Halfway through the course of his life, a man finds himself lost in a dark wood. A guide arrives to help him, but in order to be saved, the man must descend into the terrifying depths of Hell, where he will bear witness to the eternal torments suffered by countless sinners.
So begins the journey of Dante Alighieri, the 14th-century Florentine poet whose Divine Comedy has become a foundational work of Western literature. In the poem, Dante — guided by the Roman poet Virgil — travels through the nine circles of Hell, before moving on to the more uplifting realms of Purgatory and Heaven.
But for Sandow Birk, an artist from southern California, that pilgrim lost in the wilderness doesn’t actually go on any journeys through the afterlife. In Birk’s visual adaptation of the Divine Comedy, Dante stays firmly put on the streets of modern-day Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.
“In the pictures, it’s more like he didn’t really go to Hell,” Birk said. “What he did is he walked around the cities that he lived in, and this whole journey to Hell and Heaven was going on in his head.”
Birk’s reimagining of the poem began as a series of paintings in which Dante observes the horrible spectacle of Hell against a backdrop of references to modern American culture, from ATMs and SUVs to Taco Bell and Starbucks. From there the project expanded into a written adaptation, as Birk and friend Marcus Sanders created a translation of the poem to appear alongside the illustrations in a print edition.
Now Birk, 43, is preparing for the release of a film version of Dante early next year. Dante’s Inferno takes a different approach to the poem than Birk’s illustrations, imagining whom you would meet if you were to go to Hell today.
“If you know Dante, you’re gonna like it,” Birk said.
‘PAINTINGS THAT MATTERED’
Having grown up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Birk’s first paintings were about something he has long enjoyed: surfing.
After attending the Otis-Parsons Art Institute in Los Angeles, Birk studied painting and art history through exchange programs in France and England. There, Birk was influenced by the classical paintings he saw in the Louvre and other museums.
“It was just so amazing to me — especially being from L.A., from Hollywood — to study this time when painting was so important, when painting really mattered in the world,” Birk said.
Looking back on the works he saw in Europe, Birk was inspired to create art that would be equally relevant today.
“I kind of wanted to make paintings that mattered in our times,” he said.
As a result, Birk shifted his focus away from surfing and toward another aspect of California culture: the social issues plaguing the cities, such as gang wars, drugs and violence.
“When you’re a painter, you just sit home alone all day long, and you just paint,” Birk said. “And you’re listening to the radio, and you’re hearing about the war in Iraq, or the Rodney King beatings by police, and you’re just thinking about these things. To me it just seemed natural to then make paintings about them.”
With this sort of social commentary in mind, Birk produced his first large-scale series of paintings, entitled In Smog and Thunder, in which Los Angeles and San Francisco fight a fictional war for control of California. He also spent three years driving around California in the late 1990s working on paintings of all the state’s prisons for a series called Prisonation.
After that, it was on to Dante.
REVISITING A MASTERPIECE
Birk discovered a copy of the Divine Comedy in a used book store. The edition contained the famous images by Gustave Doré, the 19th-century French artist known for his illustrations of Dante, Milton and other writers.
After bringing the book home, Birk spent about a year reading bits and pieces and looking at the illustrations.
“The Doré classical pictures were just so amazing,” he said. “I started to think that I could do a new project sort of coming out of this, starting with the Doré illustrations and then changing them and doing what I had done with paintings, updating them so they’re relevant to our times.”
Birk’s illustrations bear a striking resemblance to Doré’s, often featuring Dante and Virgil in the same poses — but the devil, so to speak, is in the details. For instance, in Doré’s illustration of the circle of the gluttons, one sinner extends a hand toward Dante and Virgil. In Birk’s version, that hand holds a jumbo-sized cup of soda, while pizza, donuts and fried chicken are strewn on the ground.
However, Birk’s social commentaries go beyond simply poking fun at Americans’ eating habits. In the circle of the hypocrites, Birk depicts a line of people marching toward a mega-cathedral in Los Angeles.
“When I was working on the book, they were actually building that cathedral, and there was a lot of discussion … about the hundreds of millions of dollars they spent building this building, at a time when they could have been helping the poor people in the city or something like that,” he explained.
