The last time that the artist Sandow Birk found himself concerned about responses from Muslims was in 2006. He was developing a film using puppets, inspired by his illustrations for a three-volume English-language version of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” when riots broke out over the Danish newspaper cartoons representing Muhammad.
The outcry prompted Mr. Birk’s film team to reconsider its own representation of the prophet. “We had Muhammad in our film because he was in Dante’s poem,” he said. “Dante put him in ‘Inferno’ as someone who supposedly created schisms.” He argued at the time for respecting Dante’s treatment of Muhammad, as artists like Gustave Doré had done before him.
But the film’s producers were spooked, and Muhammad disappeared from the film. “I thought it was wrong to act out of fear,” Mr. Birk said from his studio here.
“But I was upset for another reason too,” he admitted. His film collaborators didn’t know at the time, but quietly — privately — he had already embarked on another potentially controversial project: an effort to make by hand what he called a “personal Koran.”
Curious to learn more about the book at the heart of Islam and the center of so many global events, in 2004 he began transcribing English translations of the book’s 114 chapters and painting alongside them contemporary American scenes (though with no representations of Muhammad).
“I couldn’t help but think,” he said, “if this five-second clip in the Dante film could stir such debate, what was going to happen when I started showing my Koran?”
He will soon find out. The first exhibitions of Mr. Birk’s “American Qur’an,” a work-on-paper series that is roughly a third complete, is about to open: 30 hand-painted pages at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco starting on Thursday and another 30 at Koplin Del Rio gallery in Culver City starting Friday. (A New York exhibition slated for this fall at the P.P.O.W. Gallery was rescheduled for winter 2010 after a gallery fire.)
“We’re very concerned about repercussions from the Muslim community,” said the Culver City gallery owner, Eleana Del Rio. “But it’s important to know that Sandow did this with the best intentions, no irony or satire intended.”
After viewing an artist’s statement on koplindelrio.com, the gallery’s Web site, Usman Madha, director of public relations at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, cautioned that many Muslims might nonetheless find the project “insulting to the Islamic faith,” starting with its title. “There is no such thing as an American Koran, or European Koran, or Asian Koran,” he said. “If someone calls a work their own version of the Koran, they are misrepresenting the Koran as revealed to the prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel.”
That, coupled with the artist’s choice of narrative imagery, “could cause people to react in a hostile way,” he said. “If you look at Islamic history, we have never associated any revelations with imagery because it then becomes idol worship.”
Upon being told of the project, Marianna Shreve Simpson, an Islamic art and book-arts expert who is president-elect of the Historians of Islamic Art Association, anticipated that some Muslims might consider the use of figurative images in this context “heretical.” But she added that reactions are especially hard to predict in this case because it’s so unusual. “I’ve never in my entire career heard of an artist creating a handwritten copy of the Koran in English, and certainly not one that incorporates representational imagery. So this is completely novel, what he is doing.”
Formally Mr. Birk is known for novelty, for scrambling high and low art by updating genres like European history painting with a graphic, urban sensibility. For this project, he said, he paid homage to Persian miniatures by working with watercolors and gouaches and adopting a relatively flat, non-Western perspective. And in keeping with historic examples of the Koran he made blue, red and gold the touchstones of his color scheme.
At the same time his take on the Koran is highly unconventional, complete with gritty street scenes that reflect his own skate-surf aesthetic. His calligraphy is loosely based on Cholo graffiti associated with East Los Angeles. And instead of celebrating the text as the focal point in keeping with the Islamic bias against figurative imagery, he has painted elaborate narrative scenes underneath the written word.
“Given the global situation right now, the Koran may be the most important book on earth, but few Americans know anything about it,” he said. “I’m attempting to create visual metaphors that go along with the text and hopefully make it more accessible to Americans, more relevant to American life.”
One chapter, or sura, that he has transcribed, “The Romans,” celebrates humankind’s “varieties of language and color” as one of God’s many signs. To accompany it Mr. Birk painted an imaginary city block where many races and languages (signs appear in Persian, Korean and Spanish, for starters) coexist.
Another sura discusses divorce. For it Mr. Birk depicted a weary couple, the woman pregnant with a toddler in tow, facing off from a distance outside their home.
Another chapter describes “the chargers, snorting, striking sparks of fire, attacking in the morning, leaving dust behind them.” Mr. Birk updated the war-horse imagery by painting a modern-day stock-car race.
