Sandow Birk emerges from the same just-left-of-the-mainstream school that bred the latter-day Keane artists and he offers a further testament to the insight, intelligence and wit with which the post–baby boomer generation is utilizing its pop-culture saturation. In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias is a mock-historical multimedia installation depicting an imaginary war between northern and southern California. It is, like Ryden’s Keane piece, a delightful romp of appropriation fortified by a remarkable quantity of artistic skill. With battle scenes, military portraits, allegorical tableaux, naval dioramas and propaganda posters in the style of Delacroix, Goya, Jacques-Louis David and others, as well as extensive explanatory texts and an audio-guide CD (both conducted in a nearly flawless documentary voice), it is a massive, exhaustively intricate and thoroughly consistent construction. Like Stallings and Colburn, Birk clearly understands the limits and the possibilities of a museum setting and, indeed, of contemporary art in general. He plays up the authoritarian qualities of the museum environment rather than ignoring them; capitalizes on painting’s much-bemoaned historical trappings rather than trying to avoid them; and utilizes the typical viewer’s zombielike submission to the museum audio tour rather than decrying it.

Ultimately, In Smog and Thunder is a grand analysis of the symbologies (i.e., networks of pop culture) by which Californians define themselves. It examines who manufactures the symbols, how the symbols develop, how we read them, where we place them and why we need them. Every work in the show is strewn with emblems of present-day life: sports-team logos, laptop computers, the Thomas Guide, leaf blowers, skateboards, sport utility vehicles and, of course, plenty of corporate icons. The specificity of these emblems to particular ethnic, socioeconomic and geographical groups is clearly established, and the resulting cacophony is depicted as both the cause of California’s civil unrest and the key to its resolution. A propaganda poster on the San Francisco side, for example, personifies Los Angeles as a hulking monster with the head of Mickey Mouse, a cage labeled “La Migra” with a frightened Latino family inside for a torso, and limbs labeled “Hollywood,” “Major Labels,” “Adult Film Industry” and “Water Pipeline.” Los Angeles’ self-styled muse, on the other hand, is a pregnant Latina with an Oscar in one hand and a skateboard in the other, one white and one black cupid floating above her head, and a TV camera, a soccer ball and a can of spray paint at her feet.