"When
you read it," says artist Sandow Birk of Dante's Inferno, the
great work of
Western literature he has recently illustrated and
textually updated,
"the first thing is that it's so real. They talk about the
actual scale
of how big hell is, and there are maps of it, and it's so
cool that he
makes it like a real place, it sort of sucks you in. And
it's so
ingenious, the tortures — to carry weights, or not being
able to drink
water, all the different things that he invents, you know,
people
upside down with their feet on fire, it's so ingenious,
and so
horrible. And then you start to see how many levels there
are, finding
new parts every time you read through it. And then you
think at the
end, man, on top of all of this it even rhymes."
The Inferno: book one of the Comedy of Dante Alighieri
From Florence,
a.k.a. The Divine
Comedy, the
great masterpiece of just deserts, of punishment fit to
crime, a guided
tour of an afterlife where all debts are endlessly paid.
Its well-hewn
architecture of retribution has kept the book in
circulation for 700
years, in spite of the fact that much of its text concerns
turn-of-the-14th-century political and religious minutiae,
wishful
score settling and poetical self-promotion.
Set for release March 1,
with
an accompanying show at West Hollywood's Koplin-Del Rio
Gallery, Birk's
Inferno — rewritten, with Marcus Sanders, from half a
dozen or so
previous English translations — does not scant the
Florentine local
color, the Ghibellines and Guelphs, the popes and
politicos; but it is
special in several respects. It is, for one thing, set in
a hell that
resembles Los Angeles, and it makes use of metaphorical
images that
Dante, in the wildest of his wild dreams could not have
imagined —
crack addicts, Mexican farmworkers, dim sum. It throws
Hitler and
Manson and Bill Clinton (lust was his downfall) into the
pits, along
with South African president Thabo Mbeki, "the guy that
declared
publicly that HIV doesn't cause AIDS." It pictures the
great monster
Geryon as a helicopter, and the giant Antaeus as a huge
inflatable Fred
Flintstone. Devils wear "Will Work for Food" signs;
priests and
policemen ("hypocrites") march dismally toward the new
downtown
cathedral; a field of sinners broil in their own personal
hot tubs;
another, issuing from a fiery tomb before an ATM, "is
holding a
Frappuccino iced coffee," Birk laughs. "'Cause it's a
little hot in
there."
And, finally, it is a work
of
art unto itself, a $3,000, 100-copy limited-edition
volume, produced by
San Francisco's Trillium Press and containing 60
illustrative
lithographs hand-bound in a red leather cover — "It's
stamped and it's
got a drawing on it," says Birk, "and it's got gold
lettering and
flames and stuff. It's supercool." (Chronicle Books will
later release
a slightly less supercool trade version.)
Cool
-- not the cool of Miles Davis, but "cool" as a
seventh-grader
might say it — can be seen as the foundation of Birk's
art, what could
be called "The That Would Be Cool School" of art; Birk's
work is marked
by history, parody and play, with play being perhaps the
most important
element. Even his pictures of hell are fun. His watershed
show was "In
Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of
the
Californias," which in more than 100 paintings, drawings
and models
depicted in heroic 19th-century style a modern war between
San
Francisco and Los Angeles. Last year it was expanded by
Birk, director
Sean Meredith and performance artist Paul Zaloom into a
full-blown
"mockumentary," with a cameo by KCET's own Virgil, Huell
Howser; it
screened at this year's Slamdance. He followed that with
"Prisonation,"
a series of romantic images of California penal
institutions, and an
East Coast sequel, "Maximum Security: New York
Landscapes," in Hudson
River School style. (See the March issue of Harper's for an
example.) The Inferno
illustrations are closely
modeled on engraver Gustav Doré's. His is a
magpie/mockingbird
aesthetic that can only work if the product outstrips the
concept —
when the pictures are good. And Birk's are.
We are drinking coffee in
the
artist's impressively well-organized multilevel
studio/living space in
a Latino neighborhood near downtown Long Beach; he moved
here after
losing his place in Hollywood, where he'd lived and worked
for the last
dozen years. Birk, who seems radically younger than the 40
he shyly
admits to, grew up in Seal Beach, where he learned to
surf, which is
the other thing he really loves to do; when he traveled to
Florence in
preparation for tackling Dante, he took a map of Italian
surf spots.
But "I never really thought of myself as a Seal Beach
kid," he says.
"Even all through high school I was hanging out in
Hollywood and going
to see Black Flag and that whole thing, so I got out of
the suburbs as
fast as I could. Even living here in Long Beach is a bit
weird."
His fingertips are stained
with
paint — he is finishing a painting of the Minotaur, for
the
Infernoshow, recast as downtown's famed Chicken Boy — but
that is the
only hint of mess. A pair of bicycles stand in one corner,
next to a
Vespa motorscooter. Mounted on the wall is a skateboard
Birk pulls down
for quick trips to the market, and a brace of surfboards
are neatly
filed along with canvases below the stairway, which is
itself lined
with Infernodrawings. A framed photo from the late Herald Examiner shows
a young Birk
in the mosh pit at a Clash concert; his T-shirt reads
"Destroy." There
are the diaristic retablos he painted on tin in Mexico
City and Rio de
Janiero — where he lived for four years, one of them on a
Fulbright
scholarship — and portraits of drag queens from his
"Historical Works
From the Stonewall Riots" and a large painting of Folsom
Prison set in
a tranquil Central Valley landscape. On the far back wall
hangs the
show's panoramic "centerpiece," a thing of red and gold
and smoke and
fire. "It's kind of a fictional view of urban America, as
the setting
for a further stroll through hell," says Birk, pointing,
"and it has
downtown L.A. back here, and the Hollywood sign, and sort
of these
freeways, and this is the entrance to hell through the
parking lot, and
then this here's the World Trade Center, the ruins of it,
and that's
the Golden Gate Bridge. So it's mostly L.A., but it's not
specifically
L.A."
Inferno is of a piece with Birk's other work in its application of art-historical art to the way we live now. For all the clever steals and references, he ultimately paints what he sees. After graduating from Otis-Parsons in 1988, he made pictures of surfers, "and then I started doing paintings about the city and gang wars. I was living on Adams Boulevard near Crenshaw, it was like the KDAY radio era, and I started doing all these paintings about that and the guys that I'd see in my neighborhood. "People are always surprised — 'Oh, you're doing paintings about real events in L.A.' To me it seems like the most natural thing of all. I read the paper every day; I stay here all alone all day painting and listen to the radio. Of course I'm going to paint about O.J. and [Rampart Division police officer] Rafael Perez" — Birk did a suite of Hogarth-based paintings and etchings called The Rake's Progress — The Life and Times of Rafael Perez — "that's what I'm thinking about all day." Birk and Marcus plan to take their project all the way to Paradise, with Purgatory already scheduled to be shown in San Francisco in January 2004. "We're talking about where to set [the remaining books]," says Birk. "My initial thinking is to make it always the same city, because heaven and hell can be found anywhere. One of my big fears was that people would leap to the conclusion that 'L.A. is hell,' which is just so cliché and simple. I love L.A., and I don't think L.A.'s hell at all. "We're really proud of it," Birk says of his big book. "I wouldn't be surprised if it gets blasted by some scholar who's offended, like, 'Who the fuck are these kids who think they can mess with this thing?' But we're not saying read ours instead of; read ours also. Because it's more fun. And it's easier. And it has good pictures." © Robert Lloyd
2003
and 2011
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