Donald Rodney - 20 Year Anniversary (1961-1998)

Donald Rodney - 20 year anniversary (1961-1998).

Rahul Patel, Academic support and associate lecturer, Ba/Ma Culture Criticism and Curation CSM ((TW, 2016).

Donald Rodney 1961-1998

It is 30 years since Donald Rodney died from sickle-cell anaemia aged 37. Rodney, with Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper, played a pivotal role in the development of the BLK Arts group*. He was an artist who had to fight against racism and in the art world for representation of his art and these struggles turned him into an art activist. He was dubbed as “one of the most innovative and versatile artists of his generation”. Donald Rodney’s sketchbooks which are in the Tate archive were recently exhibited at Tate Britain. His work has been used by Luke Willis Thompson who has been shortlisted for the 2018 Turner Prize.

At the Devils Feast exhibition in April 1987 at Chelsea College of Art he with Keith Piper used his art to create a daring and creative installation highlighting the ‘injustice’ of the criminal justice institutions of Britain. Art is always been ‘political’ and nearly all artists have understood this. In every given period artistic experiments have been made by artists for their practice to speak out for change. In the late 1970s and 1980s the world of contemporary British arts seemed oblivious or even refused to acknowledge racism faced by black people. Rodney and his fellow black artists were determined to puncture this sham edifice of contemporariness of British art which failed to bring the contemporary into the body of art and in particular art schools. The Devils Feast exhibition offered a chance to give a voice. It was the first exhibition in a London higher education arts institution by black only artists.

Inner city riots in the UK which broke out in Brixton in April 1981 but then spread across the country were a manifestation against police harassment of young black men. The subsequent fallout from the conduct of the state, judicial and education institutions was meant to signal a change in their relationship with young black men. However, supremely confident after their ‘pounding’ of the working-class mining communities during the Miners’ strike of 1984-85 the inner-cities police institutions returned back to their traditional form (racial and prejudicial) in dealing with all black communities. Two incidences sparked another set of riots in Brixton and in Tottenham in late 1985. The ferocity was even more then in 1981 and resulted in the death of a policeman. But incursion of the police into the homes of black families resulted in Joy Gardner in Tottenham dying and Cherry Groce in Brixton permanently injured and maimed by the police who shot her. This time it was also different because it was black women who were the target of the police. Pipers and Rodney’s The Next Turn of the Screw installation was probably the most thought-provoking, innovative and controversial piece at the Devils Feast exhibition. The installation was in response to the death of Clinton McCurbin in late February 1987 at the hands of the West Midlands police in Wolverhampton just over two months before the exhibition. The Wolverhampton, Birmingham and West Midland connection for the artists – where most the BLK Art Group had originated raised further anger as well as public outcry at what had taken place.

With Tottenham and Brixton riots fresh in the minds of people there was a sense that the police and their relationship with young black men was again out of control and oppressive. Donald Rodney attended the demonstration on March 7 in Wolverhampton protesting against the treatment of black people by the police. He took photographs outside the Next close shop where ther demonstration had stopped to lay a wreath where McCurbin had died. The riot police had also assembled in large numbers outside the Next shop. A set of these photographs taken by Rodney were used as part of the installation for The Next Turn of the Screw.

The installation was in three parts. The main part was outside the exhibition in the courtyard of Chelsea College of Art. A large wooden construction within entrance into the structure where you could watch a video sequence of these photographs. The screen was the glass frontage of the facade of the art school. Once inside the box story of how Clinton McCurbin in died is exhibited by the use of video. Outside the graphics and the images were hand-painted in black paint and the structure as a whole was painted white. Next clothes shops brand their graphics in this way. The door opening into the structure had the words painted The Next Turn of the Screw. On the other side of this partition, inside the gallery were large painted six faces of both black men and women who had been killed in police custody over the last three years. Under each of the faces was short texts detailing how they had died. It was a very clever use of space so that the visitor’s attention was immediately grabbed whilst entering the exhibition.

The killing of Clinton McCurbin could have been of one of their friends or even one of them.

The death of young black men at the hands of the police still continues in Britain today. It has been internationalised with the Black Lives Matter movement from the USA. Luke Willis Thompson’s work for the 2018 Turner Prize centralises this using his film work _Human and Autoprotrait.

The African-Caribbean, Asian, African Art in Britain Archive at Chelsea College of Art holds a collection of ephemeral works documenting the work of black artists in particular the second generation of black artists of the 1980s and full documentation of the Devils Feast Exhibition.

*the BLK Art Group were a collective of second generation of black artists since the end of WW2. They saw themselves as art activists as central to their practice was the need to challenge the art establishment and institutions for representation of their art.