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Kids on canvas
30 September 2000

Tim Rollins: doesn't let up until he is satisfied that
every student has completed the task

The American artist and educator Tim Rollins uses classical literature and music to inspire artworks from the children of the inner city. Chloe Veltman saw him in action at his Bristol workshop

School's out and for most of the children on Bristol's housing estates, the end of July signifies uninterrupted phone calls, unlimited sleep and unmitigated Eminem, Britney Spears and Pok³mon. But if the noises emanating from a squat pink building on the corner of Dean Street in the city's St Paul's area are anything to go by, one group of children is engaging in rather different activities.

'Where was Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream first performed?'

'The Globe Theatre!'

'In what year did Felix Mendelssohn set the play to music?'

'1842!'

'Who wrote the opera based on the play in 1960?'

'Benjamin Britten!'

Having survived the first interrogation of the day, the children - aged between eight and 18, and all from inner-city schools - limber up for the next academic feat. Striving to memorise a passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream in 15 minutes as music from Britten's opera plays intrusively in the background, they scribble frantically in notebooks, chant the lines to each other sotto voce or stare blankly up at the ceiling of the windowless hall.

The man persuading them to do all this, Tim Rollins, a remarkable American artist and educator, springs into the middle of the room. 'Time's up,' he declares. 'We won't go on until each of you has recited the passage. You first!' he says, pointing to a small boy with sandy hair, who must be all of 11. Self-consciously stammering his way through Shakespearian pentameters as if being forced to jump into an ice-cold swimming-pool, somehow the reluctant orator makes it to the finishing line. He is followed, with varying competence but equal trepidation, by the rest of his classmates. Rollins doesn't let up until he is satisfied that every student has completed the task. The extraordinary thing is that at the end of this ordeal the kids are not going to put on a play but paint a picture.

Dressed all in black, with his sweaty Stetson hat and affable chipmunk face, the 45-year-old Rollins looks like a diminutive John Wayne and talks like an evangelical preacher. 'We're artists,' he says as the group begins to work on pencil-sketches of the flower motif that will form the basis of a large-scale art work inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream. 'We make stuff. We don't take stuff or fake stuff,' he adds, rap-style, in a hillbilly twang. 'We're not just making art here, we're making history, so I want you to pour everything that's beautiful within you into this painting.'

Most of the kids are little prepared for the Rollins experience. 'He's a bit mad,' says Lisa Hand, aged 17. 'He's just like a drill sergeant,' adds Sam Kelly, aged 15.

'Tim is a remarkable artist, but an absolutely astonishing educator,' says Andy Garnett, chair of trustees at Multi-A, the small Bristol-based community arts organisation that has invited Rollins to conduct a two-week workshop. Rollins previously visited Multi-A in 1998, with a project based on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound.

Founded in 1997, the charity instructs some 2,500 of Bristol's primary-school children in dancing and singing on an after-school basis, and plans to expand its service to include secondary-school students. Alongside the regular schedule of classes, Multi-A organises visits from the likes of Rollins, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and George Melly. The Government has pinpointed the organisation as a model for its upcoming 'creative partnerships' scheme, which will provide access to the arts for all children in a range of cities.

For Rollins - who first came to prominence in the Eighties with paintings based on texts such as George Orwell's 1984 and Franz Kafka's Amerika - literary knowledge is synonymous with making art. 'If we're going to make art, you have to know the play,' he tells his charges perfunctorily. 'Not a cartoon version or a film version or a Sony PlayStation version. I'm talking about the play itself.' But for children more used to painting still-life pictures than memorising chunks of Shakespeare in their art lessons, it's hard to imagine how all of this will translate into painting. 'It's really weird doing Shakespeare in an art lesson,' says 15-year-old Jake Phillips.

If anyone can make it work it must be Rollins. He arrived in New York in the mid-Seventies, 'a crazy young knucklehead from rural Maine', and after an art degree and postgraduate training, he joined the 'Learning to Read Through the Arts' programme and was rewarded with a two-week placement at a school in the South Bronx, one of North America's most notorious neighbourhoods. He was due to stay there two weeks but ended up staying seven years. 'When I arrived in the South Bronx, the place was on fire. I was afraid of the school,' remembers Rollins. 'But I was angry with the system, and that's why I stayed.'

Before long he was teacher, mentor and in some cases surrogate father to a group of young, predominantly Hispanic artists. He started bringing literary works into the sessions both as inspiration for projects and to educate his students in the broadest possible way. 'Art is for every day, not just for once a week. It's about reading and philosophy and it's a means to knowledge,' he preaches.

Whether they were studying Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man or Aristophanes's The Birds, students were expected to know about the text, its author and its background as a matter of course. But one day, when an illiterate student, Carlos Rivera, misinterpreted Rollins's instructions and began drawing on the actual pages of a book, the group adopted the technique and pages of dismembered text pasted on to the canvas became the background motif for every project since. Within a few years, the work of Tim Rollins and the Kids of Survival (KOS) began to appear in many major galleries, from New York's Museum of Modern Art to the Hayward Gallery in London. President Clinton even commissioned a work by the group to celebrate his inauguration in 1996.

While in the Eighties the collective had been the mascot of the fashionable New York art world, by the mid-Nineties Rollins was being criticised for being paternalistic and neo-colonialist. Charles Saatchi sold his holding of Rollins's work and supporting the group was no longer considered a fashionable pursuit by the philanthropic classes. But the deepest slump came about when one of Rollins's 15-year-old proteges, Christopher Hernandez, was murdered for having witnessed a drug-related crime in 1993. 'The group lost hope after Chris died,' says Rollins. 'They saw that art couldn't solve the problems of the world.'

In Bristol, by the middle of the second week the floor of the usually drab hall is almost completely submerged under a wild wood of anarchically coloured and fantastically shaped blooms. Rollins issues a strong warning about mixing the wrong colours together.

'It's A Midsummer Night's Dream, not "A Midsummer Night's Doggy Doo-Doo",' he tells them, causing a rash of giggles among the group. 'And use your imaginations,' he continues, pulling a face at one student's efforts. 'I don't want this painting to end up looking like a tie-dye T-shirt!'

After stretching four canvases and covering each surface with the entire text from Shakespeare's play, Rollins's assistants, Rick and Mani, wander around the group, chatting with the kids and handing out cartons of fruit juice. The juice is meant for creating interesting effects on the ink, but for 11-year-old Max Cann it serves a higher purpose: 'We were supposed to put the juice on the pictures, but we drank it instead,' he admits, with a guilty grin. One of the younger children had a temper tantrum spectacular enough to get him thrown out of the workshop. 'I went out to see the kid,' says Mani, age 20, 'but I probably shouldn't have, as you go all soft on them if you do that. He reminded me of when I was his age. I couldn't read back then and it made me frustrated and angry.'

But for Danny Booth there is only one problem: 'I hate painting flowers,' he says as he watches violent red and black blobs of ink creep across the surface of the paper. At 18, Booth is the oldest member of the group, and a veteran of Rollins's previous visit to Bristol. Before he'd taken part in the Prometheus workshop, he says he'd never really done any art, and now, two years later, he's on his way to Weston College in Weston-super-Mare to study for an HND in fine arts. 'Tim seems to care about what he's doing. He puts more energy into it than other teachers I've seen,' he says, nodding his Mohican-crested head in Rollins's direction. An imposing, solitary figure, dressed in full punk regalia - from the studded collar to the black nail polish - Booth resigns himself to flower painting with tolerant grace. 'Tim said he remembered me from last year,' he adds, and as an afterthought, 'I can't imagine why.' the daily telegraph magazine, september 30 2000