ROBIN KID

INTRODUCTION

You don’t have to be Born in the U.S.A. to be raised under the flag. American popular culture, the psychological interventionist wing of government, made sure of that. To Robin Kid, when he was a kid, growing up in a small Dutch town, ’America’ was pure magic. His body fed with Happy Meals and Kelloggs sugar-frosted flakes, he spent hours in front of flickering television shows; tucked into bed, his spirit soared around the spires of Disneyland’s castle; guided by the second star to the right, he would be home again by morning. The shelves of his young mind were stacked so full of American iconography that by the time he actually set foot on the American landmass, libraries of images had been absorbed by his consciousness. A stranger in a strange land, the strangest thing was how well he knew it already. He speaks fluent Americana, a hieroglyphic language built out of cartoon characters, fantastic food-stuffs, cornfed kids, games on back of cereal boxes, cigarette brand mascots, the contents of capacious refrigerators. The city streets speak back to him through the promised neon signs, billboards, skyscrapers. Not one surface is left bare of words or images. Pop symbols become sacred omens. McDonalds, Mickey Mouse, Cadillacs and Mustang. New York, New York, so nice they named it twice. Times Square. Ciao Manhattan. Empire State. Midnight Cowboy. Madison Avenue. The Statue of Liberty. Andy Warhol. Kids. Coney Island.

These are American Dreams understood by a child who grew up far away from their harsher realities. Cultural imperialism, hegemony, interventionism, inequality, injustice - a child just doesn’t know what these are. Or how the unseen forces of history are behind the best lines of every song, advertisement and TV show he’s ever heard. Robin Kid, the adult, and the artist, has come to see that life under the Red, White and Blue was never all roses. That there’s toxic bloom in the water and rust under the hood. That hypocrisy was stitched into the fabric of the Stars and Stripes. But his profound fondness for this nation has not faltered, even if its complexities are more evident. This land’s memories are his own; these received images, names and faces have been with him his entire life. Struck by an insatiable nostalgia for a ‘time before,’ a past he, or even we, never knew, he’s cut up all of those iconic signs and symbols, super-sized them. Dragging these fragments out of synaptic darkness, they’ve been reassembled on these walls into artworks that take us on a wild ride though the phantoms of his imagination. This is weaponised nostalgia. By being brought back ‘home’ to their American origin point, these resurrected and remixed images provoke and agitate, as well as honour, that irretrievable past.

The ‘Outsider’ has a reverence and feeling of wonder for a place that those who grew up within its borders, too comfortable and accustomed to the view, don’t often possess. Arriving with ‘fresh eyes,’ they become expert observers. One as such is filmmaker François Reichenbach; roaming from coast to coast over 1957 to 1959, he crafted the perceptive documentary ‘L’Amérique Insolite’ - ‘America as seen by a Frenchman.’  With footage from amusement parks to police station lineups, it offers an unfiltered immersion in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of post-war American society, where consumerist, conformist harmony sat side by side with expressions of a raw, untameable spirit. The film’s poetic narration concludes: “America, if I didn’t lose myself in your mazes, it’s because I didn’t try to understand, or deduce, nor explain. It is because, in my way, I have loved you, purely and simply.”

So, let us begin our Search for America. Imagine it’s your very first time. Take out your fresh eyes, and look around. What will you find?

Text by Hannah Bhuiya

Permanently saluting is clean-cut youth Bob Hamilton, who won an ‘ideal boy scout’ contest to be painted by Norman Rockwell for a 1942 calendar. The resulting image shared its title with the WWII Boy Scouts of America slogan: “We, too, have a job to do!” The initiative encouraged home support for the war effort even from those too young to fight; ‘jobs to do’ included tending to Victory gardens and collecting metal to be melted down into armaments. Paramilitary methods - learning by rote, obeying rank, taking orders from a leader - led to the expectation that boys would enlist as soon as they were men, i.e., turned eighteen. As the threat of WWIII is exploited by media and politico alike in our current moment, this nostalgic image speaks to us in a different way. Would today’s youth be so ready to fight and die for their homeland?

To the right of the grid, a bold Stars-and-Stripes revolver is placed next to an ominously inverted Uncle Sam. The Grim Reaper of military recruitment, he wants YOU. The wild-haired, piercing-eyed figure is based on Samuel Wilson, a meat supply merchant from Troy, New York who became US Army Meat Inspector in the War of 1812. A profession which is apropos for the immortally sinister mascot of the military-industrial complex. Here, he holds his finger to his lips, miming the message: ‘Don't Talk, The Enemy Is Listening.’ But in our world where omnipresent surveillance technology tracks every loose word, the enemy of the state might be anyone. It could be you.

