Sandow Birk's Inferno and Other Religious Works

Although I wasn't able to attend the screening of Birk's adaption of Inferno, I was able to watch it at a later time and I was really interested in the way he decided to portray the message that Dante was sending to his original audience. It's very obvious that Birk intended to modernize the journey and make its figures and themes relevant to an American audience. The film begins with images like the circle of lust as a kind of red light district and the circle of gluttony representing American obesity. Eventually Birk shows us that gays will be condemned to dance forever, flatterers are lobbyists on Capitol Hill, and Dick Cheney's real soul has already gone to hell. In the spirit of Dante, Birk makes many political references and his use of specific figures towards the end shows his feeling about American politics. All in all, the film is a wacky urban rendition of the classic, yet still makes its criticisms in a strong and clear way.

After seeing the movie, I went to Birk's website to find out more about him and see his other work. I was astounded by his different forms of visual art, from drawings to sculptures to murals. He seems incredibly skilled at fine detail drawings, such as his recent work "Proposal for a Monument to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (http://www.sandowbirk.com/drawings/recent-works/). However, I was more interested by other works of his that considered religious ideas. Looking into his drawings, I found a series of five drawings titled "The Ninety-Nine Names of God," in which Birk writes the different Arabic names of God around the forms of the five airports involved in the September 11th attack  (http://www.sandowbirk.com/drawings/the-ninety-nine-names-of-god/). It is another very finely detailed drawing and I was very impressed with the concept as well as the execution.

I looked through a few more categories of his work before I found one of his projects titled "American Qur'an" (http://www.sandowbirk.com/paintings/recent-works/). It is described as "An ongoing project to hand-transcribe the entire Qur'an according to historic Islamic tradition and to illuminate the text with relevant scenes from contemporary American life." At first I was confused about what this really meant until I scrolled down to see the pictures of the work. Birk not only writes out each line of the Qur'an, but does it in a style that combines traditional Arabic calligraphy and graffiti style and then lays it over illustrations of American life. I think it is an incredible project to take on and I would love to see the original work some day.

This "American Qur'an," as well as "The Ninety-Nine Names of God" show Birk's affinity for religious text and his attempt to retell these works to a modern audience, all while keeping with the style of his home in L.A.