Ira Cohen
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, publisher, photographer and filmmaker.
Cohen lived in Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
and in New York City in the 1960s, he was in Kathmandu in the 1970s and traveled the world in the 1980s, before returning to New York, where he spent the rest of his life. Cohen died of renal failure on April 25th, 2011.
Early life
Cohen was born in 1935 in the Bronx, New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, to deaf parents. Cohen graduated from the Horace Mann School
Horace Mann School
Horace Mann School is an independent college preparatory school in New York City, New York, United States founded in 1887 known for its rigorous course of studies. Horace Mann is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League, educating students from all across the New York tri-state area from...
at 16 and attended Cornell
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, where he took a class taught by Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
. He dropped out of Cornell, then enrolled at the School of General Studies of Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
but did not graduate. Cohen married Arlene Bond, a Barnard student, in 1957. They had two children, David Schleifer and Rafiqa el Shenawi.
Morocco
In 1961 Cohen took a YugoslaviaYugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
n freighter to Tangier, Morocco where he lived for four years. Before settling in Tangier, he crossed over to Spain's Costa del Sol
Costa del Sol
The Costa del Sol is a region in the south of Spain, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, comprising the coastal towns and communities along the Mediterranean coastline of the Málaga province. The Costa del Sol is situated between two lesser known costas: Costa de la Luz and Costa Tropical...
and stayed for a spell with friends in Torremolinos
Torremolinos
Torremolinos is a municipality on the Costa del Sol of the Mediterranean, immediately to the west of the city of Málaga, in the province of Málaga in the autonomous region of Andalusia in southern Spain...
. (Cohen's early sojourns in certain European cities, including London and Paris, were as part of a return trip he made up from Morocco a little later on.) In Tangier Cohen edited and published GNAOUA, a literary magazine devoted to exorcism
Exorcism
Exorcism is the religious practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or place which they are believed to have possessed...
and Beat-era writings (prose and poetry), introducing the work of Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...
, William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, Harold Norse
Harold Norse
Harold Norse was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.- Life :Born Harold Rosen to an unmarried Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn...
and others. GNAOUA also featured Jack Smith
Jack Smith (film director)
Jack Smith was an American filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema...
, and Irving Rosenthal. Cohen also produced Jilala, field recordings of trance music
Trance music
Trance is a genre of electronic dance music that developed in the 1990s.:251 It is generally characterized by a tempo of between 125 and 150 bpm,:252 repeating melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and breaks down throughout a track...
by a sect of Moroccan dervish
Dervish
A Dervish or Darvesh is someone treading a Sufi Muslim ascetic path or "Tariqah", known for their extreme poverty and austerity, similar to mendicant friars in Christianity or Hindu/Buddhist/Jain sadhus.-Etymology:The Persian word darvīsh is of ancient origin and descends from a Proto-Iranian...
es made by Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...
and Brion Gysin. The original 1965 LP record
LP record
The LP, or long-playing microgroove record, is a format for phonograph records, an analog sound storage medium. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry...
was reissued in 1998 by Baraka Foundation/Mystic Fire as a CD.
Return to New York
Cohen returned to New York in the mid-1960s. There he published The Hashish Cookbook (Gnaoua Press, 1966), which had been written in Tangier at Brion Gysin's suggestion by Cohen's then-girlfriend Rosalind, under the pseudonym Panama RosePanama Rose
Panama Rose may refer to:*Rondeletia odorata, the Panama Rose, an evergreen shrub from Panama and Cuba* The pseudonym used by Ira Cohen's then-girlfriend Rosalind when she wrote The Hashish Cookbook in Tangier, Morocco , which was later published by Cohen's Gnaoua Press...
. In his loft on the Lower East Side
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
, Cohen created the "mylar images", styled as "future icons" as developed by a "mythographer". Among the reflected artists in his mirror were John McLaughlin
John McLaughlin (musician)
John McLaughlin , also known as Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, is an English guitarist, bandleader and composer...
, William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
and Jimi Hendrix
Jimi Hendrix
James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist and singer-songwriter...
- who said that looking at these photos was like "looking through butterfly wings". In this photographic process Cohen explored the whole spectrum
Electromagnetic spectrum
The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The "electromagnetic spectrum" of an object is the characteristic distribution of electromagnetic radiation emitted or absorbed by that particular object....
from infrared to black light. In 1968 he directed the "phantasmaglorical" film Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda and produced Marty Topp's Paradise Now, a film of the Living Theatre's historic American tour. was inspired by the films of Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger is an American underground experimental filmmaker, occasional actor and author...
and Sergei Parajanov and began as an extension of his photography work with his Mylar chamber.
