Mr. Coleman says his obsession with religion and death goes back to his childhood. Growing up in Norwalk, Conn., he recalled, he played in the cemetery across the street, lived in fear of his alcoholic father and went to church with his mother, an excommunicated Roman Catholic. Placed in a school for disturbed children, he doodled bloody martyrs and once “confessed” to a priest that he had committed several murders.

After moving to New York in the mid-1970’s, he studied briefly and unhappily at the School of Visual Arts, before being expelled, he said, for making art that his teachers called “fascist” and “schizophrenic.” Meanwhile he drew underground comics, began to exhibit in small East Village galleries and appeared in independent films like David Wojnarowicz’s “Where Evil Dwells,” in which he was typecast as Satan.

Through the 1980’s Mr. Coleman acted out his shocking and violent cosmology in infamous performances at performing arts spaces and galleries. He revived the sideshow geek act of biting the heads off live mice, outraging animal rights advocates. He set fires onstage, once threatened an arty crowd with a loaded shotgun, and often concluded his act by igniting a chest-pack of dynamite, an explosive stunt for which he was arrested in Boston in 1989 on charges of operating an “infernal machine.” He framed the arrest warrant.

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