Savvy mid-century advertisers used the vibrant ‘three-colour carbro’ photographic process to present their products in appealing, super-rich detail. The open bottles of classic Hunt’s Catsup and their bright red liquid call back not only to the the blood spilled by those lured by patriotic propaganda to fight in foreign lands, but also to the school shootings which happen locally with unstoppable repetition.

The American news cycle constantly feeds gun violence onto screens for mass consumption, as easy to access as fast food at a truck stop. The 1791 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution protects ‘the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.’ Current debate on revision of what is seen by some as an anachronistic law is highly divisory. In July 2024, a young Pennsylvania man decided to take his father’s legally-owned rifle to a Republican rally, aiming shots at a former President that killed one bystander and wounded several others. Replayed non-stop on all channels, commentators speculated that had an assassination actually taken place, it might have sparked a Civil War. Were these reckless words broadcast to incite the very bloodshed they warned against, for ratings gains or where they spot-on?

Text by Hannah Bhuiya

‘It’s New!' is the perpetual war-cry of advertising. Ceaselessly bombarding the consumer, it’s deployed across all media in all commercials and for all products. The intended effect is not only to encourage new purchases, but to cause other products to be rejected and discarded long before their already built-in obsolescence. Overwhelming choices besiege individuals every moment of their daily life, as ads promise a future that can only ever be better. More precisely, they’re selling this permanent ‘better tomorrow’ only to those willing to pay for it. Madison Avenue-set industry satire Putney Swope (1969)put it succinctly: “Our job is to manipulate the consumer by arousing his desires then we satisfy those desires for a price.”

Glossy and sleek, Venom is a ‘symbiote,’ a parasitic alien that takes over the body of its host. Opportunistic, insatiable and highly aggressive, the hive-minded anti-hero possesses a probing tongue and voracious appetite. In many ways, the creature represents the ravenous maw of corporate greed, that gets under the skin of and then gnaws the bones of the indentured consumer.

Half-eaten donuts abandoned at Disney World water park Typhoon Lagoon have been blown up to monumental proportions, their crushed icing and artificial flavors oozing, rendered in mouth watering detail that will never decay. Three steel drill bits, industrial analogues to Venom’s teeth, also evoke scaled-up dentists’ tools; drilling into the national consciousness, they’re boring cavities in the mind, to be filled with more sugary content.  A slab of shiny red steak is labelled with a crisp “Market Basket Tenderay Beef” tag, calculated to suggest hand-reared beef fed by the suns rays, even thought it probably came from a crowded factory-farm rather than a grassy green field.

The opposite exclamation to ‘It’s New’ is, of course: ‘It’s Old!’ The deflated car tire attests to the waste of all those promises that fall flat, are worn out, have no more traction. In relation to the 1950s and 1960s epoch from which much of the imagery here originates, we live in ‘the Future.’ It’s clear to see that the excesses of over production encouraged by these advertisements has not led towards a peaceful utopia with tables laden with food for all, but instead to a land of of padlocked dumpsters, overloaded landfills, and addiction to weight-loss drugs.

In the Renaissance and later periods, the patron or donor would often appear in the large-scale paintings they had commissioned; in our world, the billboards and magazine pages of American culture more often than not celebrate huge food items in appetizing full-colour, paid for by the corporations who produce and sell them to us, but who is the true sponsor of all this content?

