002 - Musings on Donald Rodney's photograph - 2025/07/07

The purpose of this post is to collect some of my thoughts about a piece of art I saw in the Courtauld Gallery at some point in the last few years. The image as I saw it can be accessed at the Tate museum site, and a photograph of the physical object itself, which was also presented separately can be found at the art UK site.

I won't claim to have any terribly nuanced insight into this work, but I found it extremely striking and I continue to come back to thinking about it with regularity. This post contains my understanding of the art object itself along with my own conjectures and musings that stem from it.

The object

The idea of the art object itself is worth some consideration, as there are fundamentally two objects in question. The first is the one that comes to mind naturally, the physical construction of the house by means of skin sections and pins. The less immediately obvious is the photograph of said object in the palm of the artist's hand. I won't specifically distinguish the two, as I think it should be contextually clear, but both are important.

The constructed house can be described as a miniature representing a platonically idealized house (at least to the American symbolic canon) constructed from planes of the artist's skin that have been removed and held together by way of creased edges and metal pins that stick through the planes of skin. The depiction of the house is simplified in the same manner as a child might draw, and the construction of the symbol is not flawless, i.e. the pins stick out past the edges, there are holes through which one can see inside, and the dimensions of the house are not regular.

The photograph adds to the immediate contents of the art object by placing it squarely and immovably in the palm of the artist's hand, which rests palm up atop white cloth. The framing of the photograph is close to the hand, and the focus is narrowed to the house and palm, leaving the background and arm blurred. The photograph in the museum on display was quite large, standing more than a meter tall and one and a half wide.

A natural observation that occurs after a glance (particularly at wall scale) is the comparison of the texture of the skin making up the house and the still living skin of the hand. This comparison is obvious and immediate following learning of the material of construction, but the photographed version of the art object takes that comparison a step further by cementing the viewers' frame of reference, leaving the comparison inescapable and perhaps even making the material inferable from the photograph directly, as opposed to information obtained via a sign nearby.

The interplay between symbolic suggestions by or about the art object and the interpretations requiring increasing amounts of external context or information is an aspect of this piece that fascinates me. All expression has an implicit division between content and context (attempts at universalist expression falling back on commonalities baked into the human experience as opposed to being innate in general) but few art objects so deftly dance over said line during the process of interpretation. As one becomes aware of more and more contextual information about the piece, in turn more and more decisions and questions of agency and intent arise within the object itself. How much context are we as the audience expected to bring with us into attempting to understand this expression? What, if anything, are we meant to read into it? Naturally these questions are applicable to all art, but I find them particularly compelling here.

Symbols

The urge to evaluate the object symbolically is inescapable when viewing this piece. The simplicity of the formal elements together with the pair of signifiers (the hand/skin and the house) invites the viewer to analyze and search for meaning. The signifiers themselves are simple to the point of being primeval. Forming associations with the material of which we are made seems universal in the human experience and while the exact form of the house is embedded in the context of the West with its structure, treating the signifier as 'house' rather than the exact concrete structure as it is imagined here makes it an equally universal idea.

The juxtaposition of these symbols alone bring into scope a plethora of threads to pull on. Should the skin be read as one's kin/blood? Are we to understand that one's relatives are the origin of one's home? Does the visible fragility of the construction and its constituents represent the fleeting human experience?

The reading of the skin as that which is inherited seems compelling. After all, we receive our bodies from our parents, if absolutely nothing else. Narrowing the house to represent a specifically childhood home certainly seems natural. This too is something generally received, not created or generated on one's own. Perhaps this piece has something to say about that which we are given?

Titles

Both renditions of this piece have compelling titles attached. The version of the house as a physical object bears the title "My Mother My Father My Sister My Brother", while the photograph is paired with "In the House of My Father". A good title can direct the mind's eye to a suitable initial reading, provide further layers of irony or context, or sometimes completely alter the reading when compared with the object sans title.

In this case, I find the title "My Mother My Father My Sister My Brother" to be fairly legible. It supports the symbolic reading of home as something constructed in part by one's relations (or more generally those that one is close with) if nothing else.

The later is less obvious to me. "In the House of My Father" certainly aligns with the rest of intuitive reading as I have presented thus far. It seems to lend weight to the idea of inheritance or what one is given as a theme of the piece. How should one reconcile the themes of that which one is given with the extremely literal description of the art object as a "home built of oneself"? Surely one cannot have constructed from scratch that which is received. The title also rings as a biblical reference to me, the obvious one being John 14:2, "In my Father's house are many mansions" (King James). The contents certainly match even if the words are not a perfect fit.

Reading the title as a biblical reference blows the doors of possible interpretations even wider open. Does the apparent wealth of God/Father support the reading of the futility and fragility of this worldly life? Does the inclusion of an allusion to the most alluded to book of the Western Canon invite the viewer to read the work even more saturated in context, a meta commentary on the fact that no art is freestanding in much the same way that the artist's fate is inseparable from that of his progenitor? A reading of the original passage could be that God's domain is wide and accepting, that the love of the Lord is not limited to one house or to one people. Does this map onto the art somehow? Is it intended to?

Certainly the intent of the artist when creating an art object is a critical piece of context in its reading. After all, the art fundamentally could not exist without it. But this piece, at least to me, seems to invite the viewer to experiment with what is included in the context of a given read. How variable we find the same sentence when placed in various places, spoken by various people.

Thoughts on context

At the most abstract, I find this piece most interesting when considered as invitation to think about context. It would be wrong to call it a statement, since as far as I can read it doesn't really have any positive or constructive statement, nor any contradictions or pointed non-statements.

The choice to photograph the construction and present the photograph itself as an equally interesting art object as the original is a delightful inclusion to this reading to me. Certainly photographs of art objects are not uncommon, and even the physical version of this piece has photographs of it (in the link at the top of this post for instance), but to have a specific image sanctified by the artist themselves and presented as equivalent to the original is fascinating. The photograph enforces the visual surroundings of the house to match the artists intent. The photograph extends the lifetime of the object itself, both representationally but also literally in the sense that the photograph is as real an incarnation of the art object as the original (since it was approved and presented by the artist himself). The photograph along with the allegorical title invites the viewer to include this art object in the broader art context, to be the target of allusions by other pieces, to live on in the interpretation of other works, to be implicated in the signified of future signifiers.

Conclusions

I can only hope these words have been as inconclusive to you as this photograph as been for me.