Super-Weirdo Joe Coleman Retrospective (FWD from St. Ken Huey)
Rev. Ivan Stang
September 3, 2006
Joe Coleman Gets a Retrospective at the Tilton Gallery in Manhattan
By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH
IF P. T. Barnum had hired Breughel or Bosch to paint sideshow banners,
they might have resembled the art of Joe Coleman. Obsessively depicting
a grim moral universe of transgression and retribution, Mr. Coleman
paints grotesque images of murderers and victims, freaks and monsters,
disease, depravity and perversities of every kind.
In his painstakingly detailed paintings, Charles Manson leers, JonBenet
Ramsey pouts, pinheads dance, drunkards lie with poxied whores, and
corpses display their wounds like obscene stigmata. Drug addicts loll
in ruined cityscapes under boiling H-bomb skies, 1930's gangsters grin
on their way to the gallows, and Mr. Coleman and his wife, Whitney
Ward, reign over the apocalypse, enthroned on the head of a giant
Satan. In a startlingly prophetic vision of his from 2000, the twin
towers burn.
A retrospective of Mr. Coleman's art over the last 16 years will open
at the Tilton Gallery in Manhattan on Thursday. With 33 paintings and
installations, it will be the largest exhibition of his work ever held
in New York, the city where he has lived for 30 years, yet where he has
always operated outside the fine-art mainstream.
Simultaneously a miniaturist and a maximalist, Mr. Coleman wears
jeweler's magnifying lenses and uses single-hair brushes to cover every
micron of his surfaces, including the frames, with minute pictorial
detail and tiny text. He paints "one square inch at a time," he said,
never sketching or plotting out the completed work in advance.
"The composition reveals itself to me," he explained in an interview.
A large work, roughly three by two feet, painted in acrylic on wood,
can take up to a year to complete.
Mr. Coleman says his obsession with religion and death goes back to
his childhood. Growing up in Norwalk, Conn., he recalled, he played in
the cemetery across the street, lived in fear of his alcoholic father
and went to church with his mother, an excommunicated Roman Catholic.
Placed in a school for disturbed children, he doodled bloody martyrs
and once "confessed" to a priest that he had committed several murders.
After moving to New York in the mid-1970's, he studied briefly and
unhappily at the School of Visual Arts, before being expelled, he said,
for making art that his teachers called "fascist" and "schizophrenic."
Meanwhile he drew underground comics, began to exhibit in small East
Village galleries and appeared in independent films like David
Wojnarowicz's "Where Evil Dwells," in which he was typecast as Satan.
Through the 1980's Mr. Coleman acted out his shocking and violent
cosmology in infamous performances at performing arts spaces and
galleries. He revived the sideshow geek act of biting the heads off
live mice, outraging animal rights advocates. He set fires onstage,
once threatened an arty crowd with a loaded shotgun, and often
concluded his act by igniting a chest-pack of dynamite, an explosive
stunt for which he was arrested in Boston in 1989 on charges of
operating an "infernal machine." He framed the arrest warrant.
Now 50, his Mephistophelean beard streaked with gray, Mr. Coleman
mostly confines his provocations to his paintings and expresses his
sideshow interests through the Odditorium, his name for the small
Brooklyn Heights apartment he and Ms. Ward share with a dime museum's
worth of curiosities.
Wax effigies of O. J. Simpson, Lenin and the serial killer Richard
Speck stand near photographs of Mr. Coleman and Ms. Ward's 2000
wedding, a sideshow affair in itself, held at the American Visionary
Art Museum in Baltimore. (Mr. Coleman, dressed like a carny pitchman,
came to the altar in a coffin, while dwarfs carried Ms. Ward's train.)
A lock of Charles Manson's hair lies near a reliquary that supposedly
holds a bit of Jesus' bone marrow. John Dillinger's death mask, a
bullet from Jack Ruby's pistol and other outré bric-a-brac crowd the
living room, leaving only enough space for an antique settee as
furniture.
