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74;; Sandow Birk based his ‘Depravities’ series on lithographs of war from the 1600s.
FPa Bc^aXTb Sandow Birk’s ‘Depravities’ mines yesterday’s art for today’s wars By Gretchen Giles
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andow Birk agrees that the timing could have been better. But he’s not to be blamed: the Long Beach–based artist couldn’t have foreseen that a loudly reviled Islamic center would be proposed three blocks from Ground Zero. He couldn’t have guessed that an attention-seeking Florida pastor with just 50 parishioners would grab international headlines by threatening to burn a holy book. And, truth be told, he didn’t really notice the opening date of his newest East Coast exhibition. All of which curious circumstances surrounded him when he found himself in New York City this Sept. 10, the eve of a particularly rancorous anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, about to open a show of work entirely devoted to the Koran. Called American Qur’an, the project is only a third finished, Birk having recreated some 92 pages of the 220-plus-page project. He showed the first two installments in San Francisco and Los Angeles to mild response. “There’s been very little criticism,� Birk says, talking by phone from a loud NYC street corner. “Mostly from people who haven’t seen it and from right-wing
Christian groups saying things like Americans shouldn’t be reading the Koran or that exposing Americans to this was wrong.� Which doesn’t mean that even thinking people might find it controversial. Using an 18thcentury English translation of the text, Birk has lettered the surahs, or prayers, in a graffiti font laid over images he’s wrought to illustrate the holiest book of a religion whose strictest adherents disallow reproduction of the human form. Because that’s the kind of thing that Birk does do on purpose. Using historical references in a contemporary update has become one of his signatures. He’s redone Dante as a both a film— 2007’s Dante’s Inferno, which used puppets in lieu of real (and expensive) actors—and with collaborator Marcus Samuels tackled the entire Divine Comedy in a completely modern version of the tripartite 14th-century Italian text. In 2000, he debuted his response to Ken Burns’ lavish Civil War documentary series with In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the Californias, in which Los Angeles (Smogtown) battles with San Francisco (Fogtown) across a series of oversized canvases whose layout and structure mimics the great epic war paintings of the American
Revolution. In Smog and Thunder exhibited at what is now called the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2001 and tickled audiences with its use of unexpected juxtapositions (Mickey Mouse boldly holding a “Free ATM� sign as a battle f lag) as much as it sobered them (the Golden Gate bridge in ruin). Birk’s work returns to the North Bay with the Sonoma County Museum’s opening of The Depravities of War, a series of oversized woodblock prints created by the artist in 2007. Earlier, Birk had been invited by Hawaii’s prestigious HuiPress to do a residency. The work evolved as the answer to a problem: Birk wasn’t trained as a printer and didn’t know how to best tackle a project with the press. “They said just come on over and hang out and we’ll see what happens,� Birk remembers. “When I got to Hawaii, I started going through their library and in doing that, I stumbled upon the works of Jacques Callot on which the project was based.� In the 1630s, Callot released a series of 18 oversized prints titled The Miseries and Misfortunes of War. Graphic and grisly even to the modern eye, Miseries inspired Francisco Goya in 1810 to embark upon The Disaster of War, a '' THE BOHEMIAN
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