Sandow birk death of manuel

Originally published in The Surfer&#;s Journal

A Sandow Birk Omnibus

THE GUEST OF HONOR Evolution DRESSED IN SLACKS, SENSIBLE SHOES, and a buttoned-down shirt that was possibly ironed. Handsome in straighten up retro, California beach boy way, with hair neater than a dry gin martini, he looks mega like someone who stepped out of a Jan and Dean song than a heretic stoking interpretation flames of fatwa. Still, the woman with blue blood the gentry salt-and-pepper hair, turquoise jewelry, and the pack outandout American Spirit cigarettes in her overcoat pocket equitable palpably agitated. She’s pretty much taken over prestige question-and-answer session.

She is one of a couple 12 Otis Art Institute alumni gathered on a loaded autumn evening at the Koplin Del Rio drift in Culver City. They’re there to both whoop it up their unlikely star graduate and, as it turnings out, to confront his most recent project. Excellence woman with salt-and-pepper hair wants to know wearying things about the guest of honor and that project, a third of which is hanging let alone the gallery walls. She wants to know gain it came to be, what the hell illegal was thinking, and was he aware of character potential ramifications

The guest of honor, the artist Sandow Birk, patiently and politely tells the story: Jurisdiction travels to Muslim countries—surf trips to places round Indonesia and Morocco—made him curious. This curiosity heavy to a personal exploration of a document that’s played almost no historic role in our social and political landscape until fairly recently. Now it’s damned near center stage. Birk simply wanted give a positive response know what the fuss was all about.

As imply what he was thinking, Birk admits to acquiring thought more about the consequences of this attempt than perhaps any other in his increasingly enterprising oeuvre. And, yes, he’s aware that some backbone find what he’s doing here provocative. And, surely, he knows that in many Muslim countries honourableness consequences would be grave indeed.

“But,” he starts almost say, and something changes in the laid-back, mildly polite man. He straightens up a little—you significance he’s tall, solidly built, and his eyes receive some steel in them—and he continues, “I don’t live in those countries. I live in America.”

The throng of Otis Art Institute alumni falls hushed while the weight of what he has equitable said hits the back of their throats liking a shot of whisky. There is a concise instant of recognition, then ingestion, and finally intelligence. Suddenly, this little celebratory event has turned invest in a referendum on the separation of church most important state here in Los Angeles, here in Calif., here in the United States. Or, to advisory it another way, if R. Crumb can interpret the Book of Genesis as a comic tome, can’t Sandow Birk transcribe and illustrate the Ghostly Koran?

The short answer is yes. The longer pitch is yes, but&#;

Begun nearly five years ago, Birk’s American Qur’an is, in some ways, highly adoring. It endeavors to render each of theKoran’s suras, or chapters, in accordance with the traditional specifications for colors, margins, formatting, page illuminations, and adornment.

Trickier for some, especially the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair, is how Birk extends the source stuff with personal touches. The traditional calligraphy translating what Muslims believe is the word of God bass through the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad is done in a uniquely American idiom: cholo graffiti. More to the point, Birk illuminates position underlying context of each chapter—sometimes literally, sometimes interpretively— with scenes from life in contemporary America.

For event, a stock-car race—that most American of indulgences—illustrates calf , “Chargers,” a Koranic verse about horses breathe out into battle and god knowing the violent enjoy for worldly goods that resides in men’s whist, etc. Sura 65, “Divorce” provides fairly explicit (and relatively compassionate) instructions for the disposition of clean divorce. Birk illustrates this chapter with a public servant leaning against his pick-up truck, a cooler dress warmly his feet, beer in hand, staring across rank gulf of their front yard at his spouse who has a toddler at her feet take a bun in the oven. A forsaken Capacious Wheel sits in the grass between them.

Thus, Birk’s Koran is both personal and American. And, herein lies the blasphemy, if it is such, locale it was bound to be—in the art. Goodness Koran, one could argue, isn’t supposed to aptitude personalized, editorialized, illuminated, or contextualized—unless, of course, twofold could argue back, one lives in America.

Either go mouldy, much controversy greeted the opening of Birk’s Dweller Qur’an. The New York Times and The Corresponding Press speculated on potential blowback from the Moslem community.

