Donald Rodney Visceral Canker – A Must Go
‘the empty wheelchair courses through its various trajectories on a sad and lonely journey of life, a journey to nowhere. Its movements repeat, like an ever recurring memory, a memory of another life and another journey' (in Chambers, 1998: 54)...
There it was on the wall of the exhibition, the exact, same piece of text I used for my dissertation. I yelped a little at seeing it and then completely lost my breath when I turned around to a 'working' Psalms
This video is of the same room from a different angle and the wheelchair user watches the empty wheelchair journey around its space.
Rodney’s works stand alone as individual masterpieces, but I wasn’t ready for how the narratives combine to accentuate the impact of his work. A time capsule that transcends time itself – a juxtaposition of anger, rawness and pain described beautifully with a softness of voice and approach; a call to arms for collaboration – how do we move forward – with not a hint of a defensive counterattack, just honesty and care. This exhibition will leave a lasting memory for me, a wider understanding of Rodney’s politics and work which resonates through the decades and beyond. The scar, smear, cancer that was the slave trade, driven by blinding and flawed ideology of empire. The black community continuing to be oppressed is still being driven by mass media and the status quo. Fundamentally black people are being let down! I am a white, straight, middle class man with all that prejudice and lack of understanding, so this blog is written from that standpoint. However, I can offer a post-modern viewpoint, empathy of an ally, the lived experience of a disabled body and research I have completed on Rodney’s life and works.
To painfully legitimise the above, can I have a quick selfish reflective. I feel like I am standing on the edge of a precipice – a wave of potential and energy and joy … I don’t quite know how I got here or whether I deserve to be in this state of potential. Possibility and practise to collaborate with extraordinary people is just within reach. The only welcome headache is, yes you guessed it, starting another ACE application and trying to bring Squeeze Box to a national conversation/a national tour. We are in early stages of reaching out to fantastic venues/partners, and with everyone stretched in the arts, I’m not sure who will respond to the initial email or phone call. This reality, which would normally have me anxious, is just another chord in the cacophony of practise; if it tails off, there are plenty of awe-inspiring instruments to continue the play. This excitement and building sense of imposter syndrome was catalysed by a golden email from my undergraduate tutor Dr Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley, who encouraged me to publish my writing on Psalms. Well, this probably won’t get into The Lancet, but this blog is important to show appreciation and to continue the legacy of Donald Rodney’s work.
Anyway, glad to get that out of the way and let’s get back to why we are here…
Back to 2019, sat in an office at The University of Plymouth talking with Professor Mike Phillips (good friend and collaborator of Donald Rodney) and looking at a forlorn and broken Psalms, in the corner of the room. But wow, what a presence it had, even there. More forlorn was Phillips’ gaze at Psalms, as he pointed out all the work that was needed to bring Psalms, and with it the essence of Donald Rodney, back to life. I am well acquainted with barriers but the barriers Psalms and Phillips faced seemed daunting even to me. Yet, just having the chair, safe in his office, even with requests from Tate and others to exhibit a half working Psalms (but without enough knowledge to restore and therefore do it justice),… this was a powerful act of care!
5 yrs later I stood outside the Spike Island Gallery. Full of anticipation and hope. All of his known and surviving work had been meticulously restored and curated into the first dedicated exhibition to the life and works of Donald Rodney. From powerful paintings on X-rays of Rodney’s failing body, to delicate sculptures made from his skin, to so many sketch books of original drawings and an echo of Rodney’s voice saying ‘never throw anything away’… if you’ve thought it, written it or drawn it, one day it will be useful. For me, the exhibition is pinned by the presence of absence. Seeing journeying around an empty space, in full motion, brought all kind of emotions, memories and understanding about my own identity as a disabled person. The eery soundscape and installations of the pieces sandwiching Psalms set the backdrop to an even more lonely existence. One slice of the sandwich was Doublethink (1992) – trophies, labelled with racist slurs heard or read, the other, Cataract (1991) 3 analogue projectors with 35mm slides interchanging and mimicking/undermining mug shots of black men. Just around the corner Autoicon (1997-2000) where you can type questions and be answered by a jumbled-up database of Rodney’s work, politics, humour and ways of speaking… further round you can hear his actual voice in a space surrounded by collaborators and friends.