After deciding to include text along with the printed illustrations, Birk considered using one of the English translations already in existence, but they were difficult to obtain because of copyright restrictions. Sanders, a journalist who writes frequently on surfing, encouraged him to follow a simpler route: creating an entirely new translation.
Working with a variety of English editions, the two set out to create a text that would be easy to read, free of the footnotes found in most editions of the poem.
“It was never our intention to make the scholarly, exact version of Dante,” Birk said. “If you want that, then you go to the scholars.”
Birk worked on the project for about four years, immersing himself in translations and commentaries. In the process, he became increasingly fascinated with the layers of depth in the poem.
“The whole poem is appealing to me because Dante is sort of the everyman, and you can really identify with him,” Birk said.
Such a connection with the reader is one of many reasons Dante is still popular today, according to Dennis Costa, a Dante scholar and professor of comparative literature at Boston University.
“He’s presenting a picture of human nature which is very complicated and which is entirely relevant,” Costa said. “We recognize immediately in the Inferno situation our own tendency, the human tendency, to choose the less good, if not to do things that are absolutely vile and vicious. The Inferno is the front page of the newspaper every day.”
Peter Hawkins, another Dante scholar and a professor of religion at BU, agreed with this assessment of the poet.
“Here’s someone who is dealing with the big human topics of ‘What is love?’ ‘What is justice?’ ‘Who is God?’ ‘How does one live in the world with a sense of integrity?'” he said. “I think these are all ways in which he connects with an audience.”
Hawkins became interested in Birk’s adaptation of Dante when he attended a showing of Birk’s work in Los Angeles.
“I was intrigued by the undertaking to bring the poem into a contemporary vernacular language, and I was intrigued even more by the visual play of these pictures that were so provocative,” Hawkins said. “They were witty and funny, but they also made Inferno seem very close at hand. It felt as if he were bringing the city I was visiting, Los Angeles, into the Inferno, or showing the degrees to which it was the Inferno.”
Hawkins said the adaptation has been able to reach readers who would not be interested in scholarly editions of the poem.
“I think one of the peculiar powers of what he’s done is that it’s like listening to someone in a bar who’s telling you that he’s been to Hell, and what he saw there,” Hawkins said. “It has that quality, a kind of immediate, ‘God, you won’t believe what happened to me’ aspect to it, which does create a new kind of reader.”
MOVING TO THE SILVER SCREEN
Birk’s latest Dante project is Dante’s Inferno, a feature-length film set to premiere at a festival in Austin, Texas next year.
Birk, along with three collaborators, chose a unique method to tell the story of the Inferno: paper puppets.
The style is known as toy theater, and it was a popular form of children’s entertainment in the 19th century, making it appropriate for the kind of adaptation Birk had already done, he explained.
“This kind of puppetry was going on when Doré was doing the illustrations,” he said. “It seemed like a perfect match, since the whole project is sort of creating this Victorian sense of Doré’s work.”
But the film is not intended to simply transfer Birk’s previous adaptations to the screen. The script and artwork are new, and the premise — imagining whom you would meet in Hell today — is meant to be less serious, Birk said.
Elyse Pignolet, Birk’s co-art director on the film, said one of the reasons for choosing toy theater was a lack of money to spend on special effects.
“With a limited budget, you can do a lot with paper and scissors and glue,” she said.
While it took the team a year to create the script and puppets, they filmed the movie in less than two weeks, spending only about $300,000 and shooting everything live.
“It was sort of a goal that we had: Let’s make a movie nowadays with no computer effects,” Birk said. “We would have an idea … and if we couldn’t do it with, like, string and paper clips, then we just wouldn’t do it.”
The film is set to premiere in March, just when Birk’s next show — featuring paintings on the war in Iraq — will premiere in San Francisco. Birk said his only fear is that Dante’s Inferno “might be too smart for a real movie. If you don’t know Dante, it’s less interesting.”
“Our dream would be if it broke even, because we raised all the money from private people, and it would be really nice to pay them back,” he added. “If it broke even and people can see it, we’d be thrilled.”