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Donald Rodney died at the age of 36 in March 1998. The sickle cell anaemia that eventually took his life had meant he had spent far too much of it in hospitals. Disease also became a dominant theme in his art but not just the disease he personally suffered from but other, more societal, diseases like that of racism which he saw blighting Britain and elsewhere in much the same way as sickle cell blighted his own body
Britannia Hospital 2 (1998)
In a quietly powerful film halfway round the Whitechapel's Donald Rodney:Visceral Canker retrospective you can hear Rodney talk quietly, reflectively, and, it seems, devoid of bitterness and anger (two emotions which would be quite understandable in the circumstances) about his work, about his disease, and about how the two have interacted with each other throughout his life and career.
He even suggests that art only really became a viable path to him because of the disease. Young black men like him, during his school days, were often directed to sport. His disability meant he was never likely to excel at sport so he was pointed in the direction of art instead. As luck would have it, it was something he excelled at as any visitor to this show is sure to come away agreeing with.
Self-Portrait:Black Men Public Enemy (1990)
Born in West Bromwich, to Jamaican parents, in 1981, Rodney grew up in Smethwick and studied art in Bournville, Nottingham, and London, first gaining visibility as a member of Wolverhampton's BLK Art Group alongside Keith Piper, Marlene Smith, and Eddie Chambers. He wasn't hemmed in by convention or genre and though, looking back on his work now, you'd probably regard him as a conceptual artist he was just as likely to paint or use collage and film as he was to indulge in weightier conceptual works.
In fact, they all seem to work together as a (rough) whole more than many other artists. Rodney's art seems to tell a story. The story of his life and the story of the era he came of age (and died) in. Lightbox images of five black men (none of which are Rodney), four with black strips across their eyes - the fifth an identikit reconstruction, comment on society's perception of black masculinity as a threat and how media could amplify that perceived threat by the choice of images they use to represent black men.
Untitled Drawing ('Cowboy and Indian' after David Hockney's 'We Two Boys Clinging, 1961) (1989)
How The West Was Won (1982)
Even when Rodney paid homage to other artists the tension, a racial tension, was there. David Hockney's We Two Boys Clinging from 1961 is changed, subtly, so that the two protagonists are cowboys and Indians. For those of us around my age, a school playground game with explicit racist undertones. Not that most of us realised that at the time.
1982's brilliantly colourful How The West Was Won took its name from a film (a 1962 Western) which would come to be another theme in Rodney's work and is a look at how Hollywood's cowboys and Indians film seemed to suggest that Indian resistance to settler domination was more of a problem than that settler domination and that the only answer to it was ruthless violence and suppression. It's roughly the approach Trump is taking to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Manifest destiny.
1991's Cataract is a slide installation that consists of various unsychronised images of four fragmented black male faces, including Rodney's own. They flicker and interchange like some racist version of Exquisite Corpse and resemble nothing less than, as Rodney intended, police photofits. I was reminded of Crimewatch and reminded of a very racist joke a waiter in an Indian restaurant in Highgate told me about Crimewatch fairly recently (within the last decade). Racism hasn't gone away but it has mutated.
Cataract (1991)
Untitled (1994)
Untitled (1994)
The House That Jack Built (1987)
1987's The House That Jack Built is certainly an eye catching piece. Described by Rodney as a self-portrait, it features a crude showroom dummy of a figure sat in front of a house made of medical x-rays. The exhibition's curator, Lubaina Himid - an artist herself, talks of how the work is "eerie" in its "secret visual codes" and how it acts as the "perfect metaphor of Britain as a sick nation". Certainly the text which pertains to colonialism and enslavement paints a less than perfect picture of our shared nation's past.
It's echoed in a less sensational, more personal work, that Rodney made nearly a decade later at a time when his health was seriously deteriorating. A large scale photographic triptych, Flesh Of My Flesh uses technologies of imaging and evidencing to investigate the politics of sickle cell anaemia and the unsettling mythologies and, in this case and this case only, actualities of racial difference.
