Sandow Birk gets ugly

SANDOW BIRK’S “THE LIBERATION OF BAGHDAD”

Poor Lynndie England! If you’re Paris Hilton, you can move past the night-vision sex scenes—or at least flood the universe with other images of yourself to make the night-vision recede into the unending tide. But Ms. England can’t show up on a thousand red carpets until we forget her youthful . . . indiscretions. She’s immortalized in one pose only—in the pantheon of Sad Subjects of Immortal Images of War, aka Sucks to Be You. When the Greeks and Romans were sculpting their marble steles, war was such a glorious and noble occupation! But there weren’t Leicas or Nikons—or Nokia phones, for that matter—bringing war home in the worst possible way.

With “The Depravities of War,” prolific Long Beach painter Sandow Birk has turned his fertile imagination to Iraq, and Ms. England pops up like Waldo—her jaunty thumbs-up and finger-guns always at the ready. Pow-pow!

A recent trip to San Francisco for the Catharine Clark Gallery’s opening of “Depravities” (the show travels to the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach this week) showed that Birk hasn’t just built on previous artists’ work—his usual mode is the ironic postmodern appropriation of arcane works by ancient artists, spiced up with sniggering visual references to the detritus of our flat, disposable consumer culture, from 7-Eleven signs to sporks—but on his own previous works as well.

Birk blazed into the art world’s consciousness with his “In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias,” which envisioned an entire history of an imagined war between SF and LA, complete with didactic texts bemoaning the “clunky” painting by “unknown” artists.

He followed “The Great War” with “Prisonation,” a beautifully painted series based on the Hudson River School of verdant landscapes with tiny prisons off in the distance—though without the imaginative (and cinematic) back story, it didn’t gain much traction.

From there, he explored Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, with himself as Allighieri and a juicy Latina with rolls of sexy back fat as his Beatrice. It touched on, among many, many other things, the hells of airport security and a kickass Minotaur shwarma shack, and Birk supplemented his black-and-white etchings with big, gorgeous, juicy oils in his old obsessively detailed style (and with plenty of sporks).

And so now we have Iraq and Abu Ghraib by way of Jacques Callot—which is a sort of meta-po-mo, since Callot’s circa-1630s “Miseries of War” about the Thirty Years War was already appropriated by Goya in his “Disasters of War.” There are row upon row of drawings turned thickly hatch-marked prints—they look almost like potato prints children make, and the figures’ faces have a snub-nosed Maurice Sendak vibe—and once again, I find it difficult to concentrate. There are no sporks, as Iraq doesn’t yet have the necessary electricity to support a proper disposable consumer culture. There are no supply-line taco trucks. There is only Ms. England, cigarette dangling like an original gangsta, and thick, smoky, oily black skies.

But then Birk takes pity on the philistines among us, and gives us a break from the hard work of high culture: he jazzes it up with his famous big oils, like the delights of Oz after drab Kansas but with desolate, naked, hooded men instead of prancing munchkins.

Birk has said he’d add a couple more oils to the exhibit by the time it reaches Long Beach, so if the past is any experience, there will be glories in the depravities of war.

SANDOW BIRK’S “THE DEPRAVITIES OF WAR” CAL STATE LONG BEACH UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM | 1250 BELLFLOWER BLVD | LONG BEACH 90840 | 562.985.5761 | CSULB.EDU/UAM | OPEN TUES-SUN NOON-5PM AND THURS NOON-8PM | OPENS THURS | RECEPTION, ARTIST’S TALK AND BOOKSIGNING THURS 5-8PM | THROUGH DEC 16

Tags: callot, goya, iraq, lynndie england, sandow birk, university art museum, War