‘Great War of Californias’ Built on a Fertile, Clever Imagination

Sandow Birk’s show at the Laguna Art Museum is a big, fat lie, thoroughly calculated and terrifically amusing. It flaunts its own fakery every step of the way, and is one of the most delicious deceptions one is ever likely to submit to willingly.

“In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias” documents battles that never happened, through paintings, drawings and models borrowed from archives that don’t exist.

Even the identity of the artist is up for grabs, since the wall labels describing the works are suspiciously evasive on that count, noting only that they are part of the record left by predominantly unschooled “artists of the period.” The period, of course, is the present or even near future, and the artist, all along, is Birk, a savvy, well-schooled young artist indulging in a highly clever, meticulously realized sendup of history painting.

We’re never really told what set off the war between Fog Town and Smog Town (San Francisco and L.A.), and we’re never given more than a hint of how it all turns out in the end--the battle is simply in full swing throughout the course of the show.

A CD-audio tour provides more than a few chuckles worth of commentary while, like the wall text, keeping up a purposely porous facade of documentary seriousness. Birk is the prototypical postmodern recycler of past styles, but his work is smart and not just clever. In attempting to construct a pictorial record of a fictional war, he strategizes on several fronts, making not just the grand gestures--the epic battle paintings and heroic portraits--but also a series of small, Goya-like ink drawings, and also a group of propaganda posters like those used in wartime to boost the morale of the citizenry.

Telling details draw us in throughout--either familiar landmarks of both cities or pop culture references that ground the allegory in the here and now. “Rendezvous at Twin Peaks,” for instance, has fires raging in the distant city, while in the foreground, L.A. forces in Dodgers caps strategize about the battle and the negotiation for film rights in the glare of a minicam.

One of the cavalrymen behind them holds aloft a banner advertising Coors Light, presumably a sponsor of the war. Like a well-financed film, product placement and corporate logos punctuate nearly every scene in Birk’s grand panorama, a caricature of our present condition in which everything’s not only for sale but already sold.

The leader of the trio marching forth in “The Spirit of Los Angeles,” modeled after Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People (28 July 1830),” wears a Domino’s Pizza shirt and holds a Big Gulp cup as he makes his way through the rubble of tilted parking meters and unplugged computer keyboards.

The landscape of war is thoroughly urbanized and commercialized. It takes place against an all-too-familiar backdrop of Taco Bell signs and grocery store logos, populated by bearers of skateboards, surfboards and spray cans. In the dramatic confrontation depicted in “Charging the Line,” one mounted soldier holds a banner that might be the plug for a worthy cause, but instead just blurts out, “FREE medium soft drink with any purchase.”

Birk, an L.A. painter who has exhibited parts of this five-year series at Koplin Gallery, makes his jabs at the local art establishment through paintings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in ruins, and, more effectively and hilariously, of the Getty Center as the ultimate defensive fortress. One of Birk’s heroic portraits shows a Lt. Major D.J. Down on his motorcycle holding off those pleading to ascend the hill to the Getty with the words “Nadie sin reservaciones!” (No one without reservations!)

A gallery holding only a few works and darkened to give an underwater effect is, literally, a low point of the exhibition, and the display of model ships built of toothbrushes, disposable lighters, golf tees, keys and bottle caps, all painted a uniform battleship gray, doesn’t add much either.

Birk also has constructed three-dimensional maps of key campaigns, but the heart of the show, curated by the museum’s Tyler Stallings and accompanied by a useful catalog, remains the drawings and paintings. It might seem quaint today to tell a tale in paint, but Birk’s tongue-in-cheek project nostalgically and critically harks back to the days when such narrative and symbolic images did actually speak to a population’s fears and hopes. War has always been a high-stakes business, but who nowadays would opt for coverage on canvas when the current appetite is better fed by live Webcast?

Birk’s project, in the end, deflates not only the heroic image of war but also the heroic, authoritative quality of its representation. “In Smog and Thunder,” as essayist Marcia Tanner astutely observes, is an examination of ‘the illusion industry,” which covers just about all the visual media, from art history to television, film and advertising.

Birk’s work mixes the mundane in with the magnanimous and, for all of its comedic exaggerations, it is barbed with truths about the inevitable partiality of the historical record. The telling of the tale can’t be separated from the teller, and the forces of greed and power determine events as well as their translation into story and myth. To our great good fortune, incisive humor is the force that powers Birk’s hand and determines just what juicy tidbits get rolled into his version of “the giant burrito of history.”

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* “In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias,” Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (949) 494-8971, through July 9. Closed Mondays.