Donald Rodney died as an artist in the ascendant. With Keith Piper, a fellow student at Trent Polytechnic in 1981, Rodney was foundational in the politically acute BLK Art Group, committed to pressing social issues within an art world hung up on form and theory. After the success of his 1989 solo show at Chisenhale Gallery, in 1997 he had an exhibition across town at the South London Gallery (in the year Tracey Emin’s show there was considered career-making). He died the following year, aged 36.
Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, at Bristol’s Spike Island, is a scholarly survey of the few works that survived a brief career punctuated by multiple hospitalisations and invasive surgery. In a vitrine are 10 of the sketchbooks that acted as a portal back to the creative space of the studio when Rodney was bedridden. Through them he developed a compelling personal iconography. By necessity, most work in this show is the result of long reflection and refinement on Rodney’s part before he had the physical liberty to go about the actual making.
The result is brutal clarity, in which the artist’s wit and keen eye are turned to the service of his political convictions. In 1992’s Doublethink, 70 sporting trophies carry plaques engraved with racist statements gathered from books, magazines and overheard conversations: “Black prostitutes are diseased”; “Black leaders are corrupt”; “Black children have no intelligence”; “Rich Black men are often secret criminals”. It is a blistering comment on a society that could simultaneously revere Black excellence on the sports field, but vilify the man, woman and child on the street.
Rodney had sickle cell anaemia, a condition that Amanda Sebestyen, writing of his Chisenhale show in 1989, noted was, like Aids, a disease “little understood because it only affects people who are themselves seen as disease in our body politic”. Within Rodney’s own work, the painful decline of his body became totemic of broader social ills, an entwining of concerns that progressively came to dictate both the form and content of his art. Sickle cell attacked Rodney’s bones, among other things, and one of his primary media became X-rays, cheaply acquired as a waste product of the hospital system.
He used them as the support for paintings, including 1988’s Britannia hospital, a series made for the Chisenhale show. A sequence of figures occupies the 4.5m length of Britannia hospital 3. To the left is a figure based on Frida Kahlo’s Broken Column (far from an obvious reference at the time). It’s clear how Kahlo’s image of a damaged and painful body would have appealed to Rodney, but rather than taking it as a personal emblem, he has given her the face of Cherry Groce, who was shot in the shoulder by the Metropolitan police in 1985, leaving her paralysed from the chest down. Beside her stands an empty-eyed member of the Met’s Special Patrol Group. In the foreground a dark-skinned body on a hospital bed raises its arms imploringly toward an Asian nurse.
The Britannia hospital paintings borrow their titles from a 1982 film by Lindsay Anderson conventionally described as a “black comedy” – a term Rodney has turned to his own ends. As in Anderson’s work, the hospital stands in for British society but, in Rodney’s paintings, the sickness at its heart is colonial and racist, even as the structure itself (personified by the Asian nurse) depends on immigrant labour.
Rodney is best remembered for My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Brother, a 1997 tiny sculpture of a house made from dried pieces of skin held together with dressmakers’ pins. The details of its manufacture are startling: he removed the sheet of skin from a collapsed abscess after a hip replacement operation, then dried it between the pages of a book. Here, the house itself occupies a miniature shelf within a large frame, echoing the dimensions of the partner photograph In the House of My Father, from the same year, showing Rodney cradling the house in his hand. It is an image of vulnerability and the limits of protection – the skin as home, the family as home. Rodney knew well how fragile both were.
This show reveals a young artist who had already composed a distinctive aesthetic language – photofit images, X-rays, iconography of the house – to explore powerful and interrelated themes. At the time of his death, he had just started to experiment with new media: the internet and other emerging technologies. Designed in memory of his own father, the empty robotised wheelchair – called Psalms – travels around the gallery, now inescapably performing as a ghostly memorial to Rodney himself.
• Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker is at Spike Island, Bristol, until 8 September
