A lively deathwatch

In spite of its title, “Leading Causes of Death in America” is actually a fairly upbeat series of work, according to artist Sandow Birk. Most subjects that Birk gravitates to -- gang violence, the growing prison population, rampant consumerism -- have the potential to dismay if not depress, but he leavens his work with wit and the reassurance of the familiar.

Birk is an irreverent mixer of the mythic and the mundane. He channels styles and strategies of past art to interpret present-day reality, enacting a delicious sense of time warp. He has recently published an adaptation of Dante’s “Inferno,” with illustrations set in contemporary urban America. Birk, a mellow surfer with an editorialist’s grasp of contemporary affairs, is a chronicler of life in the manner of Hogarth, Daumier, Goya and, lately, George Wesley Bellows.

The San Diego Museum of Art holds in its collection roughly half of the 200-plus prints that Bellows made. It was to these that Birk turned when the museum commissioned him to create a new body of work in response to something in its collection. The project is the third in the museum’s “Contemporary Links” series, organized by Betti-Sue Hertz, curator of contemporary art.

Bellows (1882-1925) called himself “a spectator of life, a reverential, enthusiastic, emotional spectator.” Like Birk, he fused the tender and the raw, his tone verging on satire at times, or scathing social critique. A political progressive and aesthetic moderate, Bellows is associated with the Ashcan School, a loosely knit group of painters devoted to urban realism and unafraid to portray its sooty underside. Though best known for his atmospheric boxing scenes, Bellows’ reach was broad, embracing portraiture, nudes and genre scenes. When he turned to lithography in 1916, his prints spanned a similar breadth.

The Long Beach-based Birk, 42, a 1988 graduate of the Otis Art Institute and recipient of J. Paul Getty and Guggenheim fellowships, created a suite of 10 etchings plus a title page. Each image relates to a specific cause of death -- suicide, accidents, heart attack, diabetes, stroke, cancer -- and many transpose individual figures from Bellows’ prints into new contexts. An exhibition continuing through Aug. 14 joins Birk’s set of prints with selections from Bellows and a small assortment of other prints that also served as source material. Upon completion of his final print, Birk discussed the project by telephone:

The way we are

I looked at a wide variety of work, but Bellows’ prints appealed to me because of his social themes and genre work. I’ve always been interested in the Ashcan School. They’re interesting to look at, but at the same time, they’re an odd bunch of guys. When Cubism was happening and all sorts of more radical things were going on, they were kind of steadfast traditionalists. They don’t seem to have been very fun guys to hang out with. They seem really stern people.

Originally, I didn’t know that much about Bellows. I knew his boxing paintings, his most well-known stuff. Some great prints I didn’t know about -- like the World War I work -- but there were also some that were really bad. I guess he was sort of experimenting with lithography and maybe doing some quick sketches as prints just to work on things. That’s interesting to me as an artist because I can see his work process happening, maybe his thinking process a bit, and that’s not something that you normally see in an artist’s work when you see it in a museum. You usually just get to see a few great pieces, not the lesser stuff, which is helpful.

When I sat down to really look at the compositions I could borrow from, I knew I wanted to use something from the boxing prints, to make that immediate connection between his work and mine. Then I looked for certain figures I could pull out. If I wasn’t pulling something out, I was trying to use dramatic lights and darks so my rich black tones look similar to his.

The images started as pencil drawings. Paul [Mullowney, of the Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center in Maui, where the prints were made] etched them into copperplates. When they’re etched and printed, they’re still only halfway done. A huge part of the process is working on the metal plates with special tools, grinding and scratching. We worked on it in a real physical way. He printed a piece every time I changed it, and there’s a big difference between the final prints and the pencil drawings. The drawings are all graphite and shiny, and the prints are really deep and rich.

