GIBBERINGS

Why the hell not?

Batman obsesses me.

And not even the franchise, because I simply don’t care. I’ve never stirred to purchase, collect, or read any official Batman comics. I picked up Arkham Asylum from someone’s coffee table and thought it was wonderful, but didn’t buy my own. I’ve always avoided “superhero comics” and been aggressively bored by ones I’ve opened in comic shops.

My own personal Batman is something of an archetype. A symbolic Man, an object of ridicule and affection, a torture subject, a grotesque, and a sex object. He is built for me to tear down.

Keaton is the only Batman. His smallness, his over-unctuous disapproval, his eyebrows. His petulance. His sleaze. And his performance was locked into the forty pound rubber suit, the one that fit like a spinal injury brace, preventing him even from looking over his shoulder. He was rigid, and helpless. Madness churning under a matte black shell.

Petulant.

Batman’s mask is lingerie. It conceals, and reveals, a face made for objectification. The leather fetishism of it, the animalism, even the aerodynamics: they turn his whole torso into a Cadillac. It is everything but human, but for the mouth, which is presented. That brilliant scene in Spider-Man where the ugly girl rolls up Spider-Man’s mask in the rain, using his mouth as he hangs there, bound up in his own sticky threads, that’s Batman all the time. He’s faceless, but orificed. His five o’clock shadow, that noir symbol of virility, is brazenly on display. While the rest of his face is armored, he is unable to defend his mouth. He is as anonymous, and accessible, as a masquerade orgiast.

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

A few days before the 17×17 SWEATSHOP rolled out at the X17 gallery in Seattle, I went for a visit to Redd and Carl. Carl was painting a series of neon nudes, studies of his candy-colored female friends, all beautiful and arched and counter-cultural. He told me the story of a drunk friend coming for a studio visit, and interrogating him about the pieces: why were they all pretty women? Why naked? Why fetishized? She made him examine his motives, he said, his meanings. I forget his conclusions, but he mentioned the Male Gaze, one of the lynchpins of art history, and followed it with his lack of faith in the concept itself.

Raised by a half dozen sisters, Carl is what someone more flippant would call a SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy). Meaning, he has the gestural gentleness, and lack of malice, that comes from being raised with the concept of women as just another flavor of human being. He seemed doubtful of the idea that women could be shackled in art, the way the Male Gaze theorists suggest. While I was impressed with his attitude, I told him I was a believer. I know Gazing. I do it all the time, in fact, but I hesitate to call it the Female Gaze, despite the tumorous growths on my chest.

My biggest failing as an artist is my lack of consistency. My eclectic style is good for commercial work, but awful for forming any sort of cohesive body of work. I have, in fact, failed to form cohesion in 25 years of drawings. The only thing you can track from drawing to drawing is my subject matter, but even that is subject to tectonic shifts. I am restless, and transient, alighting on one subject after another, discarding them when I feel I have “done” with them. Biting, shaking my head, scattering body parts, leaving the remains on some poor bastard’s porch. And so on.

No solution presents itself. So I have invented one. For the entirety of 2010, I will make drawings of Batman. I will subject him to my gorgonian gaze, freezing him in the postures I see fit. At the end of the year, there will be a massive show. All the Batmans. It will be called “Batmans”.

What choice do I have?