Text by Hannah Bhuiya

In America, freedom of religion is a fundamental right, guaranteed by the First Amendment of 1791 and enforced by the 14th Amendment of 1868. Citizens can expect to practice their religion and pray any way they wish without interference from either state or federal government. The first British settlement in ‘The New World’ was the Jamestown settlement in Virginia in 1607. It was a failure; of the over one hundred who landed, only thirty-eight survived that winter. The settlements persisted, ever precariously. In 1621 the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony - Protestant refugees who had fled England to escape religious persecution - let off their muskets to celebrate their first successful harvest. They had learned the skills to plant their crops from the local Wampanoag tribes, established in the area for centuries. Hearing the the gunfire, and learning the reason for the celebration, their neighbours brought more food to the scarcely built village so there was enough for everyone. The meal they shared together is the origin of the practice of Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is still a nationally observed sacrificial ritual practiced by millions across the USA. Eyes closed, heads bowed, hands together, a demure young girl and the family priest don’t grab at the food; rather,  their plates bare, they’re focussed on the rewards of the afterlife. The figures are adapted from 1960s pre-packaged roast turkey advertisements with the tagline “bringing to their tables the best that a bountiful land provides.” Disney’s Roger Rabbit takes the place of the sacrificial turkey; surrounding him in the refrigerator are a juicy ham, fat chicken drumsticks and a chunk of Swiss cheese. He sees Toon town birds instead of stars, a nod to the cartoons of childhood, and to the nostalgia of mornings glued in front of the (analogue) TV. The 1988 film is a lot deeper than it seems, dealing with issues of segregation, corruption and too-rapid urbanization. But Roger Rabbit is flat, he has no substance; he’s made of paint and celluloid film, and will not nourish. With widespread dissolution of ‘traditional’ family structures, today’s Thanksgiving meal perhaps merely a vestigial precursor to the hyper-consumption of ‘Black Friday’ sales.

From Jamestown to Jonestown, settling in a foreign land with the avowed intent to ‘practice religious freedom’ relies on being able to successfully feed the flock. The full name of Jim Jones’ now infamous community was ‘The People’s Temple Agricultural Project’ and much of the daily labor of those lured out to the remote Guyanese jungle was spent farming and growing food. The Reverend Jones used CIA developed psychological manipulation techniques on his followers - first find an enemy, make sure the group knows who this enemy is, unify the group. He chose as his enemy the American capitalist system, which truly did exclude many of his congregants. When the group is led ‘to freedom’ by the new leader, it is simply a switch from one oppressor to another. After the 1978 Jonestown massacre, the FBI entered the now destroyed compound, and took photos. Still hanging over Jim Jones empty chair on the stage was a plaque of George Santayana’s 1905 quote: “Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It.” It seems he did not learn that lesson well enough.

Text by Hannah Bhuiya

“There… the ceremony is over… and the children learned that cars die too”L’Amérique Insolite (1960)

There’s nothing more American than racing down a highway in a fast car, declares the narration of a 1950s American Motors promotional film, engaging in some potent myth-making: “The automobile is America. Nothing devised by the mood of man so epitomizes a nation as does this surging, omnipresent, always go-you-one-better, reproductive miracle on wheels.”

Here, a classic 1959 Chevrolet Belair and a contemporary Tesla are frozen in a mid-air collision, battling it out in their own personal Carnival of Destruction. It’s ironic that an entire civilization based on comfort takes childish pleasure in seeing symbols of that comfort scorned and demolished. The layers of symbolism reverberate; not only is it a clash between the beauty of hand-molded chrome curves and generic computer assisted design, its an age old struggle between the old and the new: the rechargeable battery vs gasoline engine; the glorious mechanical past vs a projected electric future; the eccentric vision of individual entrepreneur Elon Musk vs the prestige legacy of corporate behemoth General Motors.

Cars are not safe, and never have been, but their benefit to society apparently outweighs their inherent dangers and the innumerable deaths they cause on the road every day. As with outmoded systems of governance, we seem unable to come up with any viable alternative. Voters become crash-test dummies for untried and untested policies. One side accuse the other of trying to advance society into a future where humanity is subordinate to technology while the other faction wishes to turn the clock back to the mores and morals of mid-century America - to, as they say,  ‘Make America Great Again.’ But there really is no road back.

Even during that time, there were reactions against the notion of America being so ‘great.’ Many in the 1960s rebelled against what they already saw as the defunct systems of the Eisenhower 1950s. They had developed a militant consciousness in college, refused to fight in Vietnam, and critiqued the warmongers who sent their friends there. Kids with ideas in fierce opposition to their square parents who were tired of dull, boring suburbia, hitchhiked across the continent to California in droves. They’d read Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ hear there were cool poets in San Francisco, and wanted to become writers and artists themselves. Some of them ended up being adopted into ‘the Family,’ a loose gathering who gravitated around small-time criminal and musician Charles Manson, or as they knew him, ‘Charlie.’ Crashing in a former movie ranch, they dropped acid, sewing swastikas into patchwork quilts while listening to Manson’s manic speeches on the Apocalypse of a corrupt society to come.

