911 Premonition
Sallie Aycock-Marshall

http://www.lambertvillepeace.org/artshow2005/gallery/911_premonition_98.jpg

http://www.lambertvillepeace.org/artshow2005/gallery/

http://travel2.nytimes.com

Hat tip to Jeff Wells’ Rigorous Intuition as always.

Little School of Horrors -

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

He stopped doing it years ago, because if he hadn’t he’d have killed himself or someone else by now, but New York artist Joe Coleman used to blow himself up.As “Professor Mamboozo” – either his geek avatar or, as he described it, a raging spirit that would take possession of his body – Coleman would arrive uninvited at the house parties of strangers, provoke a confrontation and ignite the mass of firecrackers he’d strapped to his body. In the confusion, smoke and fear he would slip away before police arrived. When Mamboozo debuted on New York’s avant garde art scene in a 1981 performance at the Kitchen he also rolled in bloody meat, bit the heads off live rats and pressed a shotgun against the forehead of the woman who had booked him and asked, “How’d you like the show?” The traumatized crowed was an audience no more, Coleman having yanked them out of their art house detachment through horrification ritual and the sudden shock of their own possible, imminent death. (“I told them as hard as I could without killing them,” Coleman told Re/Search in Pranks.)

I thought about Coleman the other day when I read of the teachers of an elementary school in Tennessee who convinced their sixth graders a gunman was attacking, and repeatedly told the hysterical children it wasn’t a drill.

 <snip>

The New York Times, reviewing a retrospective of Joe Coleman’s paintings last September, wrote that, “in a startlingly prophetic vision of his from 2000 the twin towers burn.”  

http://rigint.blogspot.com