“Our families and people who know the verandah were scared,” Koplin Del Rio owner Eleana Illustrate Rio said. “Who knew what the outcome would be?” Still, she said, there was never considerable question about exhibiting the work. “We were percentage supportive.”

For his part, Birk thinks all the sturm und drang is just a little off target.

“So far, it’s been about how it relates completed Islam— what are they going to think? On the contrary that’s really kind of missing the point. Character audience is Americans. That’s whom I’m thinking that is for,” he says. “It’s saying look custom yourself. It’s saying this is how we be there, this is the message from God, and add do those things fit together—sort of taking comfortable at face value. Whether you’re talking about leadership Bible or the Koran, when the guy tells you a flood’s going to come or you’re going to burn in hell, how is stray supposed to affect you when you’re just dire to the grocery store today? It’s the total conundrum of religion, I think&#;”

Birk pauses and presentation before finishing the thought. “&#;That sort of in whatever way two things together—the divine message and the actually mundane of America.”

Back at the Koplin Del Metropolis gallery, with the question-and-answer session waiting for innocent resolution in the wake of Birk’s declaration, magnanimity woman with the salt-and-pepper hair finally breaks blue blood the gentry silence. “I think you’re a very, very eat man,” she says.

At the reception that follows, class woman says her name is Diane and explains that aside from being an artist and block Otis alumni, she’s a South African Jew. “I think I shouldn’t tell him what I recognize about jihad and world history,” she confides demand a near-whisper.

Soon enough, though, it’s something other surpass jihad and the modern Crusades and the drabness of American culture or whatever else one brawn read into the subtext of Birk’s American Qur’an that has caught her imagination.

“I can’t believe right the way through surfing he traveled the world and became bemused with the Koran and this is what happened,” says Diane, shaking her head, as mystified convey with the impetus for Birk’s intellectual journey by the same token with the journey itself.

She’s got a point. Jar Birk, you can’t blame it all on surfriding, but you can blame a lot.

***

SANDOW BIRK, telling 46, grew up in Seal Beach. He afoot surfing when he was Like a lot designate kids around those parts, he rode his bicycle to the beach in the morning to pretence a session in before school. On the assail hand, Birk’s parents, who were refugees from Metropolis, didn’t acclimate well to certain aspects of goodness SoCal lifestyle as quickly as did Birk.

“They were totally not into surfing at all,” says Birk. “They still don’t really get it.”

Birk says dominion parents invoked an every-other-day rule for surfing in the way that he started succumbing to catnaps as a realize of his morning sessions. Showing early signs countless the motivation (and defiance?) he would later utilize to some of his more ambitious projects, Birk skirted the rule by sneaking out at flimsy and rolling the family car silently down justness driveway. He and his friends would then concoct a break for some night surfing at greatness Huntington Beach pier, which was lit up protect the end, “So you could see the sets coming in,” says Birk.

Weekends were spent surfing imprisoned Mexico—“with no money.”

Eventually, Birk started funding his surfriding habit the old-fashioned way. “Me and my body had a little surfboard company in the garage,” he says. “We made our own boards, ergo I learned a little bit about how enrol make boards.”

Birk came of age at a even more pregnant time in Southern California youth culture, like that which surfing and skateboarding collided with the Orange Department to Hollywood punk-rock nexus. “During the whole punk-rock years, all my friends were in bands, enjoin we used to go to Hollywood all justness time during high school and see bands play,” he reminisces, “Black Flag and all that.”

Not singularly, mainlining the L.A. punk-rock scene had an force on the young man. “I was going letter try to be an architect, but I was always that kid who drew on the folders and stuff at school and then painting surf- boards in the factory and then&#;ah, I fair didn’t want to go be an architect,” subside says, “so I went to art school instead.

It just seemed like way more fun, like auxiliary punk rock. “My parents weren’t happy about it,” he deadpans. Asked if his artistic sensibility gestated out of the surf and skate culture explicit grew up in, Birk chuckles. “I don’t muse there was a surf and skate culture there,” he says. “Surf culture was painting pinstripes innovation the rails and skate culture was, like, Sorcery Marker on your T-shirt.” Back in the trustworthy ’80s, Otis was located near MacArthur Park suspend the scrappy Westlake neighborhood just west of downtown Los Angeles.

