GATES: In a way, a lot of the characters that fascinate you and that are the subjects of your work, including yourself, contain these aspects within themselves and are very aware and struggle within themselves between this. That quote from Charles Manson in The Man of Sorrows is what tells the story of Christ to you as well. That he was the Lord, and he was a fool. And he was the Antichrist. He was a sadistic killer, and neurotic.

COLEMAN: And all of those things make him me. And all of those things make him you. I think. I mean, I only know for me. I can only judge from myself. But I know that those things that exist in me, that's what make him real. That's what being human is. It's a facade that they keep trying to tell you, what normal is. They keep telling you to be normal, and they point to this anatomical chart of the human body, and they say, "Here is a normal body." It's not a normal body that they're pointing to in an anatomy class. They're pointing to a person's body. And they tell you it's normal. It's a trip. And it's going to make you believe it's normal to be perfect. But if they were pointing to a normal body, it would show imperfections, defects, both physical and psychological defects. Because everybody has them. It's a trip for them to tell you this.

COLEMAN: Exactly. Because that's what is really human. That's what a human being is. If you walk down the street, I guarantee the people you'll pass on the street are more like my paintings than they would be like someone elses'. Because that's perfect, and that's not what people are.

GATES: You are also fascinated with people who not only embody this Christ and Antichrist thing, but also that combine the most sacred and profane. What is forbidden in this culture is also what embodies the people that they consider either most sacred or most profane. It's like the ancient Egyptians. Their kings married their sisters, they committed incest. That's what made them sacred, but anybody else do that, and they'd be killed. Or in Africa, in certain tribes, if you have twins, the twins will be killed because only animals have more than one child at a time. Either that, or twins become geeks.

COLEMAN: That taboos often define the psyche of the culture and its obsessions.

COLEMAN: Yeah -- "How dare you have two children!" [laughs]

GATES: So I think there's this way in which your work also deals with these systems of classification, and that which is unnatural to that classification: those freaks, those mutations, those aberrances. The geek or the serial killer, these things which not only break all the rules of the world, but are shining examples of the rules of the world as well. The Carl Panzram story, which is a most amazing story of that kind of awareness of good and evil, a morality play, told from the Bizarro world, where everything that's white is black, and everything that's black is white.

COLEMAN: Yes. When you hold up a mirror, it's you, but it's you reversed. That's why you can't read the writing, because it's written backwards. Left is right. But it's a reflection of you.

COLEMAN: I would have to not think about it too much in order to do it. I could think about it more now, if I'm doing it less. There would be a certain awareness of that. But it's partially through some kind of compartmentalization in my psyche. My father was angry all the time, so he was constantly in tirades, and any other show of anger in the family was immediately stamped out. So it was to my best survival instincts to repress it, even though it was making me more and more angry. So I would repress it, and I learned this as a lifestyle. But you can't just keep stuffing it down -- it's like dynamite. You keep stamping it, and it's going to explode. But it would explode in these other ways. Like when I set the school field on fire when I was a kid. There was me externalizing inner fire. Inner fire became out. "Now the fire is here, I can look at it. It's no longer in here, it's on the school field, and it's burning all over." And all these adults were running around trying to put it out. "Now you finally understand I'm mad! Little Joey's mad!" But that's the place where it got expressed. It didn't get expressed in me telling you, "I'm mad at you." Because there was no outlet for that. So it becomes a worse explosion, because the normal one is not allowed. The normal one wouldn't be any big deal. But this one becomes a worse one. So the monster is like the Id. The God is like the Id. This monster of rage that I let come out, who is hurt and angry --

COLEMAN: No. It was all just impulse. This was when I was a child. Somehow I was more creative about my destructive acts than the average Joe. [laughs] Seeing the house with all the cars in front of it, and the people partying, having a good time, I resented that, that they were having a good time and liking each other, and I wasn't liking anybody and nobody was liking me. "How come you're having all the fun?"

COLEMAN: Yeah. So it caused me to go into the house and confront these strangers and explode. It was all impulse. This was early '70s, carrying over from late '60s.

