by Jerome du Bois
It would be funny except heroes are dying.
I'm talking about the chorus of artists, curators, collectors and art writers all straining in unison to make Sandow Birk significant, relevant, and talented. There's money and political cachet in it, after all. I'm sure he was a big hit this weekend. I guess singing in tune distracts these operators from what the eye sees: despite the 4' by 8' scale of The Depravities of War prints, Birk doesn't take advantage of the opportunity for creating more detail. These things are crude and lazy. The press release swoons:
Using Callot’s Miseries and Misfortunes of War as a starting point and casting their epic compositions in both America and in the ravaged landscape of Iraq, Birk’s prints depict the course of war and its after effects [sic]. Scaled up and utilizing the woodcut printmaking process to full graphic effect, the images are at once familiar and contemporary, while recognizable as drawing from traditions of art history. The project consists of 15 monumental woodcut prints, each measuring 48” x 96”.
"Full graphic effect" my ass. I'll be using the helpful folks at Hui Press, who know how to present graphics online, to detail examples of how bad a draftsman Birk really is, even "scaled up." The scaling up only magnifies the disappointment. (Look at his fires, his smoke, his clouds, for example. Clunky city.) And they shouldn't have brought up Callot. The reader should take some time examining the Hui Press suite, and then pop up this Temptation of Saint Anthony. Obviously, Birk is closer to Crumb than Callot. Or Goya. Or Doré.
No, I didn't see these things in person. I don't need to. What I did see awhile ago, out in Mesa, was Birk's big to-do about Dante's Divine Comedy. Catherine and I spent about forty-five minutes closely examining how his big dramatic paintings fall apart as you step closer, with buildings made up simply of little square dabs of paint. They reminded us of Andreas Gursky's photos, which we had seen before; like Birk's buildings and landscapes, they pixilate embarrassingly the closer the viewer gets. Those things definitely have a restricted viewing distance. Why make them so big, then? Because big sells. Rich people and museums have big walls to fill and other people to impress. (The prints at the Mesa exhibition showed that Birk is capable of some detail --though not modeling-- which makes these new prints all the more technically lackadaisical.)
More important, though, and not funny at all, is the subject matter --the Iraq War-- and here we see that the same crew is singing off the same page. I don't think it's inaccurate to say that most of the art people downtown and in the Valley are political liberals, and I know some are liberal fascists. In Catherine's words, All-American Anti-American Success Stories. I predict you won't hear a negative word about this show, only raves. Again from the press release (courtesy of Hearsight), which was probably written by "curator" Lara Taubman ("A Warlike People," "Holy Land"), still plowing her tiresome rut:
Images depict the attacks on the mosque in Fallouja, the torturing of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, and insurgent bombings of vehicles along Baghdad’s notorious Airport Road. As in current events, the initial invasion soon degenerates into guerilla warfare and chaos, popular uprisings, scenes of abuse, and eventually to the returning of wounded veterans and would-be celebrations of heroism. Like his predecessors, Birk’s prints draw on art history and current events in a polemical series that critiques the eternal and universally senseless practice of war and military injustice.
Notice there are no terrorists in Iraq. Only "insurgents," and "popular uprisings," and words like "degenerates" and "would-be," perpetuating the liberal side, liberal spin, liberal lies. We've heard this drone before. Was "A Warlike People" about the Polynesians? the Maori? the Yanomamo? Nigerian Muslims? the Janjaweed? the Taliban? Of course not. It was about the bad old USA of course, and the white men that blah blah blah.
A rut is only a grave that's open at both ends.
But enough about Taubman, who didn't have much to "curate" here, except maybe which pieces to put where. (And this show isn't even the main gig for these prints. That's someplace back East. You look it up.)
Let's look more closely at the details of some of these prints, and then turn to what Birk left out of his one-sided, anti-American narrative.
