| Artist: | Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) |
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|---|---|---|
| Title: | Amerika XII | |
| Date: | 1986 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Postmodern Pluralism | |
| Movement: | Community Art, Collaboration | |
| Materials: | paint on book pages | |
| Subject: one of the paintings that K.O.S. did as a response to Kafka's novel "Amerika." The book describes how a young immigrant has a series of bad, demoralizing adventures in which he is beaten, broken, and robbed. In the surreal last chapter he discovers hope in the form of the marvelous Nature Theater of Oklahoma, where anyone can find a place, a future, the chance to be an artist. Everyone is invited to join the chorus and play on their own golden horns. Rollins asked the kids, "If you could express your freedom and your voice in the form of a golden horn, what would it look like?" The fantastic horns interlaced across the canvas field were the kids' reply. Style: collaboration focused on working out the relationship of image to text. Source materials range from reproductions of masterpiece art to popular culture comic books, science journals, and newspaper events; the Kafka text they read out loud together, drawing their responses. "Jamming" sessions lead to collective group decision making; they paint right onto the pages of the text. They have sold one of the "Amerikas" for $35,000; proceeds go back to fund the non-profit after school program Rollins started up; some of the kids who have graduated have come back to the school to teach. The imagery is a cross between the representational and the abstract, the organic and the geometric, the irrational and the logical. Context: collaboration rather than the existential hero alone in the void; this work is about addressing wasted resources and social problems, and about providing kids with an opportunity to develop a voice and a vision through art education, which for them became a method of survival in a rough, urban world rather than a superfluous frill or luxury subject (it was a dead end for most of these kids until K.O.S.; one member was robbed and killed in the streets; not all made it, but several today have now gone on to art school, and these were kids no one ever expected to graduate high school); art that is more reconstructive than deconstructive; "We make art in the future tense." | ||
