Outsider Art / Music. Barbican, London, March 22nd, 2001

Article by Jack Sargeant for Juxtapoz Magazine

London’s Barbican Centre is best known as the home of socially acceptable high culture -- The Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC Orchestra’s -- so Joe Coleman’s one night show has an element of frisson -- the audience, for all the Barbican’s regulars and management know, may be there to ransack the place. Isn’t inviting such outlaws into the heart of the established art world like inviting the murderous hordes into Rome? This is also probably the first time that a performance of choral music has carried an express warning that children won’t be admitted. Amongst the healthy turnout, London’s Art Brut cognoscenti are all present, from the Raw Vision guys and the minds behind the Chamber of Pop Culture through to Pulp vocalist Jarvis Cocker and Chicagoan outsider Wesley Willis, as well as the voluptuous femmes The Dragon Ladies.

Part of an evening of outsider art and music, Joe has been commissioned to film his paintings and set the completed video to live music. He has meticulously storyboarded the shooting of each painting, and supervised the subsequent editing.

Filmed in extreme close-up and magnifying the tiny details of the paintings, the video follows these details through the paintings and traces their visual echoes into the larger body of work. Carefully constructed with fades and slow cuts, the finished video projection -- onto a full sized screen -- brings the paintings to new vivid life, allowing the assembled audience to see them in the same way that Joe does when painting them and collectors do when looking at them through magnifying glasses.
photo: Boris Eldagsen, www.splendid-industries.de
The show is divided into two halves, the first focuses on his Humanscapes. Accompanied by a full choral rendition of Tenebrae Responses For Good Friday, Third Noctrine (1611) by Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, the melancholy music emphasizes the bleak, painful nature of the paintings. Why Gesualdo? As Coleman -- in his role as the Carny Barker -- points out; the composer is famous for mutilating the genitals of both his wife and her lover before killing them, "rumours suggest the vengeful composer would fuck his wife’s corpse!" As the performance starts some of the classical buffs who’ve turned up to hear Gesualdo laugh at the paintings, but as the image fades and cuts, revealing ever more vicious cruelty and degradation of flesh the laughter becomes muted and dies. The Humanscapes are a journey into the Hell of our own making, and the screening of the fine elements of the paintings, the camera sweeping from horror to horror, lends them an added power and new visceral intensity.

"And a Child Shall Lead Them" (Portrait of Mary Bell) Joe Coleman, 2000
The second part of the show deals with Joe’s portraits -- including those of Ed Gein, Mary Bell, and Harry Houdini. This section was edited and sent to The Delgados who composed a score based on the video but devoid of input from Coleman. Playing live the group use their music to bring out elements inherent within the paintings; from an unsettling tape loop of relentless crying which accompanies Ed Gein’s portrait, to occasional disjointed country licks that punctuate Hank Williams’ portrait. But most impressive of all is the gloriously discordant tune accompanying Coleman’s The Big Bang Theory, probably the only self-portrait that sees the artist-as-a-bomb. As the painting unwinds on the screen, from element to element, the music slowly spins out of control, accompanying the madly revolving image on the screen -- the centre of this new self-portrait -- an explosion, around which it states "11 / 22 / 55, The Russians detonate Atomic Bomb: Joe".

The audience leave privileged to have seen the paintings in such unnerving animated visceral detail and shell shocked by their raw power… Joe: a bomb in the heart of London.

c. Jack Sargeant.
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