art beat / By Jennifer Savage

Cut from the Headlines

Sandow Birk’s deeply intense “Depravities of War” at First Street Gallery

(April 9, 2009)  Smoke blackens the sky. Men with guns point them at men without. Those who can flee, do — but most lie dead or captured. “Occupation” is one of a series of large woodcut prints depicting the Iraq war as filtered through American media, currently hanging at Humboldt State’s First Street Gallery. Sandow Birk’s work expands eight feet wide, stretches four feet tall. Ten same-sized pieces fill, but don’t overwhelm, the remaining gallery space. It’s Friday and the only people in First Street are director Jack Bentley and a few HSU students preparing for the following night’s Arts Alive! opening. In the quiet, a viewer has ample time and space to absorb the work.

In contrast, Saturday’s opening manifested the usual giddy Arts Alive! crowd — folks chatting over glasses of wine, squeezing past someone lingering at the artwork or reading the student-generated text. The juxtaposition unsettles, but is not entirely inappropriate. Culled from TV and YouTube moments, Birk’s images illustrate how we remain both horrified by and distanced from such scenes. Woodcuts as a medium suggest a narrative, have a storybook quality that might even draw viewers to admire the craft before realizing the depth of what they’re seeing.

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Given the intensity of “Depravities of War,” one might expect the creator of such scenes to smolder as well. But Birk exudes calm. (Or maybe the tranquility stemmed from our discussion taking place over Sunday morning pancakes, sunshine streaming through the windows, the promise of good waves lingering in the air. Birk is a lifelong surfer who later braved the 48 degree water before racing off to help judge the annual HSU student show.)

“Depravities of War” grew from conception to completion at Hui No`eau Visual Arts Center, “a tiny art school” in Hawaii where Birk collaborated with expert printmaker Paul Mullawey. Inspired by 17th century printmaster Jacques Callot’s “Miseries and Misfortunes of War” — which also shaped Goya’s “Disasters of War” — Birk, Mullawey and Birk’s wife, artist Elyse Pignolet, used corresponding imagery from the Iraq War and spent months on the series, much to the chagrin of the school. Flights back to Hawaii and paper purchases prompted administrators to ask, “What are you doing? Why are we funding this? No one’s going to want to see this.”

Initially, the school proved right — even for an artist of Birk’s stature, finding a venue to display “Depravities of War” wasn’t easy.

“We had to get people to see it,” Birk said. “We had to justify it.” They contacted dozens of galleries to no avail. Finally, four places accepted the show. “Now the snowball’s rolling.”

One of the early shows took place at Louisiana State University, where negative portrayals of America’s Iraq occupation engendered enough controversy to occasion a panel discussion. A well-spoken “military guy” complained the show was one-sided, Birk said, alleging that the panels depicting scenes related to Abu Ghraib overemphasized the situation. Birk defended his choice, noting how those images dominated the news and were “a real turning point for American morale.”

Callot’s prints measure only about four-by-seven inches, the same size Birk planned to do. But Pignolet convinced him they needed to scale up. “So we just jumped in the car, went to Home Depot and bought the biggest piece of wood you could buy in Hawaii,” Birk recalled. The process proved lengthy. Birk sketched out ideas, the team blew the sketches up at Kinko’s, taped the copies to the plywood, carved, did test prints, carved some more, until at last a final print emerged. In the midst of what was supposed to be the final piece, news of Saddam Hussein’s execution came on. The artists gathered around the computer, observing the death as recorded on a clandestine cellphone. “We were all standing there, watching,” Birk said. “We knew we had to make another [print].”

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