“It’s Like a Trail of Droppings: The Banned Henry Art of Joe Coleman”

It’s Like a Trail of Droppings

The Banned HenryArt of Joe Coleman

by Stephen Foland

"Well, my mother and I had a very complex relationship. I'd consider it very loving. My mother and I had a sexual relationship that did not culminate in fucking, but we did sexual things and it was because of certain things that my mother wasn't getting at home and that she needed for her own pathology." -Joe Coleman in conversation with Richard Metzger, 2002

Joe Coleman. If you were trying to create the perfect poster artist for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killerin a lab, you'd still fall short of Joe Coleman. The son of an excommunicated Catholic who dreamed of being an actress, and an alcoholic war hero, Joe Coleman's subversive meditations on humanity, fame, divinity,sin,personalidentity,and shamanic experience rendered him, you might say, uniquely qualified to visually depict the inner life of John McNaughton's definitive cinematic serial killer. The stark tableaux of Henry's banned original poster art recreates scenes, people, events, and thoughts spanning the arc of the character's life. Though it stands as a piece of commercially commissioned art, Joe Coleman's familiarity with Henry's realworld counterpart, the themes of McNaughton’s film, and his fascination with serial killers place this piece as an honest entry into Coleman’ s canon. Joe Coleman's obsession with what he perceives as the dual nature of man (Christ and AntiChrist) goes way back to his birthday, November 22, 1955

(11/22/55.) The doubling of numbers fascinated young Joe (I guess he just wrote off the '19' in the middle of all those doubles) and prompted Joe to seek out doubles in all things, from biological abnormalities to philosophy. Joe would find his preoccupation strengthened through Catholicism and the contrasting relationships with his parents. The elder Joseph was a veteran who turned to the bottle after fighting at Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. He kept a "hidden stash" of photographs among his girly magazines that Joe the younger broke into one afternoon. The pictures were of Joseph the elder holding the severed heads of likely enemy combatants. Joe Coleman's work, as he defines it, emerges from "fear and the conquering of fear." Who and what to fear (or love) can change within several inches of the same painting. Coleman literally builds his artworks one square inch at a time, donning jeweler's goggles and working with a single horsehair paintbrush. He uses no sketches or preproduction work, often finding his way through a painting by moving out from an edge or corner. That section will contain a theme,

sometimes an event in the subject's life, or an annotation explaining a medical procedure or concept. These intense microcosms all lead to a center containing the main portrait of the subject himself. In the Henry art, the right bottom section focuses on Henry's mother depicting a pistol pointed with the text, "Shut up Ma!" The

mother themes continue along the bottom of the painting, with a multi-mouthed maternal monster holding a screaming baby underlined by the text, "My mother was a whore! She beat me and made me watch!" The right and left sides of the painting hold the contradictory recollections of how Henry murdered his Mama, with the right side

declaring, "I shot her," standing in direct opposition to the left side bearing the famous line from the film, "That's right. I stabbed her." Unfortunately, "Fuck the Bears" did not find its way into the piece but other instantly recognizable elements include a one-eyed Otis and Becky's bloody suitcase with the haunting admonition, "It's either you or them." The artwork for Henry was found to be too gruesome for general display and was pulled. Part of the outrage against Coleman had been stoked by The Price is Righthost Bob Barker, who had seen footage of Coleman's performance art persona “Professor” or “Doctor” Momboozo (Mom & Booze-o. His parents.) biting the heads off of rats. Barker led a campaign against Coleman for animal cruelty. Coleman, very much an initiate in carny lore given his acts of geekery (the real stuff, nor being super into Deadpool) took the controversy in stride, finding humor in the fact that Bob had become Coleman's personal "barker." The original Henry painting rests safely in the possession of writer/director John McNaughton. Coleman's meticulous creations can take up to four years to complete, as with the most recent portrait of his wife of over twenty years, Whitney Ward. The meditative nature of his work enriches the art's fidelity to his subject. The way Coleman sees it, the more he digs into the essence of his subject, the more he sees about himself. This relationship transfers to the spectator of the work. Coleman notes, "The more that you put into it, the more that you're going to get out of it, the same way that I do when I'm making the painting." (Metzger, 91) Coleman's macabre subjects have attracted controversy, despite what he sees as hypocrisy and complicity from those critics, "When I say I can identify with the serial killer, all of a sudden the media then makes me into a monster. They all say, 'Joe's a monster, too,' ...but really I'm taking responsibility because he's within all of us. That's what I'm talking about...we have to take responsibility for Ed Gein. The culture gets the criminals it deserves." Speaking about Richard Speck, who murdered eight nurses in the late 1960s when Coleman was a child, Coleman clarifies what he's trying to explore, "I don't want to kill anybody, but I want to express that pain. I want to express what he was trying to express. What if he didn't have to do that? And maybe, just maybe, art is a thing where you can do that."