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Author: Richard Hylton, Lecturer in Contemporary Art, SOAS, University of London
Original article: https://theconversation.com/donald-rodney-visceral-canker-noteworthy-retrospective-of-an-artist-as-ambitious-as-he-was-audacious-254535
Donald Rodney’s art (1961-98) has been familiar to me for many years. But only rarely has it been possible to experience, at close quarters, anything approximating the sheer range and depth of his practice. In his first retrospective exhibition in over a decade and a half, Rodney’s remarkable work is given the platform it deserves.
Spanning painting, drawing, oil pastels, photography, sculptural assemblages, installation and computer-generated art, Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker at London’s Whitechapel Gallery reveals an artist who was ambitious and prolific, audacious and innovative. An anathema to today’s market-driven art world.
Invention was central to Rodney’s inimitable practice, but it was also integral to his life and upbringing. Growing up in what was often a racially and socially fractured Britain became central to his artistic concerns.
Born in West Bromwich in 1961, Rodney was the youngest child of Harold and Iris, Jamaican immigrants, who settled in Britain in the late 1950s. They, like many postwar Caribbean arrivals, had to invent a new way of living and of surviving.
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Rodney was brought up in Smethwick, a district on the outskirts of Birmingham. During the 1964 general election it became notorious for an anti-immigrant campaign led and won by Conservative MP Peter Griffiths. He helped set the stage for later, more extreme acts of racism – including new immigration laws meant to limit Black immigration, Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, and the rise of the far-right National Front.
However, by the 1970s and early 1980s, as Black children were becoming adults, new forms of British political and cultural identity were being fomented. This included an outpouring of artistic expression in Britain.
With the likes of fellow art student Keith Piper, Rodney became part of the first generation of British-born Black students to attend art school in the UK, heralding a new chapter in British art.
The painting How the West Was Won (1982) is named after John Ford’s epic western from 1962. It’s the earliest example of Rodney’s fledgling ability to sample and incorporate a wide variety of sources in his work – from Hollywood film and childhood memories of “cowboys and Indians”, to reimagining the cover of post-punk band Gang of Four’s influential debut album Entertainment (1979).
Rodney’s composition used child-like mark-markings, vivid colours and crude portraiture, typifying a certain irreverence towards “proper” painting.
While at Slade School of Fine Art between 1985-87, Rodney began making works using discarded X-rays.
Visually alluring, these anonymous X-rays became his canvas. The House That Jack Built (1987), included in this exhibition, involved meticulous scalpel incisions of words and elaborate prose. X-ray was used as a metaphor for looking beneath the surface of images and society to better understand the workings of inequality and racism.
The sculptural work Doublethink (1992), remade for this retrospective, comprises over 100 cheap sporting trophies, each emblazoned with shocking racial insults. These are intended to explore the paradoxes and pathologies of race-based discrimination.
Rodney took his title from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the language of Newspeak produces “doublethink”, a process in which two opposing ideas are truths, such as “ignorance is strength”. This, once again, demonstrates his capacity for invention.
Self-portrait as social critique
Nothing typified that capacity for invention more than Rodney’s approach to self-portraiture, which was often a conduit for wider social and political commentary.
Rodney suffered from the hereditary blood disorder sickle cell anaemia. The relationship between his illness and art has routinely misunderstood to the detriment of his artistic ingenuity. Being X-rayed, having regular blood transfusions and invasive surgery were Rodney’s personal experiences. Transfigured into art, such medical predicaments became conduits for reinterpreting history and contemporary society.
Visceral Canker (1990) is a circulatory blood pumping system overlaid on fabricated heraldic shields of Elizabeth I and slave trader Sir John Hawkins. It explored the intertwined relationships between Rodney’s Black British identity, slavery and British history.
The photographic light-box Self Portrait: Black Men, Public Enemy (1990) and the analogue slide projection Cataract (1991) sought to question the perpetual representation of Black men in British society as criminal and deviant. Psalms (1997) is a poignant and affecting self-portrait in which an unoccupied and computer-powered wheelchair moves eerily in response to the gallery visitor.
Rodney’s art-making process was resourceful. For example, the production of his important large oil pastel drawings on X-rays, including Britannia Hospital 2 (1988), were made in sections. This enabled Rodney to work at scale at a desk at home or in hospital.
The photographic work In the House of My Father (1997), depicting a minuscule house made of the artist’s skin, was shot in King’s College hospital, London. Rodney was also a master at enlisting the active support from family, friends and associates to realise the production of entire exhibitions, including 9 Night in Eldorado (1997).
The Whitechapel Gallery show is the final leg of a three-gallery tour which began in 2024. It was first presented at Spike Island, Bristol, the city in which Rodney first exhibited in 1982, followed by Nottingham Contemporary where he studied fine art as an undergraduate at Trent Polytechnic between 1981-85.
London was where Rodney lived for most of his 16-year career. This retrospective brings together nearly all of the artist’s surviving works. However, about two-thirds of Rodney’s artistic output work has either been lost or destroyed. This does not diminish the retrospective but imbues archival material held by his estate and public collections with particular significance.
The prominent role assigned to sketchbooks, working drawings and the screening of Three Songs on Pain, Light and Time (1995), directed by the Black Audio Film Collective, play an important supplementary role in narrating Rodney’s singular practice.
Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker is at the Whitechapel Gallery until May 4.
Richard Hylton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.