Travels in the 1970s
In company with former Living Theatre member Petra Vogt, Cohen went to the HimalayasHimalayas
The Himalaya Range or Himalaya Mountains Sanskrit: Devanagari: हिमालय, literally "abode of snow"), usually called the Himalayas or Himalaya for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau...
in the '70s
1970s
File:1970s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: US President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office after the Watergate scandal in 1974; Refugees aboard a US naval boat after the Fall of Saigon, leading to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; The 1973 oil...
where he started the Starstream poetry series under the Bardo Matrix imprint in Kathmandu, publishing the work of Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist best known for his editorship of the Surrealist magazine View in New York City, and as the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew...
, Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...
and Angus Maclise
Angus MacLise
Angus MacLise was an American percussionist, composer, poet, occultist and calligrapher probably best known as the first drummer for the Velvet Underground.-Biography:...
. Here he developed bookmaking art, working with native craftsmen. In 1972 he spent a year in San Francisco reading and performing and then returned to New York to mount photographic shows.
Amsterdam
In early 1964, Cohen visited Amsterdam (during same trip up from Tangier when he arranged for the printing of Gnaoua in Antwerp, Belgium). He befriended writer Simon VinkenoogSimon Vinkenoog
Simon Vinkenoog was a Dutch poet and writer. He was the editor of the anthology Atonaal , which launched the Dutch "Fifties Movement"....
, who would later translate many of Cohen's writings into Dutch. However his real Amsterdam period began in the spring of 1978. It was then that he met Caroline Gosselin, a French girl who was making and selling life masks at the Melkweg
Melkweg
The Melkweg is a popular music venue and cultural center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It is located on the Lijnbaansgracht, near the Leidseplein, a prime nightlife center of Amsterdam. It is housed in a former warehouse and is divided into a number of spaces of varying sizes...
(Milky Way) multimedia center. She and Cohen expanded this into Bandaged Poets - a series of papier-mâché
Papier-mâché
Papier-mâché , alternatively, paper-mache, is a composite material consisting of paper pieces or pulp, sometimes reinforced with textiles, bound with an adhesive, such as glue, starch, or wallpaper paste....
masks of dozens of well-known poets that he subsequently photographed. He also reconnected with Eddie Woods
Eddie Woods
For the English footballer see Eddie Woods Eddie Woods is a poet/prose writer, editor and publisher who lived and traveled in various parts of the world, both East and West, before eventually settling in Amsterdam, Holland, where in 1978 he started Ins & Outs magazine and two years later founded...
, whom he had first met in Kathmandu in 1976. Woods, who co-founded Ins & Outs Press
Ins & Outs Press
Ins & Outs Press is a small English-language publisher with international connections based in Amsterdam and registered in the Netherlands as a cultural foundation, or stichting. It was started in 1980 by Eddie Woods, Jane Harvey, and Henk van der Does as a natural extension of Ins & Outs magazine,...
with Jane Harvey, was preparing to launch Ins & Outs magazine. Cohen's work appeared in every issue and he regularly served as a contributing editor. He performed at the first of Benn Posset's long-running One World Poetry festivals, P78. Cohen (and Gosselin) lived in Amsterdam for the next three years; and even after leaving he made several return visits to the city, often staying for long spells. Ins & Outs Press, which had already published postcards of the Bandaged Poets series, produced three limited-edition Kirke Wilson silkscreen prints of the photographs including those of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
. His film Kings with Straw Mats was also edited, in collaboration with Ira Landgarten, at Ins & Outs. In September 1993 Cohen returned to Amsterdam from New York to participate in a Benn Posset-organized tribute to Burroughs, along with Woods, the American writer William Levy
William Levy
William Levy , known as the Talmudic Wizard of Amsterdam and Dr. Doo-Wop, is the author of such works as The Virgin Sperm Dancer, Wet Dreams, Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound and Natural Jewboy....
, the German translator & publisher Udo Breger, and others.
Cohen further developed a close association with the artists colony village of Ruigoord
Ruigoord
Ruigoord is a former island and a village in the Houtrakpolder in the IJ meer in the Dutch province of North Holland. It is a part of the municipality of Amsterdam, and lies about 8 km east of Haarlem....
(eight miles west of Amsterdam) and is one their very few trophy holders.
Second return to New York
In 1981 Cohen again returned to New York, and moved in with his mother in an Upper West SideUpper West Side
The Upper West Side is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, New York City, that lies between Central Park and the Hudson River and between West 59th Street and West 125th Street...
apartment. In 1982 he married Carolina Gosselin, and they had a daughter, Lakshmi Cohen, before divorcing in 1989.
