Rebecca Solnit Check out the parking lot, Dante's Inferno, illustrated by Sandow Birk, text adapted by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, Chronicle, 218 pp. London Review of Books, 26, 13, 8 July 2004, p. 32. 2004b
"Many years ago, I was supposed to move to Los Angeles, but every time I went there, something about the light and space made me think that life was basically meaningless and you might as well surrender hope right away. I was still an art critic in those days, and I would drive from north-east Los Angeles . . . over to the downtown museums, look at some art, and drive back. But when I got home I would find that the hours I spent negotiating freeway merge lanes and entrances and exits and parking garages was, in some mysterious way, more memorable than the museums. I was supposed to have a head full of paintings or installations, but instead, I was preoccupied with the anonymously ugly spaces that are not on the official register of what any place is supposed to be.
"Every city has them. Thinking about Paris . . . the long cement passages of the Metro lit by bad flourescence and smelling of piss, or the dank passageways descending from cafés into Turkish toilets. Even national parks steer their visitors into an asphalted world of public toilets, parking lots, and thou-shalt-not signage, stuff that almost everyone is good at fast-forwarding past . . . I wonder how it is that visitors can be so sure they saw what they were supposed to and so oblivious of what they were not.
". . . Not that I'm against din or cities or such, but I do wonder about those leftover spaces . . . And they get grimmer and grimmer. Perhaps what's terriftying about these new urban landscapes is that they imply the possibility of life lived [in anonymously ugly spaces.]
"The world seems to be made more and more of stuff we're not supposed to look at, a banal infrastructure that supports the illusion of automotive independence, the largely unseen places from which our materials come-strip mines, industrial agriculture, automated assembly lines, abattoirs -and where they end up: the dumps. Los Angeles consists mostly of these drably utilitarian spaces, in part because cars demand them, and it is a city built to accommodate cars. These spaces tend to be grey, the grey of unpainted cement, asphalt, steel and accumulated grime, and they tend to be either abandoned or frequented by people who are also discards, a kind of subterranean realm hauled to the surface. Or not.
'When the new Getty Museum opened off the stretch of the 405 freeway that connects Los Angeles proper to the even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier's architecture and Robert Irwin's gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, although it's the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty . . . (. . . public transportation is largely an underclass phenomenon.) . . .
". . .You come out of the smog-filtered Los Angeles light (which gives me the impression that a thrifty God has replaced our incandescent sun with diffused fluorescent light . . . spirally into the seismically unstable bowels of the Los Angeles earth . . .
". . . Altitude correlates neatly with economic clout in urban and suburban California . . . people first . . . first parked, then they looked at the mighty fortress of the Getty . . . you went through a redemptive exercise of experiencing art . . .
". . . the gardens [from which] from . . . a real-estate point of view -[you see] what the San Francisco Bay artist Richard Misrach calls "the politics of the view," the vista . . . Irwin is thought to have chosen out of contrariness to make a garden in which this splendid view disappears . . . the bright erratic plantings. They were chosen by Irwin, who is no gardener . . .
"California has often been imagined . . . And probably the whole place is Purgatory, since nearly all of us are so, so to speak, hell-bent on self-improvement. Something about my dear weird Golden State obliges it to assume allegorical and oracular proportions. A quarter of a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be seen . . . (Schwarzenegger's election as governor has deeply gratified the rest of the nation, which can now reflect even more confidently that, though we have better weather and really are inventing their future, we're totally feckless freaks.)
"One of the reasons often given to explain why the American film industry settled in Hollywood is Southern California's ability to simulate almost any part of the world: it has lush agricultural areas, deserts, mountains, forests, oceans and open space in which to build Babylon or Atlanta, all drenched in ceaseless light. That is to say, to be in California is to be everywhere else (in the posher parts of LA every house seems to be dreaming of elsewhere: this half-timbered job is in the Black Forest and that one next door in the Alhambra. And as the Los Angeles writer Jenny Price recently remarked, to say "I ate a doughnut in Los Angeles" is a different thing altogether from saying "I ate a doughnut." The invocation of LA throws that doughnut on a stage where it casts a long shadow of depravity or opportunity (which here might be the same thing.) She added that just as Lévi-Strauss once remarked that animals are how we think, so Los Angeles, and by extension, California, are also how we think- about society, about urbanism, about the future, about morality and its opposite. It's as though, in the golden light, everything is thrown into dramatic relief, everything is on stage acting out some drama or other.
