Exhibitions
Cantchant
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Aboriginal art is located within a white postcolonial borderland where the aesthetics of 'meaning making' and 'doing' collide and interact, sometimes through exchange, other times through silences, gaps, invisibility and violence. It is a place where Aboriginal sovereign acts of artmaking put big black question marks around histories, places, encounters, meanings, forms, genres and representations. These question marks signify contested meaning, which operates through, by and beyond habitual readings of Aboriginal art in terms of western aesthetic and monetary values. The borderland is a war zone constituted by epistemological, ontological and axiological violence where the nation's past and present treatment of Aboriginal people becomes blurred by repetition. Within this borderland Aboriginal sovereign warriors do battle in myriad ways. Continuing the tradition of his ancestors, it is appropriate that in the 21st Century white possession becomes the subject of sustained intellectual artistic interrogation by Vernon Ah Kee, sovereign warrior.
Ah Kee's exhibition Cantchant offers an Aboriginal rendering of 'the beach', which draws on, but is in opposition to, its signification within popular culture as a site of everyday practices and representations of 'Australian-ness'. Common ownership of the beach looms large in the Australian imagination, but, as the violent attacks at Cronulla beach on 11 December 2005 demonstrate, not everyone shares the same proprietary rights within that space. Ah Kee skilfully challenges the white Australian-ness of the beach by making visible the invisibility of Aboriginal sovereignty, framing the beach as an important site for the defence and assumption of territorial sovereignty. It is where the invaders landed. It is where, in 1788, Captain Phillip planted a flag in the name of some distant sovereign to signify white possession. The beach marks the border between land and sea, between one nation and another. This place stands as the common ground upon which collective national ownership, memory and identity are on public display; it's a place of pleasure, leisure and pride.
Ah Kee plays on the way that iconic beaches such as Bondi and Cronulla operate within the white Australian imaginary as urban and natural, civilised and primitive, spiritual and physical. He is aware that the beach is where nature and culture become reconciled through the white bodies and performances of life savers and surfers. Ah Kee undoes this reconciliation. The beach is Aboriginal land and memories are brought forth.
Upon entering the Cantchant exhibition, one sees surfboards suspended in the middle of the room, with their decks painted like rainforest shields, in red, yellow and black, the colours of the Aboriginal flag signifying our nationhood and resistance. On the other sides of the surfboards, the eyes of Aboriginal warriors silently gaze at their audience as if bearing witness to their uninvited presence. Ah Kee's grandfather looks to the east, surveying the coastline in anticipation of invaders. His silent gaze is broken by the text on the walls. Ah Kee the sovereign warrior speaks his truth. We are the first people, we have to tolerate you, we are not your other, you are dangerous people, and your duty is to accept the truth for you will be constantly reminded of your wrong-doing by our presence. Aboriginal people have not become hybrids and will not comply with what you think you have made us become.
In the second room a three-screen video installation is playing. From the first room one could already hear its soundtrack of land and water sounds, intermittently accompanied by Warumpi Band's song 'Stompin Ground', which is not about dancing on the beach. Ah Kee is subtly ironic here as The Stomp was the dance made famous by Little Pattie, one of Australia's original surfie chick icons. And white Australian youths have continued to stomp all over the beach, as shown in video clips for Australian rock bands like INXS and Midnight Oil, in soap operas like Home And Away, and in the movie Puberty Blues.
Ah Kee's video invites us to bear witness to a seeming anomaly: Aboriginal surfers at the beach. It shows Aboriginal surfers walking around the Gold Coast surveying the beach before entering it with their shield-surfboards. Only one instance is shown of the white gaze of a family, whose indignation at the Aboriginal surfers' presence is captured on film. Aboriginal surfers are out of place. They are not white, in need of a tan; they belong in the landscape in the middle of Australia not on the beach. Ah Kee plays on this anomaly by taking his audience to the landscape away from the beach, where death is signified by two cemeteries. Suddenly guns are fired at two surfboards encased in barbed wire, one hanging from a tree, the other tied to a rock. They are then seen lying within and near a creek. Here Ah Kee brings forth repressed memories of violent massacres, incarceration and dispossession hidden in landscape far from the beach. There is silence as the video moves back to the beach where repressed memories of violence inflicted on Aboriginal people are masked by the beach's iconic status within the Australian imagination.
Suddenly a lone Aboriginal surfer appears on his shield-surfboard gracefully moving through the water, displaying his skill as he takes command of the waves. He is not out of place. He embodies the resilience of Aboriginal sovereignty, disrupting the iconography of the beach that represents all that is Australian within white popular culture. Ah Kee's masterful use of irony and anomaly is like a stingray barb piercing the heart of white Australia.