ART REVIEW : Creative Survival : Exhibition: In MOCA’s ‘Amerika’ show, Tim Rollins and his Kids of Survival use Kafka as a starting point for an exploration of culture and the youths’ own troubled lives.

“Amerika,” a series of paintings by Tim Rollins + K.O.S., is kid art like you’ve probably never imagined or seen. It’s kid art that you may not believe.

Unless, of course, you follow the art press. In that case you know that the exhibition opening Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art is the collaborative work of New York artist and former schoolteacher Tim Rollins and his Kids of Survival, a group of 14- to 18-year-olds from the South Bronx who have been classified by the school district as “learning disabled” or “emotionally handicapped.”

Even if you are wise to all this, you may not be prepared for the complexity and sophistication of this series of paintings. Unlike some of the group’s more expressionistic work, based on such popular characters as Dracula and Frankenstein, the 13 paintings and 80 related drawings were inspired by the last chapter of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, “Amerika.”

The book--Kafka’s only comic novel--tracks the misadventures of a young German immigrant, Karl Rossmann. In the final chapter, he is persuaded to join the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, a utopian art community that promises employment for everyone. This may not sound like a compelling subject for a bunch of street-smart, school-dumb kids, but it could hardly be more fitting. Just as Kafka’s absurd theater welcomes misfits into a collaborative artistic endeavor, Rollins salvages society’s adolescent rejects at his Art & Knowledge Workshop.

In preparation for the “Amerika” project, Rollins read the last chapter of Kafka’s book to his students, who chose the image of a golden horn as a leitmotif. This comes from the scene of Karl’s arrival at a race track where the theater recruits have gathered. He is greeted by a cacophony of horns played by women dressed as angels. Standing on ladders hidden by long white robes, the angels tower above the new recruits and nearly scare them off with their aggressive “music.”

The Kids of Survival worked out an imaginative variety of horns that intertwine or turn into surreal creatures. These images were then transferred to 13- to 17-foot panels covered with all 298 pages of the book. A grid of printed pages forms a black-and-white background for each painting’s tracery of gold.

At first glance, these vast paintings look rather like giant illuminated manuscripts or enlarged abstractions from Hieronymus Bosch’s grotesque works. Sometimes sexual, occasionally scatological and usually strangely familiar, the paintings do not illustrate the book; they use it as a takeoff point for invention and free association. As the students became involved in the subject matter, they blended it with motifs from fine art and popular culture, as well as from their grim life experiences.

Though composed of disparate parts, the paintings hold together rather like gilded fences created by a wildly imaginative ironsmith. You can guess the sources of some of the imagery by simply looking at the work. Sources that may not be obvious include the following:

* “Amerika I,” the most cluttered and least polished painting, was intended as nothing more than a random composition of horns. It combines drawings by several students who noticed their work’s similarity to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, Mayan tapestries and crowded subway cars.

* “Amerika II” incorporates images inspired from Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy drawings, Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of antlers, and Chinese weapons.

* “Amerika III,” dominated by large horns, is a synthesis of the first two paintings. Images come from Paolo Uccello’s paintings of battles, tribal tapestries, the crying women in Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” Honore Daumier’s death sickles and West African masks, knives and ceremonial objects.

* “Amerika IV,” called the group’s “first science-fiction painting,” was inspired by director David Cronenberg’s horror films.

* “Amerika V” was conceived as a battlefield, with horns serving as weapons. A big letter M refers to the students’ most important M words: mother, money and murder.

* “Amerika VI,” with an H at one end and a B at the other, is a response to the Howard Beach incident, in which a black man was killed as he tried to escape from a gang of white teen-agers.

* “Amerika VII,” created for an exhibition commemorating the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, addresses conflicts between the Founding Fathers’ ideals and the realities of life in the South Bronx. Among motifs that provided inspiration are Christ’s crown of thorns, the shape of the AIDS virus and an attack rifle.

* “Amerika VIII,” meant to portray the hopeful landscape of Kafka’s imagined America, alludes to the country’s vast space. A central ladderlike form probably refers to the ladders that held the tall angels or the railroad track that took Karl Rossmann to Oklahoma’s promised land.

* “Amerika IX,” composed of relatively organic forms, was made in collaboration with youths in Charlotte, N.C.

* “Amerika X” contains one large and two smaller X’s, which stand for Malcolm X, the Roman numeral 10 and a mark used for cancellation. A two-pronged form in the center is said to be a double fetus and a mushroom cloud from an atomic blast.

* “Amerika XI,” the product of a collaboration with Minneapolis teen-agers, is intended to be a peaceful, harmonious composition.

* “Amerika for Thoreau,” done with Boston students, is based on Henry David Thoreau’s concept of learning through wandering. Thoreau’s sketches and John Cage’s drawings based on the sketches played a part in the imagery.

* “Amerika XII,” finished last year, concerns the concept of midnight as the end and the beginning of day. This piece incorporates death symbols from various cultures, Odilon Redon’s drawing, “The Masque of the Red Death,” and George Grosz’s sketch of a dying tree.

Rollins has been criticized for self-promotion and for directing his students into art and literature that lacks relevance to their lives, but the “Amerika” series presents an astonishingly strong case for not underestimating the abilities of “disadvantaged” youths. Although the Kids of Survival probably have emerged from this project with a peculiarly fragmentary acquaintance with Kafka and various other artists, they have clearly gained vital resources and connections to an elite body of knowledge. In the meantime, they have refined their artistic skills and worked out ways of expressing their feelings. None of those accomplishments are to be taken lightly.

Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Tue.-Sun. 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Thur. 11 a.m.-8 p.m., to Sept. 9.