It seems like the setup for a joke with a sagging punch line: Two surfers get together in a bar and, having nothing better to do, decide to illustrate and rewrite Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy."
Which, in fact, they did--undaunted that they were about to wrestle with a pillar upon which the European literary tradition has been built, as any freshman Western Civ student will tell you. Never mind that the verse epic has inspired dozens of English translations, all of them maneuvering (with varying degrees of success) through the medieval poet's minefield of tricky poetic meter, dense theological references, allusions to pagan gods and goddesses, circa 1321 Italian political digs and who-did-what-with-whom gossip. It's a sprawling work divided into three massive chunks: "Inferno," "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso." Each of those, in turn, contains more than 30 cantos, or chapters, with thousands upon thousands of closely rhymed lines.
And yet from that--dare we say it?--naive conversation has sprung one of the more eagerly anticipated art events of the year. On March 1 West Hollywood's Koplin-Del Rio Gallery will debut drawings based on each of the 34 cantos of "Inferno," big--really big--paintings and an entirely incredible book that you may purchase for $3,000.
What's got the buzz going is the show's impresario--filmmaker, author and artist Sandow Birk. Within an art world built "on a foundation of hierarchies and exclusions," as one critic has put it, the 39-year-old Long Beach artist has been making a name for himself in the cosseted sub-category of realism, an art form that's been un-hip since the early 1900s. And, in truth, much of what passes for realism these days--the marzipan nudes, idyllic landscapes, saccharin flower arrangements, cavorting dolphins, Kinkade cottages--is pretty harmless, if overpriced.
But Birk must be counted among realism's edgier, more visionary painters. He grew up in Orange County's Rossmoor subdivision, started surfing at 12 ("Look at it this way: I'm a better surfer than I am a painter. Meaning, like, in the world of surfing I'm higher up than in the world of art.") and took up art because the math required to become an architect proved too daunting. Since graduating from Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in 1988, he has scored a steady stream of successes, both critical and commercial.
Birk's big breakthrough came in 2000 with a series of shows in California galleries and museums titled "In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias." Birk cranked out hundreds of large and small works documenting a bogus civil war between Northern and Southern California. More than a post-adolescent fantasy of rockets and bombs, the work was heavy with knowing references to art's bombastic martial history, from "movie screen-sized" paintings of kings atop chargers to the "Loose Lips" posters of World War II. It also spawned a mockumentary film, "In Smog and Thunder," that was among 15 feature films recently winnowed from 850 submitted to this year's Slamdance Film Festival--an adjunct to the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah--for first-time directors. The "In Smog and Thunder" video is a crafty sendup of filmmaker Ken Burns' solemn documentaries.
The gallery shows got glowing reviews and set attendance records at the Laguna Art Museum. The Times' art reviewer called it "a big, fat lie, thoroughly calculated and terrifically amusing," and the critic from the LA Weekly described it as "a delightful romp of appropriation fortified by a remarkable quantity of artistic skill." The OC Weekly's critic was equally enthusiastic, calling Birk's paintings "agelessly postmodern . . . stunning and gorgeous even in their Catch-22 absurdity."
What makes Birk's work memorable is its broad-brush humor--a rarity in today's sometimes humorless, self-obsessed, politically correct, weirdly puritanical art scene. One of the mock propaganda posters advertises, "Porno Wanted for Our Men in Camp and 'Down There.' " A vast canvas of a sea battle off the Channel Islands shows the mighty carrier Republic of San Francisco--so overbuilt that its decks cannot launch planes--defeating the Los Angeles flagship Tinsel Town. The carrier's superstructure bears an odd resemblance to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's canted roof; the plunging Tinsel Town features Los Angeles International Airport's futuristic revolving restaurant on its deck.
A year after that show, Birk returned to the galleries with an audacious series of 34 seemingly innocent landscape paintings--except that each portrayed a California prison nestled in its bucolic setting, each limned in a parody of some classic landscape style. It was all quite postmodern, cool and ironic, but also goofy, friendly and accessible. No wonder that Birk's dealer, Eleana Del Rio, while declining to talk about price, says that "the demand for his work was really starting to come around."