He insists that these paintings are not illustrations — that the verses are “too poetic and abstract” for that — but “highly personal meditations” that use an English-language version of the Koran as a departure point. This gets at his reason for embarking on the project. A longtime surfer who grew up in Seal Beach and painted surfboards in high school to make money, Mr. Birk has traveled frequently in the Muslim world over the last two decades, from Morocco to Indonesia, looking for good waves.
Along the way, whether visiting mosques in Java or looking at Korans in bookstores in Casablanca, he grew “more and more curious” about Islamic culture. So when he finished the Dante publication, another book project came to mind. He had the idea of studying the Koran, but as an outsider (who grew up “vaguely” Presbyterian and considers himself “curious but not religious”) instead of an insider, and as an artist more than a scholar.
Fairly early in the project he tried to contact a handful of Islamic scholars but said he did not receive responses. So the project remained not just personal but private, an American artist’s admittedly unorthodox, isolated, even Walden-like attempt to understand the Koran on his own and in his own terms.
He would start by meditating on a chapter, chosen from a copyright-free 1861 English translation by J. M. Rodwell, before transcribing it and painting a related scene. He visited the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and L’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to consult historic Korans and other source materials.
But he remained haunted by the idea that his project — which he said is meant to be “respectful and reverential” — could be radically misunderstood. “I’ve been more hesitant and self-doubting about this project than anything else I’ve ever done. I think the consequences of it being misunderstood are extreme.”
He expressed particular concern about the reception of one image. For the chapter “Smoke,” which predicts “a day when the sky will bring forth a smoke which will overwhelm the people,” Mr. Birk chose to paint a Manhattan street scene from 9/11. His crowd looks stunned as the first of the twin towers goes up in flames.
He said that he thought about the image “not twice, but 20 times,” recognizing that it could become “a flash point” for criticism. “I can foresee Islamic scholars saying that tying 9/11 to this verse in the Koran is not very peaceful or appropriate,” he said, adding by e-mail that he believes the 9/11 attacks were the work of “fanatics with their own agendas and not representative of an entire, global religion.” Ultimately, he said, he hopes that people recognize his use of the image as a “metaphor — for calamity, for suffering, for despair, for tragedy — rather than a condemnation or an accusation.”
His previous work, which tends to plumb hot-button social or political issues, has also been a magnet for public debate if not outright controversy.
In 1994, after a visit to San Francisco during which he was bombarded by what he called the city’s knee-jerk anti-Los Angeles sentiment, he decided the only solution was for Los Angeles to invade San Francisco in a series of battle paintings. “The series was funny on the surface,” he said, “but also about gay rights, the L.A.P.D., immigration and other serious issues affecting California.”
Three years ago, not long after starting his Koran project, he put that work aside to create a series openly critical of the United States invasion of Iraq: 15 wood-block prints called, with a nod to Jacques Callot’s 1633 etchings, “The Depravities of War.” His San Francisco gallerist, Catharine Clark, who once wrote that “no concept seems too large” for Mr. Birk to tackle, remembered some visitors criticizing the artwork and gallery as un-American.
And last year plans for a 104-foot-long mural commissioned for a police station in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles provoked a backlash from locals who called its images of Latino life stereotypical. The work consists of 4,000 hand-painted tiles that he created with his wife, Elyse Pignolet, a ceramicist. Today those tiles are still in storage.
In that case the controversy erupted before the mural was even installed because of a few advance images published on a city Web site. Mr. Birk said he’s taken that lesson to heart, which is why he’s waited to release a sizable body of work from “American Qur’an” at once.
“I didn’t want one photo leaking out and some viral e-mail going around the Middle East saying, ‘Stupid California surfer blasphemes the Koran,’ ” he said.
And what if there are charges of blasphemy anyway? To begin with, Mr. Birk reiterated a disclaimer from his artist’s statement noting that his art project is not meant to be a sacred book. “Really, technically, this wouldn’t even be considered a Koran by Islamic scholars because it’s not written in Arabic,” he said. (Ms. Shreve Simpson confirmed as much, saying, “The Koran only exists in the language in which the prophet Muhammad received the revelations, and he received and preached them in Arabic.”)
Mr. Birk also defended his work in terms of freedom of religious expression — and interpretation. “The Koran is supposed to be a message from God,” he said. “If God is speaking to human beings, I should be able to pick up this book and think about it. I should be able to contemplate what it means to me.”
Still, Mr. Madha at the King Fahad Mosque sounded worried. “With all due respect to people’s belief in First Amendment rights, the artist may be opening up a Pandora’s box,” he said. “And that’s the last thing we want in this day and age.”