Not long ago, while winding down a day with an episode of Dexter, my betrothed turned to me and asked if I thought that Dexter’s actions are acceptable.  Vis-à-vis, is the killing of one murderer by another murderer a morally just outcome?

At first my thinking in the discussion that followed revolved around the real world. Evaluating my moral principles (murder is always wrong, no matter how justified) within the construct of living in modern-day America, and all the enactments of law and recourse it provides, quickly became a poor model to me in terms of the program. The crimes we’re generally faced with in reality, particularly on the evening news, are curt and reckless. They exist in the realm of information: facts, linear developments, static characters—not the realm of storytelling as a locus. This subtle break from reality into fiction plays a significant role in adapting our collective morality: when what we abhor in the real, we revel in the fantasy.

Obviously, Dexter is a scripted television program. We know it’s fictional. One can watch Michael C. Hall be interviewed and hear him talk like a normal human being. And as fans of the show are keenly aware, the character of Dexter Morgan is based on the novel about a serial killer, written by Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter (after the first season, subsequent seasons are written independently from Lindsay’s continuing novels on the character). In thinking about the question, which has remained lodged in my head for some time now, the thought occurred to me that while Dexter appears as a sort of anti-hero protagonist, his character is based on the traditional paradigm of comic book heroes of yore: Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, et al.

At first the idea struck me as absurd; after all, it’s a show about a sociopathic serial killer, not a search for truth, justice, and the American way. But part of the ingeniousness of the series is found in modernizing an older, culturally devoured model into a mode that’s edgy, and a bit more sophisticated in the 21^st century.

It’s not difficult to find similarities in the origin of Dexter with a number of popular heroes from Pax Americana Graphica Novela: Take a troubled childhood for example. Dexter Morgan witnessed the brutal murder of his mother at a very young age. So did Batman (his father too). Dexter was raised by a loving and supporting foster family. So was Superman, Spider-Man, and to an arguable degree, Batman as well (by Alfred). Dexter learned in his formative, early-teen years that he was “different” from other kids. See also, Superman, Spider-Man, and any of the X-Men not named, “Wolverine.” You get the idea. But it was amusing to me that a notion that initially seemed a farcical stretch of association was actually closer to plagiarism.

From the standpoint of the real world, I’m surprised that Dexter’s “Dark Passenger” compromises a part of “self;” Dexter is always cognizant of his socially disruptive urge to kill. And while it makes for a deeper and more interesting character, I’d think it more likely that a split personality would have emerged from his early childhood trauma. Still, we have a character with an ever-present understanding of who he is and what he’s capable of doing, and deliberately holds back that self while in public, ala Superman—the prototypical alter ego.

To be continued in Part 2…

On a recent trip to Nashville, TN I had the opportunity to catch the Wide Angle: Photography and Its Influence on Contemporary Art exhibition at the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery (January 13–February 27, 2011).

While I was particularly, and pleasantly, surprised to see one of Gerhard Richter’s photo-lithographs included in this exhibition (which contained works from other well-known artists including Kiki Smith and Andy Warhol), I was most intrigued by the German printmaker, Christiane Baumgartner, and her 2004 work of twenty-five woodprints, 1 Sekunde.

In this work, Baumgartner’s modernized take on ukiyo-e (literally translated: “floating world”) printmaking by distilling video into a still image through a computer, then meticulously reproducing and carving the wood block from a printed page to arrive at the final printed image, explores the notion of ”moment” by expanding one second to what could be taken as infinity.

1 Sekunde is not a departure of technique or approach to Baumgartner’s overall body of work, though the smaller scale of the prints that line an entire wall nearly elicits the feeling of watching someone’s paranoid-level collection of 9” black-and-white security monitors. But the linear presentation successfully expands her central motive in the work: stretching one second of time from video taken from a moving car into twenty-five individual images (each .04 of a second).

In the modern world we’ve become conditioned to the slow-motion scenes of action movies that serve to draw out the tension of a plot development, just as we’re even more accustomed to the relative banality of transport by motor vehicle and watching the world pass by through the lens of a passenger window. What’s significant in this juxtaposition is that by combining the two ideas in this manner, Baumgartner gives the audience a sense of the dramatic, without the drama—the ordinary, made epic.

The very process of Baumgartner’s technique compounds this notion even further: the time spent setting up the camera, taking to the road, returning to the studio, loading the video on to her computer, settling on the second of video to use, distilling the frames, printing them, copying them to boards, cutting them by hand—a high level of investment, all for one second of passing scenery that one would miss by simply blinking during an otherwise uneventful automobile jaunt between points A and B.

