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"The art we make is Aboriginal art ... because the way we live our lives is an Aboriginal experience. Now what happens in the deserts and remote communities is that the people create art and they try to make their art in a way that correlates to ... [a] romanticised idea, and it's a white construction. That's why I say the only authentic Aboriginal people in this country are the urban Aboriginal people, they are the only ones whose lives aren't wholly and solely determined by white constructs."
 
Vernon Ah Kee
 
Vernon Ah Kee's work is motivated by his profound sense of exclusion and invisibility as an Aboriginal Australian. To date, he is largely known for two bodies of work, his text works and his portrait drawings.
 
While his work is cast as a clear statement of Aboriginal sovereignty, on closer inspection it is its ambiguities that take the discussion to the next level. Ah Kee presents his texts as works on PVC, on T-shirts, and at billboard scale directly onto the wall. Most of the text works are short and punchy, with the strident high-concept compression of advertising copy-writing or agitprop.
 
 'Not an animal or a plant', 2006, reminds us that Aborigines were once categorised as subhuman, on a par with fauna and flora. 'First person', plays on the fact that Aborigines might have been here first but are silenced in the culture, unable to speak for themselves. The text of war race, 2005 - 'mythunderstanding' - puns to suggest that the prevailing romantic take on Aborigines is mistaken.
 
Ah Kee's texts range from crushingly self-evident 'no-brainers' ('if I am extremist it is because my people live in extremely bad conditions' from 'Ifiam', 2002) to puzzling word plays ('Who deicides / you deicide' of - which could be a typo or could refer to killing god). Some texts - like 'your duty is to accept me my duty is to tolerate you' from tolerance, 2004 - could be interpreted in a diametrically opposed way if written by a white person
 
But Ah Kee's text works are more than words. Their ostensible messages are complicated by their typographic treatment that recalls the look of 1960s 'big idea' advertising and various brands of conceptual and neo-conceptual art that subsequently echoed it (Lawrence Weiner, Barbara Kruger, Haim Steinbach and Christopher Wool). Ah Kee uses a familiar, no-nonsense, sans-serif typeface, typically extra-bold and lower-case. Despite opting for this ultra-legible font, he runs together words and lines of text, making them harder to read; sometimes you need to double check you read correctly.
 
There is nothing remotely Aboriginal about Ah Kee's graphic style, indeed this Madison Avenue idiom is part of a mainstream media culture that might be seen to suppress Aboriginal voices. Ah Kee's adoption of it is over-determined. It makes a political point. He speaks from a marginalised position by co-opting the impersonal authority of the Big Other's language (which claims to speak to, and sometimes for, all), making an issue of its neutral tone. He has no other option. As an urban artist it would be inappropriate and inauthentic for him to speak in an 'Aboriginal' idiom. It's his preference. He considers the 'Aboriginal' idiom always already compromised - as artist Richard Bell puts it, 'a white thing'. Plus it is expedient.  He is speaking to white people in a language they can understand. Ah Kee would doubtless sympathise with Barbara Kruger, who famously said: 'We loiter outside of trade and language and are obliged to steal language'.
 
Alongside the text works, Ah Kee has been making big drawings, mostly portraits. They were inspired by photographs of his great-grandfather, George Sibley, a Waanyi man sent to Palm Island, discovered in the Norman Tindale Collection.
 
Between 1921 and 1957, a period when Indigenous Australians had yet to be recognised as citizens, Tindale photographed hundreds of Aborigines living on missions and government stations as a scientific record of a race widely considered to be dying out. Subjects were posed front and profile, and identified by numbers rather than by names, suggesting criminal mugshots or specimens. Ah Kee has mixed feelings about the Tindale images, which provide him a point of contact with past generations but come tinged with bad news.
 
In part Ah Kee is motivated by a desire to redeem Tindale's images of his grandfather through investing time in exploring and registering details; through emphasising eyes, the intensity of his sitters' gazes, to suggest agency; through scale, granting them an ennobling Mount Rushmore grandiosity; and through identifying them and tying them in to a specific genealogy - his own. But by the same measure, his images of contemporary sitters are also tainted by association with the Tindale images, as if Aboriginals today, even his young son, might still be heirs to those attitudes, imprisoned by them. So these images are neither completely positive or completely negative
 
Ah Kee's latest project incorporates imagery from his text works and portraits but also takes a big step into a new medium, video installation. 'Cantchant', shown at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art in 2007, takes the beach as its subject.
 
The beach is a key element in white Australian mythology. It's a commons, a family leisure space invested with childhood nostalgia, the home of Max Dupain's iconic Sunbaker, 1937. This idyllic commonsense view of the beach masks a truth: although Aborigines are conveniently seen as people of the interior, the beach has been a site of racial conflict ever since English explorers first arrived in the eighteenth century.
 
The repressed history of the beach as a physical and ideological battleground returned with a vengeance in December 2005, when mobs of young white males descended on Sydney's Cronulla Beach attacking Middle Eastern beachgoers while wearing slogans such as 'We grew here, you flew here', as if appropriating Aboriginal rhetoric.
 
'Cantchant' turns on the superficial resemblance between surfboards and the shields traditionally produced by Ah Kee's people in the North Queensland rainforest. These days shields are made as art objects but originally they were used as armour in battles. Their painted designs were heraldic, standards of identity. For the show, Ah Kee created decorated surfboards, painting the decks with shield patterns while incorporating cropped reproductions of his western-style portraits into the undersides as their idiomatic flip-sides.
 
The centrepiece of the show was a ten-minute three-screen video installation in which the boards reappeared. The video mixed its genres and metaphors, each sequence pulling the rug on the previous. In a heavy-handed allegory, dead boards (waterlogged surfboards) bound in barbed wire and hung from trees or bound to stones were pelted with buckshot.
 
The metaphors were obvious: the boards are Aboriginal bodies, lynched, humiliated; Australia is a killing field. And yet the solemn tone was immediately undermined by a comic sequence showing three Aboriginal men getting about Surfers Paradise in their thongs and absurdly garish designer surf gear.
 
Carrying their rainforest-shield-patterned boards, they desperately tried to fit in but stuck out like so many sore thumbs. Cut to an inappropriately dramatic soundtrack, Warumpi Band's throbbing 'Stompen Ground', the irony was thick. The sequence could equally be seen to point the finger at the culture that excludes Aborigines and to poke fun at them in their desire to fit in - what were they thinking?
 
However, the idea that Aboriginal people are out of place at the beach was immediately roundly disproven in a sequence showing Aboriginal pro-surfer Dale Richards at work on the water on one of Ah Kee's boards, as if taken from a consummate surf movie.
 
The looping back to scenes of dead boards under attack came like a wake up call. Moving genre from allegory to skit to surf movie, and tone from preachy to silly to sublime, the video is at once engaging and alienating. As with the best of Ah Kee's text pieces and his portraits, it poses an issue of how we want to read it.
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2008 issue.