of the Good, as with the vast quantity of work that has proceeded from it, is a reclamation of portraiture as a mechanism for representing Aboriginality.

In a further reiteration of Fantasies of the Good, Ah Kee’s second wall text, ‘Not a willing participant’, a statement of refusal directed toward White Australian attempts to improve conditions for Aboriginal people that do little to help, and in some cases cause more harm than good. ‘Not a willing participant’ specifically refers to the imposition of ‘dry’ conditions as a means to combat alcoholism in Aboriginal communities, when far more complex strategies are employed to deal with the problem elsewhere in the community — how well has prohibition worked in the past? But it equally encapsulates the artist’s indifference Rudd’s apology, delivered shortly after Belief Suspension opened to the public, which stopped decisively short of providing any form of compensation to the Stolen Generations.

Complementing these resonances across Ah Kee’s practice, Belief Suspension engages in a complex dialogue with the work of other artists, situating the specific questions raised by the project within the context of a broader field of artistic enquiry into the conditions of contemporary life. He is not alone, for instance, in challenging the trite sloganeering of Cronulla, his ‘We grew here’ joining Tony Schwensen’s inversion of the similarly glib ‘Australia: love it or leave it’ in his performance Rise (2007). With its evocation of Australia’s atrocious history of Aboriginal genocide, Ah Kee’s hanged and buckshot surfboard (also called Belief Suspension, 2008) corresponds neatly with Christian Marclay’s extraordinary Guitar Drag (2000) and its chilling reference to the 1998 lynching of James Byrd Jr, an African-American man literally dragged to his death behind a pick-up truck.

But it is Ah Kee’s dialogue with fellow Brisbane artist Scott Redford that is most clearly articulated through this project, helping to clarify the relationship of both artists to mainstream Australia society. As Robert Leonard noted of the first installment of Cantchant at the Institute of Modern Art, Ah Kee ‘colonises Redford’s territory’ — dead boards, beach culture, the imagery of the Gold Coast — reveling in similar ‘paradoxes of identification and opposition’ that distinguishes it from so much straightforward, heavy-handed political art. Ah Kee himself has professed to never having surfed, the waves near his family home in North Queensland having been broken by the Great Barrier Reef long before the swell reached the shore. Likewise, as an Aboriginal man, his feelings of alienation from white Australian society are made manifest throughout the exhibition, violently in the Belief Suspension installation, humorously in the beach fashion scene of Cantchant 2. But it is the other half of Cantchant 2 that adds an element of porosity to the project, as we follow the sublime skills of Aboriginal pro-surfer Dale Richards as he executes his moves on Ah Kee’s custom-made board. Indeed, the very quality of the boards, their craftsmanship, is testament to Ah Kee’s reluctance to dismiss surf culture out of hand.

Paradox is one thing, Belief Suspension seems to suggest, and Australian society is full of it. The trick is to make it work.