Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, Whitechapel Gallery review - absence made powerfully present

Donald Rodney’s most moving work is a photograph titled In the House of My Father, 1997 (main picture). Nestling in the palm of his hand is a fragile dwelling whose flimsy walls are held together by pins. This tiny model is made from pieces of the artist’s skin removed during one of the many operations he underwent during his short life; sadly he died the following year, aged only 37.

His body was crumbling under the onslaught of sickle cell anaemia, a disease that almost exclusively affects people of African descent and for which there is no known cure. In one of his notebooks, beside a drawing of a house on fire, he wrote “Home as sanctuary, as body in a state of siege”. The attacks were not coming from outside, though, but from within his own body – a dwelling unable to provide protection against its very self. This complex work therefore addresses issues of inheritance and identity as well as of illness, resilience and mortality.

“Bodies”, Rodney said, “can be suddenly broken down by just a few cells working in the wrong way.” And he used the idea of a body dying from within as a metaphor for the sickness he perceived at the heart of society. “What lies beneath the surface is a governing principal in my work,” he said. “I try to indicate a type of unease (or disease) with the order of things.”

Blood transfusions played an important role in the treatment of his condition. And in Visceral Canker 1990, the work that gives its name to the exhibition, fake blood is pumped along tubes to link two family crests – that of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir John Hawkins. Sir John was the first person granted the use of one of her Majesty’s ships to transport slaves from Africa to the Spanish colonies. So proud was he of his trade that he introduced four slaves to his coat of arms along with the lions rampant.

Xrays played an important role in revealing the internal damage caused by sickle cell. Soon they found their way into the work, again as a metaphor for things normally hidden – for sickness within the body politic. In The House That Jack Built 1987 (pictured above), a bank of Xrays creates the shape of a building. Slumped on a chair in front of the house is a tattered stick figure, the embodiment of exploitation, while cut into the surface of the Xrays are letters reading “Jack’s House is built on 75 million dead black souls”. In a sketchbook, Rodney reproduced a diagram demonstrating the most efficient way to cram people into a slave ship. His caption reads “Conceptual patterning; black cells under a microscope” – mordant humour that appears in his work right from the start.

It enlivens a painting he did as a student at Trent Polytechnic. How the West Was Won 1982 (pictured left) is an ironic take on the version of history propagated by Hollywood films like Henry Hathaway’s 1962 western of the same name. Against a bright yellow, desert backdrop a grinning cowboy holds a toy gun to the head of terrified Indian. “The only good Injun is a dead Injun” is scrawled along the
cowboy’s spine and around his stetson. The delivery of this black comedy is deliberately absurd – as absurd, you might say, as the propaganda used to justify the slaughter of native Americans. The gun is a toy, glued onto the canvas as if to emphasise that while the narrative may be laughable, the violence was all too real.

Racism is a recurrent theme. “I am constantly being told that I am a threat”, he remarked. An especial fascination was what he called “the maelstrom of contradictions” evident in the way black athletes are subject to “cheers of appreciation and taunts of racial abuse”. Displayed on a light box is a photo of the moment John Barnes – revered as one of our all-time-great footballers – batted away a banana thrown at him from the stands as a racist put down. Nearby are 70 sports trophies with little plaques attached to their bases spelling out commonly held prejudices, such as: “black criminality is genetic; black men are sexually fearsome; black people are a political problem and black children have a bad attitude."Rodney continued to make work even after being confined to a wheelchair and bravely channeled this eventuality into his work. He envisaged a posse of wheelchairs negotiating their way around a maze in a sad “journey to nowhere” and, in the Whitechapel’s upstairs gallery, an empty wheelchair (pictured above) uses sensors to navigate its lonely way around the space. Rather than bringing the artist back to life, the empty chair makes his untimely absence the more palpable.

• Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker at the Whitechapel Gallery until May 4
• More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk