A Nightmare Vision for a Valley City

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn has invoked some awful visions of what awaits the people of the San Fernando Valley if they secede from L.A., but not even Hahn has raised so cataclysmic a specter as Sandow Birk.

To wit:

The vengeful armed forces of San Francisco rampage south along the 101 and 5 Freeways, pouring into the brand-new San Fernando Valley city on their way to attack despised Los Angeles. The Valley, having recently seceded from L.A., can field only a puny army to defend itself. It is quickly put to flight. As the San Franciscans burn and loot their way across the new city, desperate Valley military leaders gather at the Sherman Oaks Galleria and argue over whether to appeal to Los Angeles for help.

Having just thrown off L.A.’s oppressive yoke, they cannot bring themselves to go begging to their former masters.

Atop the Hollywood Hills, L.A.’s supreme commander, Major General Juan Gomez de los Angeles, is informed that the Valley is afire and utters the immortal words that seal the new city’s fate: “Let it go. Let [them] burn.”

Conjuring this particular downside to Valley secession took the delinquent imagination of Birk, who has been fascinated by the concept of schism in California for the last seven years.

The Valley’s fate is a small part of an expansive series of paintings, propaganda posters, sculptures and narratives Birk has created about a fictional war between Los Angeles and San Francisco. His “In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias” has been shown in galleries and museums in San Francisco, West Hollywood, Laguna Beach and Sonoma. One of the paintings, depicting the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge, was included in the L.A. County Museum of Art’s mammoth “Made in California” exhibit two years ago.

The “In Smog” project started in 1995, when a gallery in San Francisco gallery invited Birk to show and paint there for a time. “I was astonished by the animosity people there had toward L.A.,” he says. “It was something I didn’t know about. It was funny in a way. So I came up with the idea to do a show that would be their worst nightmare--being taken over by L.A.”

The first show, mounted in San Francisco, depicted the destruction of that city by invading L.A. forces and consisted of scarcely two dozen works. With each subsequent show, the number of works grew to its current 110, as the “war” moved to the sea off the California coast, and San Francisco’s thirst for revenge led to the counter-invasion of Los Angeles, with the aforementioned devastating results for the Valley.

Birk, with collaborators Paul Zaloom and Sean Meredith, has just completed a 46-minute film about the works, modeled, tongue-in-cheek, on Ken Burns’ epic documentary “The Civil War.” (The new film is available on DVD at www.smartartpress .com.)

In the film, a talking-head “historian” explains, “Just two months before, the San Fernando Valley had seceded from the city of Los Angeles after a long, nasty political struggle. Its troops were very green. They retreated from the get-go, without more than a few shots fired in self-defense.”

The Walter Cronkite-like narrator picks up the story, intoning, “From his temporary headquarters atop the Hollywood Hills, General Gomez watched the Valley burn ... “ and intones Gomez’s historic utterance.

The 37-year-old Birk, a surfer and son of Seal Beach, graduated from Otis Parsons School of Art, and has received Guggenheim, Fulbright and Getty fellowships. He now lives and works in a loft in Long Beach.

The paintings in “In Smog and Thunder” are patterned after heroic works by Jacques-Louis David, Eugene Delacroix, Francisco Goya and others. They include sprawling battle scenes on land and sea, and depictions full of classical allegory, dramatically gesticulating figures and courageous leaders on horseback (and sometimes motorcycles).

Combatants sport both 19th century military raiment and the streetwear of the modern urban young. In battle they’re as likely to be wielding leaf blowers, electric guitars and signs advertising no-fee checking as they are swords and muskets. The broken and bent detritus of modern city life lies scattered underfoot. At sea, tall, many-sailed frigates vie with giant modern battleships. Above, helicopter gunships share with old-fashioned blimps a sky smoky from burning, recognizable urban precincts.

But Birk’s ocean of incongruity has a serious undertow of awareness about real-life social and political issues, such as secession. The paintings cite the misdeeds of LAPD officers, the greedy inanity of the entertainment industry and the galloping commercialization of life (corporate-sponsor logos adorn battleships and swordsmen clash beneath billowing pennants that read “Smog Check; Pass or Don’t Pay”).

Although he depicts combatants of all races on both sides, Birk can be bitingly observant of various ethnic and occupational groups, the homeless, lesbians and gays. His images of urban destruction are disturbingly reminiscent of what Los Angeles (and San Francisco) have actually endured at the hands of nature and people run amok.

His close tracking of the unfolding Valley secession issue has left him with a firm opinion. “I’m opposed to secession, by far,” he says. “Even if the Valley becomes a separate Valley city, it’s still L.A. Come on. It’s part of L.A.’s history and culture and economy.”

For someone given to imagining the ultimate in social unraveling, he believes an essential coherence binds the geographic, ethnic and cultural sprawl that is metropolitan Los Angeles. “I just look at how I live every day,” he says. “I’ll be surfing in Huntington Beach in the morning, having lunch in Chinatown and maybe going to a party at night in Venice. And I live and work in Long Beach. But, as far as I’m concerned, it’s all L.A.”