Donald Rodney, British Art and the  Politics of Historical Recovery

Donald Rodney (1961–98) was one of the most gifted, perceptive and innovative contemporary British artists of his time. A protagonist from the first generation of Black British-born art students in the early 1980s, Rodney and his peers brought a new dynamic to British art – a hitherto unseen interplay between aesthetics, politics, humour and Black consciousness. Deploying recurring metaphors of the “diseased” and traumatised body, his protean practice spanned the early 1980s to the late 1990s and included a prodigious output of work across painting, photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation and new technologies. Rodney addressed racial and social inequality, legacies of slavery, police brutality and Black male identity in novel and innovative ways.

Over a generation has passed since Rodney's premature death aged thirty-six. In the intervening years, which now exceed his career, Rodney’s work has received infinitely more curatorial and scholarly attention than ever before. To what extent does what is primarily institutionalised endorsement, what we might call a “posthumous career”, enhance or distort Rodney’s legacy? Attending to the artist's material dexterity and visual acuity whilst drawing from his book Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic, Richard’s talk candidly explores the challenges and often-overlooked problems of historical recovery and seeks to offer important critical perspectives on the practice and legacies of this nonpareil British artist.

Image Caption: Donald Rodney, Flame of the Soul, 1988. Oil pastel on X-ray, (detail). Courtesy of the Donald Rodney estate.

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