L.A. Man

by Joe Donnelly

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  Sandow Birk, now forty-six, grew up in Seal Beach. He started surfing when he was eleven. Like a lot of kids around those parts, he rode his bike to the beach in the morning to get a session in before school. On the other hand, Birk’s parents, who were refugees from Detroit, didn’t acclimate well to certain aspects of the 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 his parents invoked an every-other-day rule for surfing when he started succumbing to catnaps as a result of his morning sessions. Showing early signs of the motivation (and defiance?) he would later apply to some of his more ambitious projects, Birk skirted the rule by sneaking out at night and rolling the family car silently down the driveway. He and his friends would then make a break for some night surfing at the Huntington Beach pier, which was lit up to the end, “So you could see the sets coming in,” says Birk.

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

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

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

  Not surprisingly, mainlining the LA punk-rock scene had an influence on the young man. “I was going to try to be an architect, but I was always that kid who drew on the folders and stuff at school and then painting surfboards in the factory and then…ah, I just didn’t want to go be an architect,” he says, “so I went to art school instead.”

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

  Enticed by the availability of cheap spaces, artists, punks, and bohemians started the first wave of post-Watts downtown backfill. For Birk, his first 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 totally blown away. I didn’t even know you could do that. I didn’t know there were people who were, like, really artists, in the city in our time.”

  We’re talking over lunch at a boisterous restaurant in downtown Long Beach near Birk’s home. After a long time in Hollywood, Birk and his wife, the talented artist and sculptor Elyse Pignolet, whom Birk met in San Francisco, now reside in Long Beach. Their home is in the Masonic Temple, a beautiful 1920s building built by the Long Beach masons for their headquarters. It was converted to multifamily lofts a few years ago and is now called the Temple Lofts.

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

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

  “So then,” he continues, “I really wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t really like school. So I dropped out with my high school friend and had this idea to drive to Brazil. We took my car and just started driving. We drove all through Mexico and the car eventually blew up. So we took the bus 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 shape, and Birk would glass and paint.

  “We were just out of high school, you know; we weren’t very good or anything, but as we’d travel along, we’d work in all these different places, like in Mexico, Ecuador. We’d pull into town, and there’d be one guy making surfboards, and 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 to make the tri-fin. And everyone would be, like, you can stay here for, like, a week, and we’d show them all the tricks and they’d say, ‘Oh, call this guy when you get to the next town.’ So we were able to work all the way down.”

  Birk arrived in Rio the day before Carnival with two hundred bucks in his pocket. In 1984 dollars it was just enough to make it through the five days of partying that greeted him. Luckily, when Carnival ended he and his friend had an audition with the head of the local surfboard factory.

  “He was a really cool guy, Daniel Freeman, the first Brazilian on the World Tour in the seventies,” says Birk. “Remember the Bronzed Aussies? He started the Brazilian version of that. They were called the Brazil Nuts. They had matching track suits of the seventies.”

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

  “He was, like, ‘Yeah, I’ll get you a job when you get there.’ And we got there and no job, no nothing. That’s when my buddy and I split up. We got in a big fight in a bar in Wales, and I haven’t seen him since,” says Birk. “It turned out he was smuggling cocaine in from Rio. That was part of his scheme to keep traveling, and I didn’t know about it... And then it got ugly.”

  Stranded overseas with no money 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 to go home, so I went to college. I did a semester in Paris and a semester in England. I went to school in Bath. From Bath I could take the train and go surfing at Swansea out in Wales and make it back to school.”

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

  Before that, though, Birk would struggle to find the confidence to take himself seriously as an artist, a journey that took him back to Rio when he was done soaking up old-world art history.

  “I had saved up money and bought a one-way ticket to Rio, and I was like, I’m going to go to Rio for the summer to see my friends and then I’ll go to school. And then I got a full-time job, I got an apartment, and so then I stayed three years,” explains Birk, chuckling 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 insane. I was twenty-six; I was single. I’d ride a motorcycle with a surf rack on it, and I had a one-bedroom apartment a walk from the beach, and I was surfing eve
ry day in the tropics,” he says. “Wow.”

  Up until then, Birk had been drawing “tons and tons of sketchbooks” but was daunted by the 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 first time, you know, just getting a canvas and painting a picture—not a school assignment or something,” he recalls. “For a year I did a whole series of like twenty paintings.”

  The experience taught Birk that he could motivate himself and not only paint but also have something to say as an artist.

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

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  One of Birk’s earliest painting series, featured in The Surfer’s Journal some seventeen years ago, places surfers in the middle of paintings overtly referencing neo-classic masterpieces such as John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark. In Birk’s fabulist concoction, it’s called Aggro Crowd at Lower Trestles.

  In a later series of urban paintings, Birk depicts a drive-by shooting (Death of Manuel) in the same heightened tone in which Jacques-Louis David, the nineteenth century neo-classical painter and revolutionary, portrayed the slaying of his friend, the radical publisher Jean-Paul Marat (Death of Marat). The subtexts are many layered. Marat was an associate of Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. His killer was cliqued up, so to speak, with the more moderate Girondist faction.