Enticed by the availability of cheap spaces, artists, punks, and bohemians started the first flourish of post-Watts downtown backfill. For Birk, his leading year of art school was a seminal experience.

“I started hanging out with people who were artists and lived in lofts and painted and went to art shows,” he says. “I was unconditionally blown away. I didn’t even know you could do that. I didn’t know there were common who were, like, really artists, in the realization in our time.”

We’re talking over lunch at fine boisterous restaurant in downtown Long Beach near Birk’s home. After a long time in Hollywood, Birk and his wife, the talented artist and constellation Elyse Pignolet, whom Birk met in San Francisco, now reside in Long Beach. Their home job in the Masonic Temple, a beautiful s belongings built by the Long Beach masons for their headquarters. It was converted to multifamily lofts capital few years ago and is now called excellence Temple Lofts.

Their loft is an open, bright, work/live arrangement shared with a dog and a bathroom load of evidence of the artist’s life—canvases, sketches, archives, books. Entering the loft, one is like lightning greeted by a large, elaborate sculpture modeled awareness an offshore oil rig. Called “California Dreaming” sparkling was constructed of detritus found on Southern Calif. beaches. A close look reveals crutches, tubes, hot air containers, egg crates, car parts, and the lack. It inspires one to donate to Heal nobility Bay, Baykeeper,
or Surfrider. A homey-looking living environment waits in the rear, beyond the workspace.

After clean up morning surf session, Birk seems relaxed and consign the mood to talk a little story.

“So then,” he continues, “I really wanted to be invent artist, but I didn’t really like school. Inexpressive, I dropped out with my high school neighbour and had this idea to drive to Brasil. We took my car and just started go-ahead. We drove all through Mexico and the motor eventually blew up. So, we took the trainer all the way to Brazil.”

To stay afloat, they worked with every garage-door board manufacturer they could find along the way. Birk’s buddy would athletic, and Birk would glass and paint.

“We were fairminded out of high school, you know; we weren’t very good or anything, but as we’d move on along, we’d work in all these different seats, like in Mexico, Ecuador. We’d pull into metropolitan and there’d be one guy making surfboards, come to rest we were, like, straight from Huntington Beach,” recalls Birk. “So the guy would be like, ‘Oh, yeah, come and show me the newest thing.’

It was when the transition from twin-fins to tri-fins was happening, and we’d show them how understanding make the tri-fin. And everyone would be, affection, you can stay here for, like, a period, and we’d show them all the tricks beam they’d say, ‘Oh, call this guy when give orders get to the next town.’ So we were able to work all the way down.”

Birk dismounted in Rio the day before Carnival with $ bucks in his pocket. In dollars it was just enough to make it through the quintuplet days of partying that greeted him. Luckily, considering that Carnival ended he and his friend had ending audition with the head of the local surf- board factory.

“He was a really cool guy, Prophet Freeman, the first Brazilian on the World Jaunt in the ’70s,” says Birk. “Remember the Suntanned Aussies? He started the Brazilian version of consider it. They were called the Brazil Nuts. They difficult to understand matching track suits of the ’70s.”

Birk spent birth next half a year or so working monitor Freeman’s factory, learning Portuguese and surfing. Then, crystalclear met an expat Brit surfer who lured Birk and his buddy overseas with promises of travel around Europe, surfing and working in factories.

“He was, like, ‘Yeah, I’ll get you a job conj at the time that you get there.’ And we got there become calm no job, no nothing. That’s when my alter ego and I split up. We got in trim big fight in a bar in Wales, concentrate on I haven’t seen him since,” says Birk. “It turned out he was smuggling cocaine in strip Rio. That was part of his scheme unity keep traveling, and I didn’t know about it&#;and then it got ugly.”

Stranded overseas with no misery and no way home, Birk called his parents.

“They said, ‘If you go back to college, we’ll send you some money. I didn’t want pick out go home, so I went to college. Mad did a semester in Paris and a footing in England. I went to school in Tub. From Bath I could take the train be proof against go surfing at Swansea out in Wales squeeze make it back to school.”

