SANDOW BIRK illustrates our periodic literary excursions. I became interested in his work before I knew anything about him. I’d picked up a book of his paintings of the state prison system, not the system itself in all its terrible manifestations, or even aspects of the system I saw in another painting the other day that I also liked very much, a painting by Chester Arnold whose painting depicted individualized con­victs walking in a perpetual prison yard circle. Arnold is also a painter who views industrial civilization as a literal blight on the landscape. He’ll paint a pristine country lane with scattered spills of books at the end of it, or a stream running clear but surrounded by clearcut stumps. But Sandow Birk’s prison paintings were of the prison structures themselves as seen from a distance in their soft natural settings. Looking at them was uniquely affecting, not jarring but topog­raphically contradictory, which they are in living fact because almost all our prisons are located in rural ar­eas, most of them placed in these areas as jobs pro­grams for depressed communities, and all of them just about as unnatural intrusions on the landscape as it’s possible to get considering both the human suffering they contain and the industrial-scale hugeness of them plunked down in an otherwise rural setting. Ever been to Pelican Bay just outside bleaker-than-bleak Cres­cent City? You drive along through the forest then it’s suddenly there, this giant concrete excrescence. Looking at Birk’s renditions of the prisons, I felt like I’d just walked up over a pre-industrial hill and there, suddenly, was one of our post-industrial holding pens, reproduced exactly in soft, sardonic pastels. I laughed because I was both surprised and amused, and I won­dered if my response was what the artist intended, not that he’s a guy who would seem to spend much time with his worry beads over public responses to his work which, in a word, is apocalyptic, great canvases of vast, final battles for Los Angeles, say, with skate­boarders battling the cops, and other satirical touches, all of it hugely rewarding the longer you look. Birk’s latest work is absolutely unique. Called “American Qur’an” it’s his illustration of about half the Koran’s 114 suras or stanzas. Alongside each of the thundering Old Testament-like prose passages, which Birk has copied out in his own bold print, a prose work of art by itself, he’s placed his rendition of the contempo­rary American experience. I found a lot of it funny as hell, frankly. His juxtapositions of the Koran’s dire moral instruction as illustrated by our slovenly vari­ousness! Paintings of chubby office pinkies next to an injunction on the necessity of honest labor; floozies alongside demands for female modesty. Oddly, though, the net effect of the work by this gifted infi­del confirms everything about modern Americans that terrifies fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians, for that matter, the two groups alike in emotional responses to life. The paintings confirm the decadence the Taliban-brains want to bomb out of existence. But fundamentalists ought to be as pleased with Birk’s illustrated Koran, at least as pleased as this particular decadent was, but the young man working the gallery desk said he was “apprehensive” about how Bay Area Muslims “would receive it. I didn’t stand around by the door the first week,” He said, adding, “but so far it’s all been positive.” I’ve read a couple of reviews of “American Qur’an” neither or which jibed with my impressions of it, but you can see it for your­self at the Catharine Clark Gallery at 150 Minna, San Francisco, which is an alley next door to SF MOMA.

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