And that is how the ‘Happy Days' of mid-century Americana came to an abrupt end with the Manson murders of late August 1969. The unprovoked horror also marked and end to the carefree, hitchhiking hippy era where a pretty girl knew she could catch a ride wherever she needed to go. Instead of free-love and playing the guitar around the fire, many who arrived in Los Angeles with just a smile were instead lured into the hardcore sex industry, prostitution and drugs, as depicted in the Paul Schrader movie Hardcore (1979), and as Manson himself wrote in a song later adapted by The Beach Boys, (who also erased his writing credit). An entire way of life had, on the turn of a dime, ‘Ceased to Exist.’

Text by Hannah Bhuiya

“Searching for America - IX to XVIII” [ten individual works]

Just as flowers use alluring, bright colors to attract the attention of bees to secure the future of their species, food and toy manufacturers use the same tones to secure the trust and eternal loyalty of their target audience of children. For most adults, recognition of these faces, shapes and brand logos of yesteryear will instantly take them back to a limitless, responsibility-free ‘time before,’ when all they had to do was play.

The huge cut-out components are placed at all angles around the ‘playroom’ walls, as if in free-fall from a vending machine in a giant’s gaming arcade. Like forgotten favorite play things unearthed from a parents’ garage after decades stored away, these characters and toys have been rescued and retrieved from our collective cultural memory. They still have the power to make us smile, and to remember childhood hours of fun and long adventures that happened solely in our imaginations.

Together, these works form a fractured but deeply recognizable portrait of America—its myths, contradictions, and the way it sells its own image, even as it struggles to define itself.

Text by Hannah Bhuiya

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!” is a curious line recited by Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow while on the way to see The Wizard of Oz (1939). When they get there, they quickly realize he’s not a powerful magician, but merely a skilled master of mass communication, expert in dressing up lies with a smoke-and-mirrors illusion. Eminem includes the phrase in the lyrics to Untouchable (2017), in which he presents three conflicting perspectives on race relations in America today. The track ends with the critique: “Got you singing this Star Spangled spiel to a piece of cloth that represents ‘the land of the free’ that made people slaves to build.”

Each generation’s achievements are only possible because of the advancements that have been made by those who have come before them. “What has God wrought?” was the first message ever telecommunicated over ‘the wire,’ tapped out by Samuel Morse in 1844; a spiky electric forest soon connected cities from sea to shining sea. In 1889, the New York Times ran an article entitled ‘The War on Telephone Poles’ detailing incidents where the intrusive ‘bare trees’ had been attacked and even cut down. Despite this early hostility to fast communication, the utility poles soon became ubiquitous and the services they delivered essential to maintaining daily life. There are around 150 million still standing.

Sighted during a Route 66 road trip, a lightning-struck telephone pole becomes a readymade American crucifix. A car park tow-away warning sign hangs in the position of the ‘INRI’ carving traditionally found on the cross of Jesus Christ. This placard reads: ‘No Parking for Perverts or Thieves,’ apt when one of the two candidates for executive leadership has been accused of being both. From Morse Code to 5G, the Messiah’s message is now fully electric. After all, ‘power’ is another word for ‘electricity.’

At the foot of the cross, crowded around a single bowl of soup with awe and devotion are a gaggle of freckle-faced children resurrected from an early 1960s ad. Any attempt to turn the youth of today away from telecommunication devices would be futile. Their feed is their ego, their identity, their whole self. They derive sustenance from the glowing screen. Here, easy-heat, pre-packaged soup has transubstantiated into the water and wine that can lead masses away from Mass and into a celebration of the ecstasies of communal consumption (of the image, not the Word). With all of their attention on the ‘meal,’ none of the kids look towards the Kalashnikov automatic rifle, hatchet and studded baseball bat hanging so near to them. They’re not interested in cutting down this tree…

Text by Hannah Bhuiya

From Mount Rushmore on, no other country crafts pop culture icons out of their Presidents the way America does. The brick wall backdrop to the composition is cut out from the August 1968 Saturday Evening Post cover, whose headline read ‘WILL AMERICA BURN?’ It shows the campaign posters of competing candidates Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey posted up in a rough inner city neighborhood.

1968 the year the world was on fire. 1968 was a tumultuous year in American and world history. Americans were suffering with an identity crisis. They had seen an overflow of police brutality, they had seen riots, and they had seen shootings; Martin Luther King was murdered in April, Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas on June 3rd and a mere 3 days later Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel on June 6th. The war also had entered America’s living rooms and Americans started to realize that they might be the bad guys. It would be the last election year, until 2024 that is, in which the incumbent president was eligible to run again but would not the eventual nominee of their party while facing an opponent, looking to ride the wave of discontent and disillusionment.