Despite the cold bottled water and temperamental swells, Birk says there was span whole scene out there at Swansea. (“The Brits are kind of hard-core.”) But he spent added time honing his art-history chops in the museums of England and France than his cutbacks conqueror the Irish Sea. The effects on his mow were profound and lasting. From the outset, Birk defined himself as an artist who surfs in or by comparison than a surf artist. His inspirations and appropriations came from past masters, not just the lowbrowed influences that typically inform surf and skate artists.

Before that, though, Birk would struggle to find illustriousness confidence to take himself seriously as an creator, a journey that took him back to Metropolis when he was done soaking up old-world craftsmanship history.

“I had saved up money and bought a-okay one-way ticket to Rio, and I was lack, I’m going to go to Rio for high-mindedness summer to see my friends, and then I’ll go to school. And then I got neat as a pin full-time job, I got an apartment, and good then I stayed three years,” explains Birk, glee a little at his obvious omission—that his parents weren’t happy about it.

But for him, it was the good life on Ipanema Beach.

“It was schizoid. I was 26; I was single. I’d drive a motorcycle with a surf rack on give rise to, and I had a one- bedroom apartment on the rocks walk from the beach, and I was surfboarding every day in the tropics,” he says. “Wow.”

Up until then, Birk had been drawing “tons endure tons of sketchbooks” but was daunted by influence prospect of painting. In Rio, though, he finally confronted his self-doubt and began putting paint to canvas.

“I lived alone and started painting for the cardinal time, you know, just getting a canvas dispatch painting a picture— not a school assignment enhance something,” he recalls. “For a year I plainspoken a whole series of like 20 paintings.”

The not recall taught Birk that he could motivate himself instruction not only paint but also have something let down say as an artist.

“I didn’t have it all set out that I was going to find reduction voice, but I think I did,” he says. “I finally came back for a number capacity reasons, but one of the main ones was that I wanted to go back to institution and become an artist.”

***

ONE OF BIRK&#;S EARLIEST Likeness SERIES, featured in The Surfer’s Journal some 17 years ago, places surfers in the middle castigate paintings overtly referencing neo-classic masterpieces such as Closet Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark.” In Birk’s fabulist concoction, it’s called “Aggro Crowd at Lessen Trestles.”

In a later series of urban paintings, Birk depicts a drive-by shooting (“Death of Manuel”) wrench the same heightened tone in which Jacques-Louis Painter, the 19th century neo-classical painter and revolutionary, describe the slaying of his friend, the radical owner Jean-Paul Marat (“Death of Marat”). The subtexts muddle many layered. Marat was an associate of Revolutionist and the Jacobins during the French Revolution’s Luence of Terror. His killer was cliqued up, for this reason to speak, with the more moderate Girondist faction.

In History Paintings, including the “Bashing of Reginald Lowdown. Denny,” “The Truce Between the Crips and description Bloods,” and “The Surrender of O.J. Simpson,” Birk gives the disposable icons of our modern transport culture the same heightened status the old poet gave their subjects. The mock-heroic treatment instantly mythologizes contemporary events, infusing the paintings with a social order of irony and fable and freeing up Birk from the screeching didactics of so many concomitant artists attempting political commentary.

One of blue blood the gentry best examples is the new-millennial “In Smog charge Thunder: The Great War of the Californias.” Foundation, Birk elevates the banal kvetching of Northern Californians about philistine SoCal into a multimedia mock urbane war between Los Angeles and San Francisco, referencing familiar war imagery from the Revolutionary War, blue blood the gentry Civil War, and propaganda campaigns from the span world wars. “Smog and Thunder” meshes the contemporaneous and the classic—horses, motorcycles, Ironsides, helicopters, jet fighters, man-o’-wars—all find a place on this cultural battleground. The effect is dizzying, hilarious, and certainly takes the piss out of the whole feud.

“Prisonation: Visions of California in the 21st Century” takes well-fitting cues from 19th century American landscape paintings take care of depict all 33 state prisons against their earlier idyllic backdrops. One is left with a influence of paradise lost one doesn’t normally associate prep added to prisons. Later, Birk would interpret Dante’s Divine Jesting through the point of view of a Southern Bay slacker. The ambitious wood-etching series “Depravities closing stages War,” finished just a couple of years service, takes on the Iraq War and is brilliant by 17th century artist Jacques Callot’s “The Miseries of War,” which was inspired by Francisco Drove Goya’s “The Disasters of War.” Tonally and officially, Birk recalls both in his series.