Frequently, my subject and setting are contemporary, even if the style I might be depicting it in is from the past. To me, the work I do is not just about L.A. gang wars or drug deals. The subtext is about art itself and art history, thinking about what painting used to be and what painting is now, what history painting used to mean, a commentary on the whole history of art. Inside of me, that’s what’s going on. My works are stronger when there’s a direct connection between what I’m drawing from and how I’m changing it into something else. I start with an original thing, and my work is also a comment on that original thing.

The strength of doing this kind of work, using styles from the past, is that it makes that work really accessible. When I was doing the War of the Californias [“In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias,” 1995-2000], I was painting people fighting in Dodgers jackets, but the average person could see that I was working from a tradition of battle scenes and making jokes off that tradition: ‘Hey, he’s on a motorcycle, not a horse.’ If people can see the subject immediately and don’t struggle with how it’s portrayed, it comes to them easier. Then they’re going to think about the subject, [in this case] death in America.

When we finished the prints and it came time to sign them, I decided to title all the images with the medical names for the causes of death. As people were seeing them while we worked, there was a lot of discussion about the definitions of cancer -- like, does ‘cancer’ as a cause of death include breast, smoking-related, lung? -- so I decided to use the medical names that I found. And again, the 10 causes I depicted may or may not be the ‘top 10,’ according to which list you look on. Lists vary by who’s counting, age groups, race and definitions, so the ones I chose are ‘leading causes,’ not necessarily ‘the’ leading causes.

The Octavio Paz quote [on the title page: ‘Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are’] sums up the whole point of my project. It’s not about the morbidity of death but a comment on the way Americans live their lives.

If Bellows’ daughter [Jean, the subject of a portrait in the show and the basis for one of the figures in Birk’s image about diabetes] was alive today, statistically she’d be some chubby little kid eating Cheetos. Something like 70% of Americans are overweight. It’s so depressing and so enormous. I feel like any sort of artwork about America has to be about fat people, because it’s a fat nation. If you’re showing our world, you have to show people how they are.

Early on, when I was doing inner-city gang war paintings, I was living in East Hollywood, working in a storefront. If I couldn’t think of what clothes to put on a figure, I would open up my studio door and use the first person that came by. I would use those clothes for my painting. The randomness of real life became part of the artwork.

In my image ‘Malignant Neoplasms (Cancer),’ an average guy is shown at work surrounded by all the various things that may cause cancer: bad food and tons of meat ... smoking, stress from work, the giant drink on the right, overweight, out of shape. He’s working away, not getting exercise and being generally unhealthy.

For ‘Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases (Smoking),’ I was thinking of the group most at risk for smoking, teenage girls. So it’s a simple depiction of a high school girl smoking, smiling, and she’s at risk to be smoking now for life, along with all the complications and health problems that are going to come with that. So often the things that cause death in America are avoidable health risks whose effects are down the road and not really seen, even though they’re right in front of us.

I don’t think [the suite of etchings] is unflattering. It’s a straightforward portrait of regular Americans. I’m not picking through the mass of Americans to find the most attractive or unattractive. I’m looking for the average. I don’t think it’s necessarily an ugly thing. It’s an everyday thing, the same with Bellows and his genre scenes. That’s how we look now, talking on the phone while driving, drinking too much coffee, eating at our desks, being under stress and all that.

I’m a big fan of Hogarth, and I’ve done a spoof of his ‘Rake’s Progress.’ I can see the connection, but Hogarth seems to be more preachy. He’s showing you the result: Don’t go down this path because this is what’s going to happen to you. I don’t think I’m preaching. Maybe I am. It’s not my intention. I’m not trying to change anyone’s behavior. There’s no shortage of people being told to exercise more and eat less. There’s a barrage of messages to that effect, and we just keep getting bigger. I don’t think a suite of etchings in an art museum in the bottom left corner of America is going to change that.

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Sandow Birk: ‘Leading Causes of Death in America’

Where: San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park,

San Diego

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, until 9 p.m. Thursdays

Ends: Aug. 14

Price: $4 to $9

Contact: (619) 232-7931, www.sdmart.org