February 12–May 4, 2025
Donald Rodney, who died in 1998 at the age of 36, was part of the BLK Art Group and a forerunner, in many ways, of what we would now call Disability Arts. Rodney’s limning of his intersectional identities—born in West Bromwich, UK, to Jamaican parents, he lived with sickle cell anemia—keeps relevant and resonant his keen ability to employ new materials and ahead-of-his-time technologies. His monumental oil pastels on x-rays, kinetic and animatronic sculptures, sketchbooks, and installations pierce the sociopolitical culture of racism, colonialism, and ableism still rampant today.
Entering the exhibit’s main ground floor room, one first encounters Self-Portrait: Black Men Public Enemy (1990): five lightboxes, arranged to resemble a sacrificial cross, containing images of the faces of Black men taken from newspapers and a book about blood diseases. None of the faces belong to Rodney—the artist’s self-portraits rarely include his own image—and four of the images show black strips placed across the men’s eyes. In 1995, according to the exhibition’s incisive wall texts, Rodney said the prevalent image of “Black masculinity intrigues me because of being a Black man and constantly being told I am a threat.”
The ground floor room includes crucial work including the monumental mixed-media installation The House that Jack Built (1987), which combines X-rays into the shape of a house, in front of which sits a scarecrow-like figure. Dressed in a striped shirt and paint-splattered pants, a gray-black leafless tree sprouts where the man’s head should be. The allusion to lynching is sinisterly clear. On the X-rays are painted and stenciled texts, as well as silhouettes of hands and scissors. The texts narrate “the enduring pathologies of colonialism and enslavement.” When first shown in “Critical,” Rodney’s 1990 solo exhibit at Rochdale Gallery, its curator, the artist Lubaina Himid, said, “his X-ray pictures, eerie in their secret visual codes, overlaid with bright strong realism, are the perfect metaphor of Britain as a sick nation.”1
Rodney identified “destruction, oppression, state violence and hidden history” as the principal themes of his work, using X-rays as metaphors to “reveal in biological terms ‘what lies beneath the surface’” and to show the “inner workings of late-twentieth-century capitalism.” He did not attempt definitively to map the “uneasily charted” and “vast terrain of Black history,” but rather tried in his work to indicate “a type of unease (or dis-ease) with the order of things.”
Upstairs, the exhibition continues with Three Songs on Pain, Time and Light (1995), the Black Audio Film Collective’s twenty-five-minute film featuring interviews with Rodney and images of his work. In the film, Rodney talks about Psalms (1997), one of the artist’s most resounding, even lyrical, works: a standard motorized wheelchair programmed to navigate the floor space using proximity sensors to avoid obstacles.
Watching this result of Rodney’s exploration of digital and robotic technologies, on which he collaborated with Mike Phillips, is an evocative and mesmerizing experience. It is deepened by knowing that Rodney’s illness caused him to be unable to attend his father’s nine night, a traditional Jamaican event that takes place after the death of a family member. In Three Songs on Pain, Time and Light, Rodney riffs about Psalms: “I’m intrigued by aestheticizing the wheelchair, not just simply dealing with notions of disability, but with notions of absence and of loneliness.” He describes it as a “soulful piece,” about unattainable desires and “journeys to nowhere.” The exhibition text correctly emphasizes that “the wheelchair may also be understood as a proxy for the absent body of the artist, who was unable to attend the opening of his own exhibition due to his deteriorating health.”
But in this retrospective, it is as if Psalms brings Rodney, through his absence, into the room. Intensifying this experience is, on a nearby wall, In the House of My Father (1997), a large close-up color photograph of his small sculpture My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Brother (1997), cradled in Rodney’s hand. Alluding to the Christian ritual of communion, the symbolic body of Christ is replaced by a tiny house constructed from the artist’s skin. The sculpture itself was shown in previous iterations of the retrospective but due to the work’s fragility it could not be shown at Whitechapel. For Rodney, “bodies can be suddenly broken down by a few cells working the wrong way.”
The exhibit ends with Autoicon (1997–2000), perhaps Rodney’s best-known work. This early version of AI was conceived in 1997 but completed by close friends and produced by two universities after his untimely death. The website and CD-ROM of Autoicon, through which one can communicate with Rodney, are available within the exhibition’s auxiliary archival room, where we are reminded that “Visceral Canker” consists of most of Rodney’s extant work. A slide show of other work reminds us that what is missing is lost because of Rodney’s inventive use of fragile materials and work conceived to be temporary or site-specific.
In the archival room, I asked Rodney, through Autoicon, to “Tell me about yourself.” The reply: “We all have flaws.” My response to his response, and to this moving, haunting, and far-ranging exhibit: yes, we do, and sometimes what we might deem flaws are actually what can keep us, one way or another, alive.
Quoted in the exhibition wall text.