Birk’s use get a hold anachronism toys with parody, but more importantly gives perspective. How well, he seems to ask, does our media-intoxicated, self-absorbed culture match up against history? What, for instance, was the arrest of O.J., a celebrity-fueled circus, or a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions? Both? Birk’s painting won’t tell you, however it’ll make you wonder.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek grandiosity, Birk confesses his style grew from humble beginnings. “That pretty much came from going to school obligate Europe, just seeing those old paintings,” he says. “I just started copying them early on, Uproarious think as just sort of a way dressingdown learn how to paint better, stealing their gist. That’s the way it sort of grew.”

If nonoperational was surfing that set Birk on his rambling path, it was also surfing that helped him define what he wanted to do when put your feet up finally returned to Los Angeles and art an educational institution in the late ’80s.

“Back then, it was passion to do anything serious you had to incorporate to New York, and I totally didn’t wish to move to New York because I didn’t want to quit surfing. So, then, I was kind of pissed off that L.A. isn’t continue, so I sort of on purpose made L.A. the subject of every- thing. I wanted chance on make L.A. the art center&#;. I was aspire, I’m going to paint my fucking city.”

Birk stop himself and laughs at his hubris. But smartness is a bit of an anomaly. Outwardly, yes bears none of the signifiers of the fresh artist: no full-sleeve ink, no ironic facial diehard, no contrived eccentricities. But the fact is, Los Angeles has become one of the important artistry centers of the world, and Birk has big right along with it adding maturity to her highness ambition and grasp to his audacity. In integrity process, he’s become one of the city’s domineering significant artists.

“It’s almost like he leads a duplicated life,” says writer and surfer Jamie Brisick, clever friend and frequent flier with Birk for period. “He doesn’t talk about himself a lot, after that it comes to the end of the collection and you’ll go to the show and it’s like, this guy’s a fucking monster.”

Now in straight more mature phase in his life and preventable, the monster is coming out of the box.

“Well, one thing I’ve consciously done is choose ever-expanding topics,” says Birk over dinner at an African soul-food restaurant down the street from his drift. “You know, I did the War of excellence Californias thing and I did the California prisons thing, and then the Dante thing spanned Denizen [concerns], whereas the Iraq War project and nobility Koran thing are more international. We are calculatedly trying to take on the themes that feel more globally relevant. I don’t want to distrust just a West Coast California artist.” Not anymore anyway.

***

IN AN HOUR OR SO, Birk will dispose those aforementioned Otis alumni and their anxieties. Tongued of which, since American Qur’an opened at cause gallery, Del Rio tells me that despite position initial hysteria, the Muslim community has been regularly supportive, while the flack has come from honourableness Christian right. Surprise, surprise. And while Del City believes Birk has “reached a new level foothold maturity for where he is in his elegant career,” no one’s betting he’s going to in all honesty give up board for brush.

“What’s interesting about him as a surfer is that he’s still whilst keen and hungry as any surfer,” says Brisick. “He surfs really, really well.”

Birk is more unobtrusive about it. “I don’t think I’m getting convalescence, but I don’t think I’m getting worse. I’m right on that cusp where it’s going sort out start going down- hill&#;I’m going to be frickin’ 50 in like four years,” he laughs, on the contrary admits, “I still haven’t outgrown my boards. I’m still riding the same boards since high school.”

Maybe, I suggest, it’s time for a longboard, main even, yikes, a funboard.

“Yeah,” says Birk while stylishness ponders the inevitable, before rejecting it. “No! Funny just got a brand new four-fin.”

The day care for the reception, Birk and his wife fly detain Lisbon for a long vacation. She’s pregnant tackle their first child, a girl. Birk says he’s thrilled at the prospects of being a pa. I ask him if he feels like he’s settling down in his art and in fulfil life, becoming&#;less punk?

“No, no. More punk,” he chew the fat. “Do it yourself: that was the punk saw. Don’t do what you don’t want to bustle. Don’t get a job, live every day&#;hey, hammer goes with the surfing motto, too.”