The title page shows some of the elements I want to point out. On both sides you can see fire and smoke, both of which look stiff and heavy, as if cut from tin. The sky features only long lazy lines, except for a toylike helicopter. Look at the grouping in the lower left. The repeated vertical shade lines remind one of Bill Mauldin's WWII cartoons. Finally, notice the kneeling Iraqis. Throughout the series there isn't a single Iraqi who isn't kneeling, bowing, raising their arms, running away, cowering, or having an American weapon aimed at them. Not one stand-up, honorable Iraqi. That's beyond shameful. Not to mention a single good American, of course. No binding of wounds here, only scattered body parts. Not a single good thing has happened in Iraq since the American invasion, according to Sandow Birk. Millions agree. I'm not one of them.
Let's skip through the rest of series, pointing out one or two things here and there. In Preparation check out the flat parachutes, stick figures in the middle background, stuffed-cotton sky, and wooden smoke. Same sky and smoke in Insurrection. Invasion shows better smoke --a hint of Rockwell Kent-- but the whole lower half is almost completely uninflected and washed-out, and there's no sense of perspective: we are supposed to be looking down into a vast desert valley, after all, following the trail of greased lightning. Oh, but nothing but lone and level sands don't stretch really nowhere, with again a few toy tanks pulling what looks like snowbanks behind them. Degradation --wonderful titles, no?-- shows once again a white-lozenge-filled sky, some of it inexplicably reflected in the lower foreground. Again, in the middle left background, Birk shows prisoners sitting cross-legged, but their heads are simple circles, and the guards behind them mere shadows. Lazy, lazy, lazy! When he shows groups, as in Insurrection and Repercussion, the figures blur into one another. Patriots signing up to fight appear in the print titled Obsession, the tenth print in the series and the first one to show a reference to 9/11 --in the background. The very technique itself, though, crude, casual, sketchy and cartoonish, is a dreadful and disdainful insult to the unforgiveable horror of that day.
So now we're into the subject matter. Running through the series again, one can focus on the dead Iraqis on the ground with the Americans just casually standing around; three prints on the subject of Abu Ghraib and torture; defenseless, sometimes naked, Iraqis, surrounded and bullied by strutting, arrogant, blank-faced troopers. Everything burning everywhere, except for Saddam's execution and the sterile committee room at the end of the series.
In Birk's world, there is no Taliban, no Osama bin Laden, no Flight 93, no devastated Pentagon, no vanishing Towers, no murderous 19 Saudis and Egyptians; no assassination of Daniel Pearl, no London or Madrid bombings; no mass graves in Iraq; no poisoned Kurds. No ten-year war between Iraq and Iran. No stonings, no women-killing for what amounts to sport. No evil Islamists, no Caliphate Dream. Sayyad Qutb, who he?
In Birk's world, Theo van Gogh is still offending people; hundreds of beheadings never happened: miraculously the blade passed harmlessly through all those defenseless necks. Looking through these fifteen giant images, we see not a hint that there were such people as Uday and Kusay Hussein; there were no rape rooms, no street abductions, no unexplained disappearances, no giant shredders, no throwing people off of buildings, no cutting out tongues, no starvation, no manipulation of the electric grid, no corruption, no hell on Earth in Iraq. In Sandow Birk's world.
And Hector Ruiz's, too, yeah? and Lara Taubman and the Hui Press people and everyone else who signs off on these obscenities. Who buys these prints, too. I condemn them all; these moral cowards need to change their ways; they need to change their souls. To find them first, though. I say it.
Strong words, yes. But I'm standing up, as best I can, for even stronger people. People five, ten, fifteen, twenty years younger than the cynical art players who both hate and benefit from America's incomparable system. I'm standing up for those who went to rescue other human beings from monsters, who risk their lives for strangers (and us) while we sleep safely in our beds. These privileged downtown Phoenix assholes sipping wine, smiling smugly and nodding knowingly at each other while pocketing profits from printed lies? They've got burnt holes for souls, every damned one of them; they've got nothing, nothing at all to bring forth and compare to such sheer clear honesty and clarity, and eternal shining honor, as our military holds high every day over there.
Posted by Jerome at March 9, 2008 09:12 PM | TrackBack