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

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

  Prisonation: Visions of California in the 21st Century takes its cues from nineteenth century American landscape paintings to depict all thirty-three state prisons against their formerly idyllic backdrops. One is left with a sense of paradise lost one doesn’t normally associate with prisons. Later, Birk would interpret Dante’s Divine Comedy through the point of view of a South Bay slacker. The ambitious wood-etching series Depravities of War, finished just a couple of years ago, takes on the Iraq War and is inspired by seventeenth century artist Jacques Callot’s The Miseries of War, which was inspired by Francisco De Goya’s The Disasters of War. Tonally and formally, Birk recalls both in his series.

  Birk’s use of 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 Shakespearian proportions? Both? Birk’s painting won’t tell you, but 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 in Europe, just seeing those old paintings,” he says. “I just started copying them early on, I think as just sort of a way to learn how to paint better, stealing their ideas. That’s the way it sort of grew.”

  If it was surfing that set Birk on his wandering path, it was also surfing that helped him define what he wanted to do when he finally returned to Los Angeles and art school in the late eighties.

  “Back then, it was like to do anything serious you had to move to New York, and I totally didn’t want to move to New York because I didn’t want to quit surfing. So then, I was kind of pissed off that LA isn’t bigger, so I sort of on purpose made LA the subject of everything. I wanted to make LA the art center... I was like, I’m going to paint my fucking city.”

  Birk stops himself and laughs at his hubris. But he is a bit of an anomaly. Outwardly, he bears none of the signifiers of the modern artist: no full-sleeve ink, no ironic facial hair, no contrived eccentricities. But the fact is, Los Angeles has become one of the important art centers of the world, and Birk has grown right along with it adding maturity to his ambition and grasp to his audacity. In the process, he’s become one of the city’s most significant artists.

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

  Now in a more mature phase in his life and work, 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 Ethiopian soul-food restaurant down the street from his gallery. “You know, I did the War of the Californias thing and I did the California prisons thing, and then the Dante thing spanned American [concerns], whereas the Iraq War project and the Koran thing are more international. We are consciously trying to take on the themes that are more globally relevant. I don’t want to be just a West Coast California artist. Not anymore, anyway.”

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  In an hour or so, Birk will face those aforementioned Otis alumni and their anxieties. Speaking of which, since American Qur’an opened at her gallery, Del Rio tells me that despite the initial hysteria, the Muslim community has been mostly supportive, while the flack has come from the Christian right. Surprise, surprise. And while Del Rio believes Birk has “reached a new level of maturity for where he is in his artistic career,” no one’s betting he’s going to fully give up board for brush.

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

  Birk is more modest about it. “I don’t think I’m getting better, but I don’t think I’m getting worse. I’m right on that cusp where it’s going to start going down-hill... I’m going to be frickin’ fifty in like four years,” he laughs, but 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, or even, yikes, a funboard.

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

  The day after the reception, Birk and his wife fly to Lisbon for a long vacation. She’s pregnant with their first child, a girl. Birk says he’s thrilled at the prospects of being a dad. I ask him if he feels like he’s settling down in his art and in his life, becoming...less punk?

  “No, no. More punk,” he laughs. “Do it yourself: that was the punk motto. Don’t do what you don’t want to do. Don’t get a job, live every day... Hey, it goes with the surfing motto, too.”

  What’s Wrong With Wes Anderson?

  Originally published in the LA Weekly, November 20, 2009

  Author’s note: Ten years later, some things had changed.

  If we were back in Wes Anderson’s native Texas, the plate of food he’s showing little mercy might be called the Morning Roundup or the Wildcatter’s Special. Unfortunately for m
y wallet, we’re in a booth at Kate Mantilini on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, and here it’s called Barry’s Breakfast and costs about four times more than it has any right to. Anderson spears an Italian sausage link (butterflied and grilled), bites off a chunk, holds the remains in the air for a moment, and confesses, “It’s my second breakfast.” Despite that, he’s more than game when I suggest splitting a side order of pancakes. The thin man’s unexpected voraciousness reminds me of the last time I saw him.

  It was a little more than ten years ago when I accompanied Anderson on a road trip that started in Los Angeles on the morning that his breakthrough movie, Rushmore, opened here and in New York. With each mile marker on our way to Texas, the first stop in a journey that would propel him to New York and beyond, came reports from theaters on both coasts. The reports were good. Anderson’s quirky story of a love triangle between a rich industrialist played by Bill Murray, an eccentric prep-school rebel played by newcomer Jason Schwartzman, and a first-grade teacher touched a nerve with a certain audience that appreciated its postmodern updating of The Graduate by way of Harold and Maude.

  As the miles passed and the momentum built, it became clear that the horizons of Anderson’s future were expanding in ways that few people experience. Just two years earlier, his first feature, Bottle Rocket, had crashed and burned so badly that his panicked writing partner and muse, Owen Wilson, suggested they put as much distance as they could between themselves and the now-beloved cult classic. “When eighty-five people get up and leave the theater, you kind of get the message that something’s wrong,” says Anderson, remembering a particularly bad screening. That all changed in a day: Rushmore would soon be nominated for Independent Spirit and Golden Globe awards and placed on many critics’ year-end Top Ten lists, not to mention relaunch Bill Murray’s career. Suddenly, we were driving into a landscape of endless possibilities—terrifying in some ways, or so I imagined. Anderson, though, seemed poised and welcoming. Besides, the white Ford Explorer he had apparently convinced Disney to rent for him in perpetuity was stocked with a cooler full of sandwiches, sodas, and various snacking items. What could go wrong?