L.A.’S ‘INFERNO’

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.”

His early shows were a tough act to follow. “The war of California stuff was so successful or popular or something, it was really sort of hard to get away from it,” says Birk. “I did the prison stuff, and that did really well too, so--I dunno--I mean, I was thinking I need to do something big and theatrical and grandiose and ambitious and just sort of moved forward, you know?”

thus, dante. birk had a beat-up copy of “the divine comedy” on a bookshelf of his tidy studio in a nondescript neighborhood not far from Long Beach’s downtown, where he’d moved from Hollywood to be closer to the ocean. The book was filled with the work of the great Victorian illustrator Gustave Dore.

For a contemporary artist who says, “I always start with art history and relate it to my life now,” the Dore etchings were fat curveballs waiting to be hit out of the park. Each of Birk’s 34 drawings for “Inferno” is based on the French illustrator’s lurid vision of hell’s many tortures, but with Birk’s trademark spin. “I’d simply look at his [work] and update it,” says Birk. The book’s first Dore engraving shows Dante peering into a dark wood, hell’s antechamber; in Birk’s updated version, a paranoid citizen stares into a gloomy Los Angeles alley. Birk catches the compositional rhythms of the Dore original, turning writhing tree trunks into twisted air ducts and rocks into piles of urban trash.

Dante’s guide to hell is the Roman poet Virgil: “He always has that robe on” in the Dore engravings, says Birk. “I was driving around the city and looking at, you know, all the banners that you see around. I just used those.” Birk depicts the classic poet in robes fashioned from iconic banners--the American flag, I Love NY, Grand Opening, Free Drink With Any Purchase, If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now.

It’s funny--but then it isn’t. “I’d use the word ‘poignant,’ ” says Birk. “I don’t set out to make it funny, it just sort of--I mean, the stuff people say is all real, you know . . . when you watch the news and there’s a gang shooting and there’s a guy lying in the street and next to him it says, ‘99-Cent Tacos.’ You know, I didn’t make that up.”

Birk flew solo in doing the book’s artwork, but he enlisted a surfing buddy, freelance writer Marcus Sanders, to collaborate on rewriting Dante’s poetry.

“To tell the truth, when I started this I hadn’t read the entire ‘Divine Comedy,’ ” says Birk. “Most people I’d talk to about the project . . . everyone sort of knew about it, but almost no one had really read it. You’d go down to Borders and see the five versions they have . . . [but] they’re really not that easy to read. It was sort of [through] the frustration of slogging through them that we came up with the idea that maybe we can just rewrite it ourselves.”

Sanders, an editor with the Surfline Web site and a frequent contributor to Surfing magazine, recalls that they “powered it through and [Birk would] keep sending me drawings and I’d get more stoked . . . they’re super-cool.”

Out of it came a new take on Dante and “The Divine Comedy.” “The levels and sins are different than what we would think now,” says Sanders. “I mean, flattery as a sin? Now that’s just part of life; it’s how you get a job. People have jobs as flatterers and seducers.”

Then there’s the matter of repopulating Dante’s hell. “We put our own people in there,” says Birk. “Like, in the one section of hell where there are people who went astray because of sexual desires and things, we put in Jimmy Swaggart and people like that.” Also making cameos: Bill Clinton, Idi Amin, Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler.

Birk and Sanders mixed in a few choice Anglo-Saxonisms as well. In fact, those folks down in hell swear a blue streak. “We wanted to simply put it into common-speak, so when you read through it, it just flows along and you don’t have to stop and think,” says Birk.

It adds up to a unique version of Dante’s writing. Consider this conventional translation of the poem’s famed opening stanza:

Upon the middle of our mortal way

I found myself within a forest black

As from the rightful path I went astray.

Here’s the Birk/Sanders version:

About halfway through the course of my pathetic life,

I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place.

I’m not sure how I ended up there; I guess I had taken a few wrong turns.

The updating--we’ll leave it to literary critics to debate its validity--makes for some startling scenes:

Like the crazed crack addict jonesing for a

rock who instantly calms down after he scores

and gets his first drag of the smoke,

Cerberus’ disgusting barking heads sniffed

at the mud and lapped at it so intently that

they seemed oblivious to anything else.

Or . . . .

When he finished I asked him, “Who are those two

guys lying next to you on the ground, steaming

like fresh dim sum at a Chinese restaurant?”

“We’re really, really faithful to the text--it’s sort of sacred,” says Birk. “Even the way we mess around with it, like putting slang words in there, is probably sacrilegious to high scholars and stuff.” Then, he adds, “We weren’t trying to make fun of it or anything. We were trying to be serious, yet, from our sort of naive viewpoint, just make it more accessible.”