I was also lucky enough to speak to the curatorial assistant, whose enthusiasm for Rodney’s work, matches my own. We discussed how Psalms was now becoming more ‘confused’ and how they need to constantly ‘remind’ the chair which path it should be taking – a figure of 8, in this case between four white pillars. When the work decides to deviate (I think that this might be after the sensors pick up someone), especially after so many years, it gets attracted to a corner. Like many wheelchair users navigating public space, the corner or edges seems more appealing – less chances for awkward encounters with able bodies just trying to get to where they are going, or the worst scenario, running over toes. The chair’s ageing technology (still a masterpiece of design and imagination) has sensors which pick up movement. If someone crosses its path, it shudders to a halt and pauses for an almost unbearable amount of time before it chooses a path in which it is more confident in not hitting someone. I feel this deeply in my own journeys.
Not my field at all, but I think it has a degree of A.I: not one that can ‘learn/improve’, more like taking data from the outside world and filtering through it to find an answer in order to complete the algorithm of a figure of 8. It is lonely, very awkward, painfully slow, confused, lost, and intimidated…but a beautiful marvel, a thing that is undermining so many hegemonic narratives and toxic tropes …it is absent of body but the essence of everything human.
I experienced all of the above, as at one point, the chair 'stumbled' towards me, I tried to back away, but the sensors pick me up - the way the chair halted, paused as if it was in shock that it might have run someone over and then finding another way to continue its journey, was a perfect mirror of how I navigate busy spaces. The mighty Dr Bob shared some reading on the idea of stumbling or falling – a complementary lens on the concept of failure. Falling undermines unhelpful Western concepts of progress, ignoring the effort and learning found in getting up and starting again (Emilyn & Allsopp, 2013). Psalms can’t be allowed to fall, it is too fragile and far too important, and is now receiving the care it needs. They will wrap it in the proverbial cotton wool until it is next allowed out to tell its story.
I wish I’d had that proverbial cotton wool when my chair tipped over on a kerb. After 2 guardians somehow got us upright the chair had barely a scratch but I took the brunt with a fractured skull and collar bone and bruising to be proud of. We journey a lot together but the journey to recovery for me was worlds apart from the quick fix of my chair. All these narratives being told by Psalms are magnified by all Rodney’s works coming together here. Also magnified were the emotions that this exhibition brings to the forefront of our being.
I was full of rage seeing how rife racism was when Rodney was making work and this rage just grew seeing how very little has changed. Resonating through Bristol especially, is the ugly truth that ‘[t]he bricks of Bristol are baked in the blood of slaves’ (as an eighteenth-century chronicler recorded, a reference in Perera, 2024), and the city is littered with statues of slave traders, well at least there is one less now, with one once ‘demanding’ prestige for accumulating wealth from slavery, now rejected at the bottom of Bristol dock. ‘[I]n the year to March 2022, black people were almost 5 times as likely as white people to be detained under the Mental Health Act’ (Gov, 2023) and last year ‘black people were 2.2 times as likely to be arrested as white people’ (Gov, 2024).
As Rodney states, throughout his work, he was a sick body, in a very sick society…. And that society still has much to learn.
Seeing this celebration of Rodney’s works made me realise how family and friends were both so important to his life and his practise. Reading about the pieces individually, I got the misguided sense that life was difficult (on top of his pain and gruelling medical treatment) and he was surrounded by toxic male figures. I really had a moment of soul-searching and truly appreciated that the work is about hegemonic media perception of black lives. He was a legend and his legacy must continue to shape our world and heal our society.
Bibliography
Baysen, Lacin (2023) Why are Black people overrepresented in Mental Health Act detention data?, ‘Literature Review’, University of Reading, access: https://cypf.berkshirehealthcare.nhs.uk/media/109515042/why-are-black-people-overrepresented-in-mental-health-act-detention-data.pdf accessed: 03 August 2024.
Claid Emilyn & Allsopp, Ric (2013), ‘Editorial: On Falling, Performance Research’, A Journal of the Performing Arts, 18, (4): 1-3.
Chambers, Eddie (1998) ‘His catechism: The Art of Donald Rodney’, Third Text, 12, (44): 43-54.
Gov (2024) Arrests, access: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-justice-and-the-law/policing/number-of-arrests/latest/ accessed: 03 August 2024.
Gov (2023) Detentions under the Mental Health Act, access: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/health/mental-health/detentions-under-the-mental-health-act/latest/ accessed: 03 August 2024.
Perera, Milan (2024) Slavery Obscured, Slavery Revealed: Dr Stone discusses histories of enslavement in Bristol, access: https://epigram.org.uk/slavery-obscured-slavery-revealed-remembering-histories-of-enslavement-in-bristol/ accessed: 01 August 2024.
University of Bristol (2024) Unit information: Bristol and Slavery (Level H Special Subject) in 2023/24, access: https://www.bris.ac.uk/unit-programme-catalogue/UnitDetails.jsa?ayrCode=23%2F24&unitCode=HIST30078 accessed: 01 August 2024