Joe Coleman; Saints and
Monsters
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON
THERE'S little of the great
17th-century cabinets of curiosity, from hand-shaped carrots to human-faced
pigs, that Joe Coleman, an artist, can't match in his 20th-century version.
He owns a pair of Fiji mermaids and a two-headed prairie dog. He has
a framed piece of embroidery sewn by a 19th-century woman in Sag Harbor,
N.Y., who had no hands: Mlle. Tunison, ''World's Greatest Phenomenal.''
If the island of Dr. Moreau had had a visitors' center, it might have
looked like Mr. Coleman's four-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights, the
living room of which houses his Odditorium, a natural descendant of
the great specimen collections.
The armadillo was the most
popular quadraped of the 17th-century curiosity cabinets; Mr. Coleman
has a Tiffany-like table lamp, the carapacious shade of which is an
armadillo's shell. ''The rooms that make me the most uncomfortable are
these really minimalist rooms,'' Mr. Coleman said, at home, standing
at the center of what looked like a carousel of lost souls: a wax Chinese
prisoner being eaten by rats, a pre-Columbian mummy, a jar of tumors,
and leg braces designed for victims of polio. ''With white walls, just
one chair here, one table there. I'm really frightened in those places.''
On Saturday, ''Joe Coleman/Matrix
139,'' an exhibition of his paintings, will open at the Wadsworth Atheneum
in Hartford. Selections from his Odditorium will be on display to provide
a mise en scene. The temporary removal makes him nervous. ''It's like
having your children go away to summer camp,'' he said. Mr. Coleman,
who lives with his fiancee, Whitney Ward, a photographer, is a small,
meticulous man, dressed in formal, frontier-town 19th-century black,
hair combed back in slick waves with Top Brass. When he smiles, two
square, slightly fanned front teeth appear, like playing cards stuck
up a sleeve. An alligator paw hangs on his waistcoat, below a blue enamel
pin of Little Boy, the first atomic-weapon deployed in war.
As a teen-ager, Mr. Coleman
strapped fireworks to his chest beneath his shirt, pretending to blow
himself up at parties. Mr. Coleman, 43, collects the arcane: religious
reliquaries, freaks of nature, carnival sideshow memorabilia and artifacts
like letters and paintings of the criminally insane, which he finds
at auction houses, like Guernsey's on East 73d Street, and antiques
shops, like the Wandering Dragon on East 10th Street. He bought his
livid floral wall fabric on Orchard Street. The drapery material came
from La Lame Inc. on West 39th Street, which sells clerical cloth. ''It's
kind of like living in my work,'' said Mr. Coleman, whose paintings
are elaborate, iconographic depictions of stories, often biographies.
Those portrayed have included Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Jayne Mansfield,
Edgar Allan Poe and Carl Panzram, an American serial killer who taught
himself to read in prison and whose favorite authors were Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer.
Mr. Coleman considers his
subjects the Odditorium's household saints. ''It's an amazing world,
modeled on dime museums,'' said Jim Jarmusch, the filmmaker, who commissioned
a painting of New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century
(Mr. Coleman's paintings, acrylics on masonite, now sell for more than
$30,000). ''It's one of the world's great collections'' of extremely
weird stuff, Mr. Jarmusch said, though he said it more pungently. Leonardo
DiCaprio, the actor, is another collector who has stopped by. He named
Mr. Coleman's stuffed South Seas snapping turtle Happy. ''There is a
tradition among artists of collecting things that are bizarre or morbid,
objects that disturb,'' said Nicholas Baume, the curator of contemporary
art at the Wadsworth Atheneum, who is organizing Mr. Coleman's show.
''Certainly the Surrealists and Dadaists -- Andre Breton had a fascinating
collection.'' Mr. Coleman has strong tastes, but he also has a strong
sense of what a home can be, and of what it can do. It is a heart of
darkness. More than his castle, the Odditorium is his kingdom: part
one-room schoolhouse, part chamber of horrors. Mr. Coleman lives like
a king who has been buried with the things he will need to make it to
the next world, or Orpheus, as a man who went to the underworld and
stayed, seeking not Eurydice but himself. ''It gives you a way to possess
your fears,'' he said of his belongings, which he likened to prayers,
''in the same way that primitive tribes will make fetish objects. A
hundred years from now, my collection might give an indication of our
fears and obsessions and perversions and lusts and anger. It preserves
these things that are inside all of us right now.'' Mr. Coleman said
he thought the Odditorium, with its representations of the sciences
of pathology, the fringes of society, the variety of death and the admiration
of mayhem, was like a Rorschach test. ''People's reactions are interesting,''
he said. ''Certain things are very disturbing, and then others not.
A friend of mine who's a cop on the third floor -- he loves it here.
His wife makes lemon meringue pies to bring up. They're very neighborly.''
Mr. Coleman's apartment is also a rat's nest of Freudian associations.
''As a child, I lived across the street from a cemetery,'' he said.
''I would find things and bring them home. This is stuff that I've been
searching for my whole life.'' Mr. Coleman grew up in Norwalk, Conn.,
the son of an alcoholic war veteran who failed in his ambition to become
a painter and who bought Mr. Coleman his first paint box, and a beautiful
woman who never became the movie star she thought she would be. A divorced
Catholic, she was excommunicated for marrying Mr. Coleman's father,
he said. As a boy, he bought duplicates of plastic model kits, including
Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, using the extra parts to make more monstrous
monsters. In paintings, he has twice burned down his childhood house.
President Kennedy was shot on Mr. Coleman's eighth birthday. He sold
his first painting to Lady Bird Johnson when he was in the third grade.
''I had done this painting of garbage,'' he said. ''She was traveling
around at that time, sponsoring this Beautify America campaign. She
saw my painting as a great indictment against litter. She was my first
collector.'' In the 1970's and 80's, Mr. Coleman worked as a performance
artist as he developed his extreme-comics, folk-art, tattoo-parlor painting
style. As the acquisitions director of the Odditorium, which he created
in 1994, Mr. Coleman has had his bargain days. He was able to get Gretta
and Eddna, two Fiji mermaids with impeccable provenance (constructed
of monkeys' heads, antlers and human hair, they came, with papers, from
the collection of Jack Lambert, who was a ticket agent for P. T. Barnum)
for just less than $1,000 at an auction in Fishkill, N.Y. ''When they
opened the box, they gasped,'' he said of the auctioneers, ''so I knew
I would get them cheaply.'' But collecting has come at the cost of some
convenience. ''I only throw away furniture,'' Ms. Ward said, dressed
in black tulle and five-inch black heels. ''We're down to a sofa and
a wheelchair.'' She nodded at a Victorian wicker coffin propped against
the wall: ''The guest room,'' she said. In the kitchen, the undefrosted
depths of the refrigerator's freezer compartment contained a polar diorama
of Alaska, created with toy figures. In the door was a pint of Haagen-Dazs
Raspberry Lemonade Swirl and a half bag of Tater Tots. What for many
might be an exercise in queasy living produced a strange comfort for
a visitor on a recent evening, like a knowledge of the worst. If the
sorrows of the world could be exposed, put out like family pictures,
pain would lose its power to surprise. In a shadow, Mr. Coleman's telephone
rang. A machine picked up the call, answering with a clip from ''Nightmare
Alley,'' a 1947 film noir about carnivals. ''When you been around this
carny a little longer,'' the barker says, ''you'll learn to quit asking
questions.'' ''Joe Coleman/Matrix 139'' will be at the Wadsworth Atheneum,
600 Main Street, Hartford, from Saturday through Nov. 14. Information:
(860) 278-2670.