1968 was also the year that Sesame Street was conceived, introducing a groundbreaking, inclusive vision to educational broadcasting. It cast authentic ethnic character actors to represent the multicultural population of urban America, interacting with Jim Henson’s muppets like Kermit the Frog or Big Bird who came in all shapes and sizes. Taking advantage of the television in every home, the show used the techniques of advertising (animation, jingles, alluring colors, humor) to effectively ‘sell kids the alphabet.’ Over decades of global syndication, it became a safe haven for countless children and it was to educate millions more.

But in the early 1950s, there was no friendly, funny green puppet to teach children - and their parents - other ways of relating than hatred and prejudice. Ruby Bridges was 6 years old when she was to become the center of the integration storm. Arriving to attend William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans, the little girl had to do so with a U.S. Marshall escort, facing a torrent of abuse from a crowd of angry students and parents. Norman Rockwell’s painting ‘The Problem We All Live With’ captures this moment, although in Rockwell’s version Ruby is walking towards the left, towards progress and social advancements, but in this work the artist chose to turn her around, symbolically walking her backwards.

The lower portion of the frame is cut from press shots of the Capitol Riots of Jan 6th, 2021. As some gathered calling to hang Vice President Mike Pence, holding aloft a makeshift gallows, a female protestor is tackled by riot police, a large ‘Betsy Ross’ flag still in her grasp. With its distinctive thirteen-star circular pattern, it dates from 1777. While many Americans are waiting for a ‘Knight’ in shining armor to ‘clean up’ the country and somehow restore the ideals of the very early years of the founding of the United States - to a time before Civil Rights, universal franchise, andSesame Street - others might see a cleanup of the Supreme juridicial complex as a necessary step towards a more inclusive future.

Text by Hannah Bhuiya

The scholar Lorenzo Veracini writes, “the suburbs are a re-enactment of settler colonialism.” The car has become a stand in for the settler wagon, the commute in to the city mirrors the westward journey, and the very style of homes, “ranch” and “colonial” harken back to settler roots. But the suburbs for white Americans, much like the frontier for white Euro-Americans, was importantly an opportunity to flee the corrupting values of the cities and return to a haven that better reflects their own, often conservative, views. Veracini puts it this way, “settlers and suburbanites are ‘escapees' even though they escape different things at different times (corrupting old worlds on the one hand, racial mixing, violence, crime, congestion, gender confusion, and filth on the other) they are also ‘returnees;’ they undertake a movement in space that is meant to bring about a movement in time, a social order that is perceived as compromised.” In short, much like settler colonialism, suburbia has used movements across the landscapes as a way to go back in time to a period were things were good, or when America was “great.”

Over 50% of Americans live in what is considered suburbia. Millions worldwide inhabit neighborhoods designed using the Post-war American suburban model - car-dependent residential areas of single-family homes deliberately separated from commercial or industrial zones. For all suburbanites, the lure is the dream of space, living in a house with a white picket fence and yard for the dog, in contrast to the crowding and stress of inner city apartments.

In this particular suburban dystopia, standards have crumbled. The previous generation of home-owners  yells at the kids to ‘keep off the grass.’ A foreign-made carflies into the side of a clapboard house, wrecking the car and smashing a gaping hole. An 80s Care Bear shoots out of the house and away on his own rainbow, like a kid in an upstairs bedroom taking drugs to escape the grinding boredom and strict rules of conventional life with his parents. The beaten-up basketball hoop stands as witness to childhood games abandoned. As each member of the family leaves home, to college or for better jobs in the city, the clapboard fades and calls for another coat of paint. And next? The breadwinner loses their job, can’t pay the mortgage, loses the house to the bank. This pattern continues along the street, until the whole neighborhood goes to hell.

The truth is, the shining white dream home has become an unrealistic and unattainable expectation for most. Millennial generations are the first to not be able to default to raising their family in the suburbs - it simply became too expensive. Being able to eat and save enough for a deposit is impossible. They just can’t compete with the corporate interests buying up huge swatches of properties as rental investments. The result is a whole generation that has been priced out of starting life in peace and incubated safety, and the pleasure of hitting a ball around the cul-de-sac or shooting hoops against the garage door with Dad.

Text by Hannah Bhuiya