There’s no invitation whatsoever that this moment presented to the audience is of any particular significance in and of itself. Rather, Baumgartner suggests a world omitted. The trees, flora, and fauna of landscape in visual art constitute a great deal of the composition and feel of an image; often, it’s what the artist wants us to focus on. But in the age of the automobile, much of what could be a marvelous scene has become a nuisance: “stuff” along the way that only reminds us that we’re between where we were and where we’re going. The landscape becomes a geographical impediment, and our collective response is to tune it out altogether with indifference.

Interestingly, it’s the technology of capturing and reproducing time and place that Baumgartner uses to such great effect in 1 Sekunde that makes it possible to critique another technology that blurs our sense of time and place.

I’m going to miss George Carlin. Not as though I knew the man; I never even saw him live. A good friend introduced me to him fairly late in his career, which for me opened up an archive of commentary that had permeated my adult life, most of which I’d consider to be his best and most poignant material–pretty much from “What Am I Doing in New Jersey?” onward.

I was more disappointed in the media’s reporting of his passing and career, particularly as it came on the heels of Tim Russert’s death a week prior. Everything I read or saw on Tim Russert was a flower piece, highlighting his dedication and achievements as a journalist and his prominent role in past elections, as though being a wizard with a dry erase board in the 21st century is some sort of unrivaled, technical feat.

Meanwhile, every news piece on Carlin highlighted his controversial career in comedy, particularly the topics of censorship, religion, and politics, while giving a paragraph’s nod to his past drug and heart problems (the latter being the cause of death for both men). That’d be relevant, except that Carlin lived to age 71, Russert to 58, and I didn’t catch a single sentence on Russert’s diet or excercise regimen.

Russert was very adept at shaping every dialogue into the fashionable pro/con, black & white dichotomy that’s become standard today, which is vastly easier and more audience captivating than actually investigating why only one in one-hundred scientists deny global climate change or its probable cause in human activity/industrialism, for example. But he was proficient in counting to 270, which would rank him near the top of any 5th-grade classroom in America, and he was apparently loved by everyone who knew him. Of course, great journalists aren’t loved by many people; they’ve pissed off too many of them by doing their job: telling the story that the people involved don’t want you to tell, to people who might not be ready to hear the truth. A beloved journalist is a lousy journalist. Period.

Carlin asked the questions that highlighted inconsistency, especially ones relating to religion, language, and logic. The sort of queries that beg for, but don’t recieve, a good or reasonable explanation, like why most Christians who are pro-life also support capital punishment, as though “Thou shalt not kill” has negotiable properties of meaning. But in his comedic commentary, nothing was taboo (as his role in the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in F.C.C. vs. Pacifica Foundation will attest), and oftentimes, only in crossing that perceived line of decency could a meaningful understanding begin: “There’s nothing wrong with the word, ‘nigger,’ in and of itself; it’s the racist asshole who’s using it that you ought to be concerned about!”

I’ll miss George Carlin, the comedian, but what I’ll miss most is George Carlin, the most prominent, vocal, and reasoned critic and voice of dissent America may have ever had.

“I don’t like words that hide the truth.”

~George Carlin ( May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008 )

There are parallels of the rule in poetry and painting too. Yesterday I discovered this really nice little area in a painting I’ve been working on, and instead of killing it instantly, I changed the rest of the picture to accommodate this one area, effectively turning the overall picture into another image that I’m not at all pleased with.

Painting is not confined to acts of creation, but equally aligned with acts of destruction–whether on the canvas or en route to the waste bin.

A respectable portion of the time, one thing leads me to another thing, which might lead me to something else not quite as good, but that directs me to another, even better thing, and so on.

For example, watching Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog lead me on to read Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Other Stories (which I’d rank right with J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories) and Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai. Hagakure, being focused on the ways and mentality of being a good warrior, understandably often slights and dismisses the arts as a folly or distraction from what’s important–being a good retainer, developing quick and sound judgement, etc. Yet there is a scattering of passages that relate to the nature of making art, sometimes quite directly:

Master Ittei said, “In calligraphy it is progress when the paper, brush, and ink are in harmony.” Yet they are so wont to be disjointed!

This is as profound and succinct an understanding as I’ve read anywhere else, by anyone else, in or out of the brain trust of art, and reminds me to always look beyond the walls of my studio, a museum, or a gallery; precious truths abound everywhere.