Exhibition reviews: Tim Rollins And K.O.S. | Donald Judd Drawings, 1963-93

Tim Rollins And K.O.S. – The Black Spot

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Donald Judd Drawings, 1963-93: Working Papers

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Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

In 1981, Tim Rollins arrived to take a job as a teacher at the notorious Intermediate School 52 in South Bronx. He was tasked with creating a programme incorporating art and literacy for students classed as “at risk” academically or emotionally.

He devised a system whereby he, or a student, would read to the class from a work of literature, while the others made art in response. They called it “jammin”. There were certain terms on which he would not compromise: the writers – Orwell, Hawthorne, Kafka and the like – would not be abridged or simplified; and the art would be real art – it would hang not on classroom walls but in art galleries.

It was a student who came up with the idea of drawing on the pages of books themselves, but it was the next natural step in Rollins’ ideology. This wasn’t just making art about a text, it was a response, a challenge, a critique, an engagement of head and heart. What does it mean to be reading Orwell in the 1980s as a marginalised young person in the South Bronx? This is what it means.

Rollins called his project the Kids of Survival. Within a few years, it was working independent of the school system, and in terms of both art and education, the results were remarkable. Kids branded no-hopers were graduating from high school and winning scholarships to college. And the works of Tim Rollins & K.O.S. – individual responses worked up into large-scale collaborative paintings on book pages – were hanging in major museums in the US and overseas. Rollins’ Art & Knowledge Workshop continues in New York and has been replicated in several cities.

This year, during the Edinburgh Art Festival, the work of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. was shown in Scotland for the first time. In late July, Tim Rollins and members of the collective worked with young people from the Lothians to produce new works responding to texts with obvious local connections: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (giving the show its title, The Black Spot) and Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. For the exhibition, their work has been included in a survey of K.O.S. works from the early 1980s to the present.

That the Edinburgh works don’t really stand out as different is interesting. The Rollins/K.O.S. work has a strong visual identity, with a similar structure and approach used in all the collaborative pieces. The work is often formally beautiful, and it is clear, from the history of K.O.S., that a strong structure has enabled the pursuit of excellence, as well as giving the work a homogeneity which has been important. However, it does raise questions about the space within this for self-expression, particularly as the project is rolled out elsewhere in the world.

Within that structure, however, different texts prompt different kinds of visual response. HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds leads to a canvas criss-crossed with shards of bright colours which look like fragments of flags. The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny Act II (some of the most recent works respond to music as well as text) is a lattice of golden twine woven across pages from the musical score. Animal Farm has been revisited several times in K.O.S.’s history, giving rise to a series of animal caricatures of politicians, from a 1987 take on segregationist senator Jesse Helms, to a more recent farmyard featuring Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush: a skunk. Says it all, really.

Amerika – Infinity (after Franz Kafka) is a response to Kafka’s incomplete first novel The Man Who Disappeared, in which celestial horns, each unique and strange, network across the canvas, intricate as a design by William Morris (whom the collective also studied). A bigger show at Talbot Rice – and there is certainly room for more work – would have shown an even greater diversity.

Rollins’ work with K.O.S. is unique on many fronts, not least in his determination to get the work accepted as serious, professional art. The irony is that, while it is doubtless good enough to hang in the major museums of the world, it can’t be separated from its origins. To look at a piece by Tim Rollins & K.O.S. is to see formal beauty and conceptual rigour. To understand why it was made, and by whom, is to realise just how remarkable and compelling and inspiring it is.

It is equally true that the drawings of Donald Judd, on show in the Georgian Gallery, cannot be separated from their context. The remarkable thing about these is not the drawings themselves (actually, they are fairly unremarkable) but the fact that he made them at all. Judd, the great abstract minimalist sculptor (at different times, he resisted all three of these terms, but is still considered a key figure in the movement, both as an artist and as a theorist) resisted representation in all its forms. And what is a drawing, if it isn’t a representation?

This is an academic exhibition, asking what purpose drawing served in Judd’s artistic practice. Some of the earliest sketches, from his earliest years of making objects, seems to be a working-out of ideas on paper – nothing unusual about that. By 1964, he was having his works made by small-scale industrial fabricators in order to further remove any sense of “the artist’s hand”. A range of purchase orders show the instructions he gave them: perfunctory descriptions, dimensions, colours. There are occasional sketches, but where possible it seems that he left any visual realisation of the idea to the technician.

The later drawings are the most puzzling. They seem to have been completed after the works they are concerned with, and act as a kind of rough record of the objects (we know Judd disapproved of photography for this purpose). Curator Peter Ballantine, who worked as one of Judd’s fabricators for 20 years, says that in them he sabotages the process of naturalistic drawing, as if to prove that any act of representation is doomed to fail: lines run off the page, perspective looks deliberately false, the paper is rough or has been folded. Nevertheless, he still considered them important enough to make them.

So the show leaves us with questions as well as answers about Judd’s relationship with drawing.

While it’s true that it will offer most to viewers specialising in Judd and Minimalism, it is interesting to see an artist of such clarity and principle wrestling with the issue of representation, which refuses to go away even for those who have rejected it. Perhaps especially for them.

• Both shows until 20 October