For most of Mr. Coleman's career his macabre visions and unironically
primitive style earned him a cult following even as they positioned him
far outside the mainstream.
Though his work hasn't changed much, curators and gallerists have
expanded their purviews. After Damien Hirst's dissections, Henry
Darger's drawings and shows of graffiti taggers, it's not such a
surprise that Mr. Coleman has become more of an insider recently. His
paintings now sell for $100,000 and up. He has had solo exhibitions at
the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Corcoran Gallery in Los
Angeles, and has put on an extravagant multimedia presentation at the
Barbican Theater in London. Even the School of Visual Arts invited him
back as a student adviser.
Now he goes uptown for his first solo gallery exhibition in New York
City since 1992. "I always knew," he said. "I take the work very
seriously. I knew where it belonged."
The Tilton Gallery's owner, Jack Tilton, said he was introduced to Mr.
Coleman's work "eight or nine years ago" by a collector, Mickey Cartin,
who helped organize the exhibition.
"I'm into eclecticism and individuality," Mr. Tilton said in an
interview. "Most of what we show has an edge. It's got to move my gut."
He argued that it was appropriate for an eccentric like Mr. Coleman to
be showing on the Upper East Side, rather than in the Chelsea art zone,
with what he called its "mall" atmosphere.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Cartin, a well-known collector of
outsider and contemporary art, said: "I've been encouraging Joe to do
this for some time. Joe's the real thing, truly one of a kind. I just
thought it was sad that nobody knows about him in the New York art
world."
The paintings in the show date from 1990 to a new portrait of Johnny
Eck, the "half man" who appeared in Todd Browning's film "Freaks."
Another recent portrait is of Mr. Coleman's friend Larry Desmedt, a
Coney Island legend known as Indian Larry who died in a motorcycle
accident in 2004. Installations will include selections from the
Odditorium and a large construction from 2003, "As You Look Into the
Eye of the Cyclops, So the Eye of the Cyclops Looks Into You." It
represents a giant, old-fashioned television console, 66 inches high by
38 inches wide, a homage to the electronic monolith he says he
worshiped from the floor as a child.
On Friday at 9 p.m. the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in the East Village
will screen some of the films in which Mr. Coleman has appeared, and on
Saturday he will give a talk at the Tilton Gallery at 3 p.m. Warning:
He may explode for old time's sake.
just john
> St. Kenneth Huey forwarded this
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/arts/design/03stra.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1157318553-phpAbHtkJ1dCF8YWtolYlQ
>
> September 3, 2006
>
> Joe Coleman Gets a Retrospective at the Tilton Gallery in Manhattan
> By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH
>
I considered posting the link here too, since the guy seemed to be on our
wavelength, but I figured I'd reached my link-forwarding quota for the week.
--
* Radio Free Entropy: http://just-john.com/cn/rfe.shtml *
Rev. Ivan Stang
just john wrote:
> Rev. Ivan Stang said, On 9/5/2006 9:00 AM:
> > St. Kenneth Huey forwarded this
> >
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/arts/design/03stra.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1157318553-phpAbHtkJ1dCF8YWtolYlQ
> >
> > September 3, 2006
> >
> > Joe Coleman Gets a Retrospective at the Tilton Gallery in Manhattan
>
> wavelength, but I figured I'd reached my link-forwarding quota for the week.
>
I switch to my secret identity when I burn up my post quota.
Joe Coleman used to trade 'zines and off stuff with us, millions of
years ago, in the Late Zinetradian Period. I have his latest huge $50
coffee table book, but haven't yet found the right drug that will allow
me to really examine it.
just john
Sounds like the same relationship I have to that Negativland book I
somehow still possess.
nenslo
"Rev. Ivan Stang" <st...@subgenius.com> wrote:
> Obsessively depicting
> a grim moral universe of transgression and retribution, Mr. Coleman
> paints grotesque images of murderers and victims, freaks and monsters,
> disease, depravity and perversities of every kind.
KEWL. OH WAIT!! I'm not a fucking teenager any more. Dammit! Suddenly
I'm not interested.