To maintain a soupcon of seriousness, Birk and Sanders enlisted the help of a literature professor, Michael Meister, who teaches religious studies at St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga. It was very much a cyber collaboration--professor and writers have yet to meet in the flesh--but Meister, who has collected and computerized 50 different English-language translations of “The Divine Comedy,” quickly became a fan of the project.

“I’m not aware of anything published that’s as free as this translation,” he says, adding, “Virtually all the translations that are out there today have been done by scholars and poets as scholarly and poetic representations of Dante’s original. But none of them, to my knowledge, have been artists. I think these fellows have rendered Dante’s text visually rather than literally. And I think they’ve done this very well.”

Birk and Sanders would ship their reworked cantos into cyberspace and Meister would e-mail back his reactions. “I was deeply honored to be associated with their project, but always kept my place relative to their vision,” says Meister. “Unless, of course, they were going off the track with an error in characterization, geography, dialogue [or] facts.” In all, he recalls, he made 180 suggested revisions.

“I recall a point where the souls of the damned are waiting to cross the river Styx and the infernal ferryman, Charon, is cursing at them. What is shocking to us, as readers, is that the damned start cursing too: [about] their parents, God, their lives--everything. Sandow and Marcus were pretty much letting Charon do the cursing, and I had to tell them to let the damned curse too because that’s what Dante did, and the effect is much more powerful in the end.”

all of this work resulted in yet another of the hundreds of editions of Dante--one that is quite possibly the most lavish, and unorthodox, of the lot. When published March 1, it will be 250 pages, printed on high-quality Arches paper, each print signed by Birk, everything hand-bound between double-thick boards covered in embossed kid leather, the whole package as big as the proverbial coffee table and weighing more than 10 pounds. Trillium Press, just outside San Francisco, invented a new lithographic process for the Birk drawings involving plates being “inked four times and printed twice,” according to master printer David Salgado. Some of the inks are 60% transparent, giving Birk’s spidery pen lines an ethereal richness. Small touches abound: While some of the gallery works are in vivid color, the only color used in the book is reserved for the title, “Inferno,” which is reproduced in precisely the same color as that of fire extinguishers; the cover’s inner lining, left blank in most books, has a repeated pattern of the international symbol for flammable materials.

Trillium, which usually does contract printing for other publishers, is putting its neck on the block by publishing this magnum opus on its own. Using the argot of a Hollywood studio mogul, Salgado says of the Dante project, “There’s some juice there . . . this is high concept . . . there’s some tease in it.” And, odds are, the small company’s bet will pay off. As of this writing, 20 of the 100 copies in the initial press run have been sold to early buyers, who got a $500 break on the cover price.

Which brings us back to what’s between this book’s glove-soft covers: this cornerstone of the literary canon, a poem, as Meister puts it, that “still commands our attention today because it’s a pilgrimage of redemption and it appeals to the truth of our experience. It’s midlife crisis, it’s self-discovery, it’s mourning for lost youth, it’s yearning for a better world--it’s all these things and more.”

Dante’s message, says Meister, “is a hard one, and it’s the key to the entire poem: The way up is down! In a sense, long before psychology made such original claims, Dante’s vision clearly articulated in poetry an eternal truth. In order to grow and develop and mature at any given point in our lives, we must face our own demons first. We must face ourselves.”

Freely translated from surfer-speak, this is what Birk has to say: “I think being a painter in Los Angeles is sort of--I’m a realist about it--I think it’s a pretty silly occupation. It’s pretty useless. It’s an anachronistic thing to do, to be painting in a centuries-old style in this capital of movies and television and music and stuff. I realized this is a really sort of pathetic occupation that I have.

“So what I’m always thinking about is, what does it mean to be a painter in Los Angeles? The audience for painting is so small. If I do a super-successful painting show and it runs for a month, it might get 400 people who come to see it or something. And if Marcus calls me up and says, ‘Hey, could you do a little thumbnail sketch for this Surfing magazine article?’ I do it in an hour and send it off and you’ve got 60,000 circulation. Compared to 400? Where’s the audience for painting? It’s nothing.”

Then he adds: “In general, I’m a fatalist. I’m really skeptical about my single voice in the world, just like I’m skeptical about my single painting going out there and making a difference. I don’t think it will.”

So is Dante the end of the line? Birk grins, looking deceptively boyish. “I have many ideas,” he says. After hell there’s purgatory, and then paradise beckons. “Two hundred fifty drawings, if all goes well. Twenty paintings. That’ll be 2005.”

Meanwhile, the “In Smog and Thunder” mockumentary seems set to go into DVD distribution (there was interest after it was shown at Slamdance). And there will be more opportunities to win film festival prizes to add to the Best Digital Film award it received at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

“If I get up on stage and they ask me what my next movie is,” says Birk, “I’m saying Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ You want to fund it? Let’s make it. I got the script.”