Perhaps you heard it too? Like, sometime back in ’98, maybe you were pulling a late, late shift, and, to kill the time, you picked up an Internet streaming broadcast of the Joey Reynolds’ show on WOR from New York. Reynolds, "The Nice Guy of Late Night"–an unfunny jokester on station that runs far Right of centre during the day–had assembled a cadre of forgettable local NYC-type celebs–forgettable except for one–and posited the following question for discussion, "Who do you think is the most important American and why?" And, like the guests, their answers, as you’ll recall, were equally forgettable–except for that one guy. His name: Joe Coleman. His answer: "Albert Fish." And although he tried to answer as to the why, Reynolds drowned him with evasive banter until the program mercifully–for Reynolds at least–cut to a break.

So, curious, you did a little research on this nominee for "Most Important American"...

Albert Fish was born in 1870, but he really made his mark, so to speak, in the early 20th Century with a spate of cannibal killings. In 1928, he claimed his final victim, 12-year-old Gracie Budd. In 1934, he sent a gloating letter to the Budd family. Fish was eventually caught, tried, and executed for that and other crimes in Sing Sing’s electric chair. A masochist as well as a sadist, Fish reportedly became aroused as he was strapped into the chair...

Communal rationale

"I have the actual letter that he sent to the mother of his last victim," says Coleman today. That he possess the letter is no surprise, for as his star has ascended in the art community (and has it ever) so has public knowledge of the "Odditurium" he keeps in his Brooklyn home–a private museum of the macabre that houses such remarkable curios as reliquaries allegedly containing a part of Christ and all of St. Agnes, as well as a "pickled punk" (deformed baby in a jar) named Junior and a lock of Charles Manson’s hair. (Manson is a fan, having famously called Coleman "a caveman in a spaceship.")

Coleman describes the letter, as pleasant as pie, noting that Fish insisted that because he hadn’t molested the girl he hadn’t defiled her.

"At first you think, ‘Well, he cut her up into pieces and ate her, how can he say he didn’t defile her?’ But, in a way, there’s a certain rationale to what he’s saying. [Having been] raised in a Catholic orphanage, he’s kind of re-enacting the Communion ritual; Jesus said, ‘Eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, abideth in me and I in him.’

"In all of Christian imagery... there’s the image of the tortured saviour... so violence is holy. All of the great Saints are holy because they suffered some great agony, some great pain, some great tragedy.

So the cutting her up only makes her holy, and, besides, the only real atrocity, in Fish’s mind, was sex.

"So, the reason I say he’s the most important is that he’s pointing out the very contradictions that are inherent in [American] Judeo-Christian society."

Say what you will about Joey Reynolds: he may be a cornball, but he sure knows how not to have his station’s license revoked...

Portrait of the artist as...

Perhaps another reason that Fish–and the other criminals and outcasts the painter depicts in his work–are so important to Coleman comes courtesy of his friend, the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, who wrote, "All of Joe Coleman’s paintings are of himself."

Coleman exploded, quite literally, on the New York art scene in the late ’70s, performing a stunt he had being doing since he was a teenager–strapping explosives over a protective metal sheet on his chest and letting the sparks fly on unsuspecting bystanders. The son of an abusive, alcoholic father, and eventually a heroin addict himself (Coleman has been clean for a number of years now), his act was quite the metaphor for his pent-up rage. In the most famous of these "performances," he attended a high-school reunion and assumed the identity of an alumnus who had actually perished in a car accident a few years earlier. Already disconcerted by the presence of their former "classmate," the attendees cleared the hall in pandemonium when Coleman delivered the coup de grace and blew himself up.

Such antics certainly helped Coleman get noticed, but what’s really secured him a place in the forefront of the contemporary are his paintings: depictions of Christian religious figures, the aforementioned criminal element, oddballs, freaks, and visionaries–from cult hillbilly singer Hasil Adkins to filmmaker Tod Browning (Freaks, Dracula) to Sigmund Freud. Intentionally structured in a pre-Renaissance, iconic mode–flattened perspective with the main figured squarely centered and facing the viewer–Coleman obsessively fills in each piece with single-hair brush until every millimeter of the frame contains precisely rendered and placed elements, both textual and figurative, growing exponentially from the most microscopic detail on outward.

They are both brutal and mesmerizing, much in the same way the works by Coleman’s admitted influences are–from Bosch’s 16th Century Hellscapes (Jung called him "The master of the monstrous") to Ivan Albright’s 20th Century studies of human decay.

And they are all indeed portraits of Coleman–as well as reflections of the society in which he exists.

PRISONER #31614

"Well, I think it embodies all of us to tell you the truth. But, I’ve felt in my life such rage and hatred; especially when I was at my lowest point–I just hated the world, and if I would have had the ability to put my finger on the Button and blow it all to Hell, I would have," says Coleman, discussing the affinity he feels to another one of his subjects, a veritable killing machine named Carl Panzram, who was executed by hanging at the advent of the ’30s.

A figure in one of Coleman’s large-scale pieces, Panzram also makes an appearance in Coleman’s new book, Muzzlers, Guzzlers, and Good Yeggs, a collection of four true crime tales researched and penned by the painter and accompanied by his black and white illustrations, the stories originally commissioned by Blab!, a periodical of avante-illustration and cutting edge comic art.

Packaged with subversive humour–the 3 X 4 1/2" inch book was deliberately designed to resemble the Little Big Books of Coleman’s childhood–the tiny tome packs a weighty punch with Panzram’s story being the most jarring. Brutally abused as child, Panzram grew to personify pure hatred, admitting that, "In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons, and last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1000 male human beings. For all of these things I am not the least bit sorry... I hate the whole damned human race including myself."

"I think a lot of people have felt like that," says Coleman. "It’s inside all of us, that kind of rage. Panzram was incredibly honest about it, and he was honest about how much he hated himself. He was robbed of the capacity for gentler emotions–for mercy and kindness. He had suffered so greatly in his life that there wasn’t any room for it.

"There but for the Grace of God go I–I have room for it, but some people don’t, and I can certainly identify with those feelings.

"I mean, the people that Jesus hung out with, for one thing, they were terrorists and prostitutes, and he disdained the Pharisees. His religion was co-opted and corrupted, but the religion itself deals with pain and suffering... ‘The lowest will be the first among us to enter heaven.’ So the people who have gone through the most suffering are certainly of importance to understand myself and the world that I live in. The religion I was brought up in taught that suffering is important–it’s a teacher. Many people were destroyed by it, and their stories are morality plays–lessons to be learned.

"I think," he adds, "that people from another culture looking at my work would learn a lot about America."