Donald Rodney @ The Whitechapel Gallery

12 Feb 2025 – 4 May 2025

Visceral Canker

With museums and galleries such as The Royal Academy and The Fitzwilliam Museum putting on major exhibitions highlighting their historical connections to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and how their collections benefited as a consequence, I went to see Donald Rodney’s work at The Whitechapel Gallery expecting to encounter another exhibition held to assuage the guilt of the hosting institution. I was wrong.

The Whitechapel Gallery’s decision to hold a major exhibition of his work does two things. By giving a voice to the work of a relatively unknown (to mainstream audiences) black artist, it cements the Gallery’s position as a centre for contemporary art prepared to deal with difficult subject matter. By shifting its focus away from the slave trade (as much as that is ever possible to fully do when exploring the black experience) it focusses largely on problematic and uncomfortable aspects of more recent institutional racism in Britain.

Rodney was a key member of the BLK Art Group. A movement of black British artists whose work contained predominantly social and political narratives. Rodney himself had a medical condition known as sickle-cell anaemia, which eventually killed him at the age of 36. Despite the difficulties of working with the disease and having to navigate his art production around frequent trips to the hospital, Rodney’s artwork is incredibly diverse. He chose the mediums he thought best to articulate the message he wanted to convey and Rodney’s stated aim was to use his own illness as a metaphor for the ills of the wider British society. Powerful indeed.

Below are some of the key works.

Visceral Canker  (1990)

Visceral Canker (left panel)

Visceral Canker (right panel)

Visceral Canker – detail

A work acting as a stark reminder of the interconnectedness of our institutions with power and slavery. Sir John Hawkins is credited as being the first English slave trader. His first expedition, capturing slaves in Africa and selling them on to plantations in the West Indies, proved so profitable that for the second expedition Queen Elizabeth I loaned one of her ships and helped to finance it. Hawkins was even allowed to change his family coat of arms to incorporate an enslaved African, such was the pride associated with this trafficking. Rodney takes the two coats of arms and connects them to a system of pumps and blood bags. His diseased blood running through the installation, a metaphor for the disease, that is the legacy of slavery, at the heart of our society. 

Self-Portrait: Black Men Public Enemy (1990)

Self-Portrait: Black Men Public Enemy

Black, male masculinity; This was a subject that Rodney came back to time and time again. How he saw himself and how British society portrayed the black male were contradictory. Taking images of black men from the Sunday Times, the Evening Standard and a book on blood diseases, the images conveyed the black male as a threat with no distinction visually being made between the black criminal or the black patient.

Camouflage (1997)

Camouflage

A racist slur stitched in the same material as the background material to render it virtually invisible. This remarkable piece, Camouflage, draws attention to the way in which everyday racism can remain an insidious presence, even when not visible on the surface. It references the racist slur “you can take the nigger out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the nigger” shouted at OJ Simpson during his murder trial. OJ Simpson ostensibly accepted by the white society he was part of until that moment it was inconvenient to be so.

Psalms (1997)

Psalms

A wheelchair fitted with sensors moves around the floor of the gallery space. Exhibited at Rodney’s last exhibition before his death, one in which he was too ill to attend, it acted simultaneously both as his corporeal presence and absence. A metaphor too for the invisibility of black and disabled artists in mainstream art culture.

In The House Of My Father (1997)

In the House Of My Father

Made from Rodney’s own skin, In the House of My Father “is about the fragility of the human body …and of the human ego…bodies can be suddenly broken down by just a few cells working the wrong way”. The fragility of human bonds and Rodney’s own relationship with God.

The House that Jack Built (1987)

The House that Jack Built

The House that Jack Built - detail

An installation which speaks of both historical and personal pain. Sitting in front of a house comprised of x-rays, is the figure of a man with a tree emerging from its torso. Perhaps alluding to racial lynchings? The text, an unflinching account of the enduring pains of slavery written over x-rays of Rodney’s own body, in themselves a painful diary of his own experience. The phrase, ‘the house that Jack built’ refers to a house poorly built, here Rodney uses it as a metaphor for his own body as well as our rotten society built on the backs of others.

Untitled Drawing (‘Cowboy and Indian’, after David Hockney’s ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’ 1961), (1989)

Untitled Drawing (‘Cowboy and Indian’, after David Hockney’s ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’ 1961)

We Two Boys Together Clinging – D. Hockney

Hockney in his work depicts two men in a tender embrace. Rodney, by changing the figures to that of a cowboy and Indian manages to completely alter the picture’s undertones. The relationship of the native Americans to the cowboys is historically one of oppression, subjugation and eventual annihilation. The embrace between a cowboy and a native American can therefore never be seen as a tender embrace between two equals. The relationship is violent. By linking his work to Hockney’s, Rodney manages to highlight how some relationships have been allowed to develop, whilst others will always be steeped in the violence of the past.

This exhibition was excellent and brought a key artist to my attention. Not only did Rodney not compromise on the messages he wanted to convey, but he managed to do so using a novel visual language. There is always a danger that by including the self in the work, the work becomes an indulgent exercise and any message is lost. Rodney clearly wished to incorporate his own suffering into his work without making it its dominant theme. Using his illness as a metaphor was a brilliant way to depict both him and society’s wider ills.