A central panel depicts a thick scar on Rodney's thigh following the then most recent of his many hip operations. Evidence, it is believed, of malpractice by a reckless surgeon who believed that black skin was 'tougher' than white skin and therefore required more 'work', The scar is flanked by two images of knots of human hair photographed under an electron microscope. One of Rodney's hair and one of fellow artist Rose Finn-Kelcey's hair. Finn-Kelcey is white and female. The hairs are, of course, indistinguishable. So, surely, should be the skin.
Flesh Of My Flesh (1996)
Prepatory drawings for 'Soweto/Guernica' and 'The Watchtower', Citizens Stand in British Standard Time, An X-Ray History' (1968)
Rodney riffed on Picasso's Guernica to make works that comment on Apartheid era South Africa and made pastel drawings of his x-rays with equal passion, commitment, and righteousness as if to underline that, to him, the personal and the political were eternally intertwined. The debilitating condition of human bodies can be seen very easily in the debilitating condition of nation states.
A disease, in fact, that infected the order of all things. It's perhaps best exemplified in 1990's tremendously original and powerful Visceral Canker - a work that gives its name to the show itself. Commissioned for a site-specific public art project by Television South West (!) it was originally installed inside a former military battery at Mount Edgcumbe overlooking Plymouth Sound. Two wooden plaques display heraldic images and they're each linked to a series of medical tubes and electrical pumps that circulate imitation blood around them.
The heraldic images are the coats of arms of slave trader John Hawkins (1532-1595), the first slave trader to sail from Plymouth, and Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) who did very well out of Hawkins, and slavery, herself. Rodney had originally wanted to use his own blood in the work but because he was ill his blood was deemed, incorrectly, unsafe to use. That's a shame but it takes nothing away from a work that seems to be the ultimate example of what Rodney was trying to, and did, achieve. A comment about the inhumanity of Britain's colonial history and how it has continued, and will continue, to shape the country. A house made of bricks will always be made of bricks. A country built on slavery will always be built on slavery. That's not contentious. That's just our history.
Visceral Canker (1990)
Visceral Canker (1990)
The racism of that era hasn't gone away and nor has the racism of a more recent era. I've actually been at a football match when a banana was thrown on the pitch (at Man Utd's Paul Parker, a black player). That was in the 90s and by then that, and monkey noises, were becoming, thankfully, far less common. One player who put up with more than his fair share was John Barnes and Rodney has captured the infamous, and shameful, incident (along with the US athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos performing a Black Power salute from the podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City) in lightbox form as if to the frame these racial stories as the important parts of history they are.
He's also made, or had made, dozens of replica sporting trophies, each emblazoned with lazy and stereotypical generalisations of black people. Slogans like BLACK MEN ARE VICIOUS AND CRUEL and BLACK PEOPLE WON'T INTEGRATE. You get the idea. The sort of thing you may hear a common or garden racist say in the shop, on the bus, and, most likely of all, to their mates in the pub. Rodney's called the work Doublethink. A nod to George Orwell and a comment on how the same people who may cheer John Barnes, or - now - Bukayo Saka, one evening may use discriminatory and racist language later that same night.
Mexico Olympics (1991)
John Barnes (1991)
Doublethink (1992)
Doublethink (1992)
These works also lean towards the sport that he was increasingly unable to take part in but clearly enjoyed. In the next room, Rodney's disability is laid bare but more so than that his death and his absence. Psalms is a motorised wheelchair complete with sensors to stop it bumping into walls or people. It moves quietly, and without any real purpose, around the room. A constant reminder of a life that was taken far too soon. It made me wonder what work he would have gone to create had he lived longer.
Psalms (1997)
An information board tells us visitors that when Rodney's father, who migrated to the UK in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation, died in 1995 his son was too ill to attend his father's 'nine night' (a traditional Jamaican event that takes place after the death of a family member) and this too is a painful reminder of the experiences life takes away from those whose bodies fail them. The wheelchair continued moving around and not getting anywhere. A journey to nowhere that all of us, both disabled and able bodied, are ultimately on.
With the passing of his father, and his own imminent death, Rodney leaned into themes of life's fragility and a photograph of a sculpture he made in the last year of his life is shown cradled in the artist's hand. A tiny house constructed from Rodney's own skin. The skin that encases the hand that holds it and the skin that is home to the cells that would very soon take his life.
In the House of My Father (1997)
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