GATES: Did you do that a couple of times?

COLEMAN: In variations, yeah. I did it quite a few times.

GATES: Was this in Connecticut?

COLEMAN: Yes.

GATES: Are there rumors of the mad bomber around town?

COLEMAN: YeahÉ Then several things got to happen after doing it over and over again, like humor. It's always kind of funny anyway. But then the humor got more overt. Like going to the high school reunion of Doug Sprag, who died in a car accident, and impersonating him, and turning his high school reunion into Carrie's. [laughs] After doing it for a while, I'd start playing with it. That was probably one of my favorite ones of that period.

GATES: And that was written up in the RE/Search Pranks book. And then at a certain point it was put into a context of art.

COLEMAN: It actually was turning into theater, where people would actually pay money to go see it. But that's not at all how it started.

GATES: Even when it was put into this framework where people knew it was going to happen, all hell broke loose. You would keep breaking the rules so people would think and felt they were profoundly in danger. Isn't that what brought about the whole thing with the arrest?

COLEMAN: Yeah, it brought about all kinds of stuff -- being charged with being an "infernal machine" (my favorite charge); cruelty to animals for biting the heads off of live animals; and the headlines like in The Boston Globe: "Audience flees explosive performance."

GATES: So there were these rules that -- even though art supposedly s supposed to be breaking all the rules -- there were rules you were breaking that you weren't supposed to break.

COLEMAN: Yeah. The thing is, the Id is not controllable. He doesn't care what the rules are.

GATES: Like the performance where you had a shotgun?

GATES: You just broke that wall, the invisible wall. The fourth wall just exploded.

COLEMAN: Yeah. The geek with the gun seems like something they don't want to take any chances with. [laughs]

GATES: That's one of those remaining taboos that people just can't handle. You haven't done one of those performances for a while.

COLEMAN: No. The last performance I did was the one where I put to rest my parents. It was the one where mice were Mommy and Daddy. That was '89.

GATES: Is that the one that was filmed for the movie, Mondo New York?

GATES: And points at him!

COLEMAN: And that's what he did. He became my barker. "Step right up!"

GATES: And that's where you got your "infernal machine" charge.

COLEMAN: No, that came in Boston, with the funeral ritual with my mother. That was my last performance. It seemed appropriate for me because I recreated the fires of hell. I lit things on fire on stage because, as I told you earlier, my mother was told she was going to burn in hell for eternity. So, "Okay, you want hell?" This is where she's going, this is where's got to be. So the place got covered with fire and smoke and that set off all the fire alarms and that's why the fire department came.

GATES: How did you feel about your relationship to the museum, the Boston Film Video Arts Foundation?

COLEMAN: They became really cowardly and said, "We didn't know he was going to do that!" But they fucking put up a poster of me exploding! You didn't know I was going to do that?! "We have nothing to do with this. This is horrible taste. This is not art."

GATES: They said, "This is not art."?

COLEMAN: Yeah.

GATES: That's the best thing they could have said. That's the greatest compliment, I think.

COLEMAN: Yeah. But it's cowardly. But the woman who was actually behind me, Jerri, was the only one sticking up for me, but they fired her. They issued this statement that the public should be outraged: "A mutilation of animals is not art. The endangering of the audience through explosions, that's not art."

GATES: Except when Chris Burden does it, for example. There are supposed "high art" performance artists who do work that's not so far different from your work. It's just that, they're "okay" for some reason. Had you applied for an NEA grant, or had you spoken the right lines and given the right justifications for your work, they would have probably defended you all the way.

COLEMAN: But I wouldn't want them to defend me. Someone said a good thing about that: "Whenever art's name is called, it runs and hides."

COLEMAN: Yeah -- because that's literally what happened! [laughs]

GATES: But I think you've steadfastly maintained your position as an outsider in the comics world. You're not a comics artist. You don't do comics. You're in the world of painters. And you're certainly not in the world of performance artists, even though on occasion it's been labeled that.

