like Joe Coleman. I especially like Joe Coleman when he's dressed in his Confederate Civil War uniform, smoking a cigar, and ceremoniously inviting you into his now famous "ODDITORIUM"--one of the world's greatest collections of extremely weird shit. On a recent visit to the museum I became mesmerized by one of its newest additions--a 19th century cast-iron coffin shaped like something manufactured by the imagination of Jules Verne.

I also like Joe Coleman when he's drinking a beer, smoking a cigar, and talking about films he likes. Films like Planet of the Vampires by Mario Bava, On Dangerous Ground, by Nicholas Ray, The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Deadlier Than the Male (both starring Lawrence Tierney) or Odds Against Tomorrow by Robert Wise. Joe particularly loves the dialogue in the scene where Gloria Grahame asks Robert Ryan what it felt like to kill a man. I think Joe Coleman should have his own TV show where he introduces and comments on his favorite films. He would be the 21st century's answer to Zackerley (or, if you're from Cleveland, Ghoulardi).

Once Joe told me a beautiful story about why the film Plan 9 From Outer Space has always terrified him. You may already know this from his paintings, but as a child Joe lived across the street from a cemetery, and in the film Ed Wood's limited budget (not to mention Bela Lugosi's untimely death) didn't permit Wood to match the night shots in the cemetery scenes. The shots with Lugosi are filmed in very brightly-lit conditions (bad day-for-night) in an actual cemetery, while the other shots for the scene are extremely dark and filmed in a very obviously fake cemetery (cardboard tombstones, etc.). Joe's childhood interpretation of this discrepancy reflects how completely engrossed he was in the bizarre story unfolding on the screen. He reasoned that the more peripheral areas of the cemetery (where the cloaked Bela Lugosi lurks) were flooded with daylight, while the deepest, creepiest interior of the cemetery somehow allowed no light to reach it! Joe says that this particular accidental element of the film is what terrified him as a child--I'm sure it also gave an extra-spectral resonance to the cemetery across the street from the young Joe Coleman's house.

I also like Joe Coleman's taste in music: the classic "Psycho" by Eddie Noack, "California Hippie Murders" by Red River Dave, and just about anything by Hasil Adkins or the very darkest side of Charlie Feathers.

Then there are Joe Coleman's paintings--the real subject of this book. I think these paintings are what I like best about Joe Coleman, because their detailed, non-linear narratives are where the real Joe Coleman is most dramatically revealed. This man may well by the last great painter of religious icons: While subjects like Christ, John the Baptist or Saint Sebastian have become, in Joe's own words, "quaint and folksy", Joe's motley pantheon of saints includes the likes of Tod Browning and Harry Houdini, Albert Fish, Adolf Wolfli and Carl Panzram, Charles Manson, Edgar Allan Poe and Hasil Adkins. The power of some of these subjects as icons may presently be disputable, but eventually the world will catch up with Joe Coleman's vision. And yet, when and if this happens seems to be of no concern whatsoever to the artist himself.

Like William Blake two hundred years before him, Coleman has no real interest in politics, aesthetics, morals, fashionable opinions, the evaluation of anything by money, and no interest in technology. Joe tells me that in his opinion the last useful technological contribution was dynamite! His connection to the "art world" also remains distanced and full of suspicion--he refuses to be represented by any gallery, working instead with an ever-lengthening waiting list of collectors (much closer to a medieval system of patronage than any modern concept of commerce). More importantly, though, it's his own vision and process as an artist that he protects without compromise, and he remains a true outsider, an outlaw. The fact is, all of Joe Coleman's paintings are portraits of himself.

Disconnected by choice from a huge portion of art history, Joe Coleman's inspirations end before Michelangelo painted even a single brush stroke. For Coleman, painting changed after the early Renaissance, becoming more about aesthetics and sophistication than about detail and iconography. While Bosch may still hold power for Coleman, the aesthetics of Rembrandt or da Vinci are of no interest. This is, of course, obvious to anyone who is familiar with Joe's work--his obsession with detail and with the icon are extremely powerful, and he himself will tell you that his paintings must be literally "framed" with "charms and borders" in order to protect himself from their power. Coleman will describe them as "evocations... a kind of raising of the dead--and in the way that sorcerers would draw a circle when evoking or raising a devil, you need that circle to protect yourself. And I can only raise the ones that I identify with... I'm interested in the parts of them that reflect myself." These portraits then, are both religious icons and self-portraits. Coleman's "modern saints" all, like himself, live (or lived) outside of the accepted culture. In choosing them as icons, Coleman reflects his own self-investigation as well as directly pointing to the contradictions and extremes of the world we all live in.

In a letter to Joe Coleman, Charles Manson once described Coleman as "a caveman in a spaceship". Although this has often been quoted by now, I still find it to be one of the most perfect and succinct descriptions of this artist. But then, critics have a lot of trouble slapping a label on his back. I've seen them try to connect him with, for example, Robert Williams, but I don't get the connection. I've heard Joe Coleman described as a folk artist, which also eludes me. If anything, Joe Coleman's paintings are closer to those of a psychotic, obsessive, medieval painter of illuminated manuscripts than to any painter from the past six centuries.

Maybe a certain kind of insight into his work might arise by showing Joe Coleman's paintings to children. Inside each work is a myriad of tiny worlds one can enter. The stories these details tell are not arranged for us in any linear, logical, "adult" pattern. Pieces of text snake their way around the nearly microscopic imagery. Our own interests and obsessions are our only guides, and we are free to follow our eyes in and out of these worlds in our own unrestricted time-frame. Joe Coleman's paintings tell many stories, and their link to our cultural and iconographic history is not tenuous--even if the seemingly random arrangement of imagery might suggest this.

To phrase it in the most blunt (and possibly cliched) way, Joe Coleman's paintings illustrate his own beautiful and often terrifying attempts to organize the chaos that is both around him and inside him. In some ways these paintings are like books and movies, in some ways like cartoons, or like nightmares, but they are not like images and words. They are the associations and obsessions that come from some deep place inside Joe Coleman's psyche and soul, and are then meticulously transformed into his amazing paintings, often via a single-haired paintbrush made by his own steady hands. I like Joe Coleman's paintings. I like the way they reveal our world to us. To me, Joe Coleman is a great artist.

 

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