"Sandow Birk, who early in his career restaged great watery history paintings - The Raft of Medusa, Washington Crossing the Delaware - as surfing scenes, has long been picking California's allegorical crops. A Southern California surfer himself, he once painted a brillian series-In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the Californias -in which the cultural clashes between San Francisco and LA were depicted as a multi-ethnic battle complete with fast-food sponsors and gang colors carried by the armed factions. Another series, Incarcerated: Visions of California in the 21st Century, an inspection of California as Heaven and Hell, represented all 33 state prisons in this incarceration-crazy state . . .
"And now comes Birk's California Divine Comedy . . . Hell, naturally, is Los Angeles . . . its line drawings depict the back-alley Los Angeles of anonymous dead-ends . . . Canto I sets the stage nicely with a tipped-over shopping cart on what appears to be a vacant lot. The words 'Canto I' seems to be spray-painted on one of those oblong cement wheel-stops that mark the front end of a parking space.
". . . Birk . . . took on the project [translating the text] with . . . surf journalist Marcus Sanders . . . I'm not sure [they're] always up to the challenge . . .
""About halfway through the course of my pathetic life I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place . . . I can't really describe what that place was like. It was dark and strange, and just thinking abut it now gives me the chills.""
". . .
". . . Birk's book is better looked at than read. His pictures are a critique of urbanism in the vein of Mike Davis's City of Quartz, rather than a contribution to Dante studies or theology. LA has little to give Dante, but Dante via Birk has much to give LA. The city's invisible territories and Dante's phantasmagoria go together beautifully; in Canto XXI, the winged devils of the fifth ditch fly toward Dante and Virgil as they overlook the freeway from a clifftop. There is a cyclone fence behind them, a one-way sign in the lower right, another shopping cart, this time full of the posessions of a homeless demon, and the flying demons carry . . . carry signs: "Will work for food," "Homeless veteran," . . . .
". . . In Hell, something happens; in the genre scenes, all is quiet, and a sense of inertia, inevitability of pure doom is there, the doom that disaster alleviates . . .
"The cover of Birk's book is also its masterpiece. It remodels Frederick Church's gargantuan 1862 luminist painting Cotopaxi, Ecuador into a vision of all California as Hell. The same belching volcano is there on the horizon filling the sky with sun-reddened smoke, the same vast gorge in the central foreground. But Birk has turned the gorge's sublime waterfalls into a sort of terraced lava-bottomed mining pit around which emblems of all California gather. There are palm trees and oil derricks and power lines in the foreground, along with signs for chain stores and, rather in the mode of Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego, a skull sitting on a plinth inscribed "Inferno." In the middle distance a shattered Golden Gate Bridge reaches toward the gorge then breaks off, and birds, black against the backlight, fly through the ruddy scene and perch on the power lines. Freeways snake throughout this vision of Hell, the red tail lights of departing traffic balanced with the yellow-white of approaching headlights in what looks like California's most frequent invocation of Hell: the rush-hour traffic.
"Sandow Birk's ongoing project has been to revamp the language of history painting so that it fits California. This means bringing a Californian sensibility (surfer jokes, burger-joint references) to reiterations of history paintings while attempting to come to terms with a place where the idea of history itself is problematic. The mythology would have it that California went from pristine wilderness to suburban paradise in a single bound, thus erasing the genocide of the Native Californians and the marginalization of the Californios, who lived here when California was still part of Mexico; to say nothing of the environmental disaster and drive-by shooting that was the gold rush and the epic corruption of the railroad corporation that ran California into the 20th century . . .
"Birk's surfer series mocked histories that had unfolded elsewhere . . . and his prison paintings were situated in the absolute present. History is what gives a place meaning, and Birk has wrestled with the conundrum of California, a place full of amnesiac erasures of history and impositions of histories that never happened, a place where roots are, in some strange way, in the future. Rome was the eternal city; California, as Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, is the eternal present tense."