COLEMAN: That's some of the problem that people who went to my last show had, they expected to see Laurie Anderson, and all of a sudden they can't handle what they thought they wanted.

GATES: But it's great because I think you've been very careful not to get into a position where it could be easily digested, where it could be consumed, it could be rendered harmless.

COLEMAN: Which is what they're always trying to do.

COLEMAN: Right. Which they haven't done for me.

GATES: I think there's this tricky point where you're getting to though, where you're getting really well known; where you have long waiting lists for your paintings; books are being published about you. So you've got this challenge, to keep messing with people before they ingest you.

COLEMAN: Funny how it turns to cannibalism. Well, it seems like all of life is about eating and being eaten. Eventually I will be ingested. I'll be ingested by micro-organisms, if not by rats, like my wax figure over here. As I eat, so shall I be eaten.

GATES: One of the most interesting things about you, is that you're a comics artist, you do paintings you do performance, now you write books and act in movies. And yet you don't let any one of them take you over. There are people I know who only know the work you've done in comics, and didn't know you did this other stuff. And there are people who only know you did those performances and didn't know you did these other things. So there's this way in which you're always side-stepping or revealing a new thing and hiding something else.

COLEMAN: It has become harder because people are putting them all together. But yeah, there are so many manifestations of me and my personality -- there are several personalities.

GATES: There is another personality that is revealed in some of your paintings, and that's as a collector, an archivist or historian. You spend your five days, eight hours a day making your work, then on the weekends, you go to auctions and collect these incredible things. Your knowledge of them is that of a real connoisseur.

COLEMAN: And even that could be a whole direction or personality in and of itself, that would be just as interesting to them as an actor or a painter or comics artist. Any one of these things could just exist by itself.

GATES: You've created a museum, so you're sort of a curator. You talked about being involved in reissuing the Carl Panzram book, and that's kind of a historian's role.

COLEMAN: Right. Sometimes people come to me in that sort of a role, as a criminologist that invites curiosity, wanting to know about certain cases or my opinion on something.

GATES: You mean other fans, or police people?

COLEMAN: WellÉ Sometimes other police people, just out of curiosity, or to get a better understanding of things. This is like an archive. There was a morgue museum in New York that was recently moved that had an archive of crime artifacts.

GATES: You told me about the time you were touring in Europe after Cosmic Retribution came out and you went to Vienna to the police museum, and you seemed to find a soul mate in this.

COLEMAN: He was an ex-con who opened his own museum on criminology in Vienna. A really fine, little museum. Harold Sorel. He offered for me to do a show in his museum.

GATES: That would be an ideal location for your work because there's this way in which it would be possible for you to be claimed post fact safely by the art world, and though that would be an interesting thing because you'd be teaching them something they really need to know, there's a way in which the correct context for your work would be more like the Wooder Museum or this Vienna museum, because they are alike the same way the work of the insane is being accepted by the art world now.

COLEMAN: Yeah, which is kind of sad, the way they're almost like leeches: "And this artist was a drug addict and was in the insane asylum..." They're feeding off of these guys' pain. These sophisticates sitting around comfortably exploiting, and getting top dollar, making all this money off of these things that only recently found a "market."

COLEMAN: And that kept a special quality to them, an intimacy, which was nice. It was more private. It kind of happened to Frida Kahlo too. Before Madonna, Frida Kahlo's work was generally less respected than Diego Rivera's, even though when most people really started to look, they could see that she was the more fascinating one. But then all of a sudden it gets turned into a feminist cause celebre.

COLEMAN: And it kind of took away the nice intimacy that could be found there. Same thing with the art of the insane.

GATES: What projects have you done recently and what do you have coming up that you're thinking about these days?

COLEMAN: The one I just finished was the portrait of my parents which was a pretty major one. The one I'm working on right now that is in its early stages, is a portrait of the film director, Tod Browning, who always was fascinating to me. He was the director of a lot of Lon Chaney's silent films. He also directed Freaks and the original Dracula. He was fascinated by deformed people, half people, people with no arms or no legs. I feel this strong connection to him.