Cohen continued to travel during the 1980s , making trips to Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
, and back to India where he documented on film the great kumbh mela
Kumbh Mela
Kumbh Mela is a mass Hindu pilgrimage in which Hindus gather at the Ganges river.The normal Kumbh Mela is celebrated every 3 years, the Ardh Kumbh Mela is celebrated every six years at Haridwar and Prayag, the Purna Kumbh takes place every twelve years, at four places Prayag, Haridwar, Ujjain,...
festival, the largest spiritual gathering on the planet in the film Kings with Straw Mats. In the latter part of the decade Synergetic Press published On Feet of Gold, a book of selected poems.
Cohen also worked as a contributing editor of Third Rail magazine, a review of international arts and literature based in Los Angeles.
Publications and exhibitions
In the 1990s Cohen met with increasing international recognition as his poems were published in England by Temple Press under the title Ratio 3: Media Shamans Along with Two Good Poet Friends, the friends being Gerard MalangaGerard Malanga
Gerard Joseph Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, curator and archivist.-Early life:Born in the Bronx, New York, Malanga graduated from the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan and attended Wagner College on Staten Island...
and Angus Maclise. He had a show called Retrospectacle at the October Gallery
October Gallery
The October Gallery is an art gallery based in central London, showing contemporary work from all cultures around the world.Since first opening its doors in 1978, the October Gallery has promoted the art and artists of the Transvangarde or trans-cultural avant-garde; work by artists who, whilst at...
in London and he also took part along with William Burroughs, Terry Wilson and Hakim Bey at the Here To Go Show in Dublin in 1992 which celebrated the painter Brion Gysin.
In 1994 Sub Rosa Records released Cohen's first CD, The Majoon Traveller, with Cheb i Sabbah
Cheb i Sabbah
Cheb i Sabbah , born Haim Serge El Baz in Constantine, Algeria, is a club DJ based in San Francisco, California....
, which also included the work of Don Cherry
Don Cherry (jazz)
Donald Eugene Cherry was an innovative African-American jazz cornetist whose career began with a long association with saxophonist Ornette Coleman. He went on to live in many parts of the world and work with a wide variety of musicians.-Biography:Cherry was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and...
and Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s....
.
In the 2000s Cohen gave a number of readings in New York City, including a collaboration with the musical group Sunburned Hand of the Man
Sunburned Hand of the Man
Sunburned Hand of the Man are a band from Massachusetts that formed in 1997 from the remnants of the Boston psychedelic punk trio Shit Spangled Banner....
.
Cohen was a participating artist in the Whitney Biennial
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...
2006, "Day for Night" with two back-lit transparency photographs, Jack Smith as the Norebo, Prince of the Venusian Munchkins, and The Magician from the Grand Tarot.
In May 2007 Cohen was featured in performance Georg Gatsas' Process VI - FINAL exhibit at the Swiss Institute in New York City. Cohen read poems accompanied by projections of his mylar photographs and was accompanied by the musical group Mahasiddhi.
In October 2007 an exhibit of Cohen's portrait photographs Hautnah / Up Close & Personal was mounted at the WIDMER+THEODORIDIS contemporary gallery in Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
. A complementary book was planned by Papageien-Verlag for early 2008 but is, as yet, unpublished. Subjects included Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....
, Madonna
Madonna (entertainer)
Madonna is an American singer-songwriter, actress and entrepreneur. Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York City in 1977 to pursue a career in modern dance. After performing in the music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, she released her debut album in 1983...
, William Burroughs and Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...
Also in October 2007 an exhibit of his mylar photographs opened in London at the October Gallery
October Gallery
The October Gallery is an art gallery based in central London, showing contemporary work from all cultures around the world.Since first opening its doors in 1978, the October Gallery has promoted the art and artists of the Transvangarde or trans-cultural avant-garde; work by artists who, whilst at...
.
External links
- A detailed account of the life and works of Ira Cohen
- Ira Cohen exhibit at Big Bridge
- A short excerpt from Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda on The Wire Magazine's website
- Kathmandu Dream Piece Audio. Ira Cohen reciting the prose piece he wrote specially for the first issue of Ins & Outs magazine.
- Ira Cohen with Paul Bowles in Tangier, Morocco, 1963
- Ira Cohen interview in "Conversations with Harold Hudson Channer" Hour long video interview
- Ira Cohen interviewed by Nina Zivancevic New York, 2001. Jacket magazine #21, February 2003.
- Long, Strange Trip for a Hypnotic Film James Gaddy, New York Times, August 27, 2006.
- Ira Cohen: From the Mylar Chamber at October Gallery Article by Waldemar JanuszczakWaldemar JanuszczakWaldemar Januszczak is a British art critic. Formerly the art critic of The Guardian, he now writes for The Sunday Times, and has twice won the Critic of the Year award...
. The Sunday Times (London). November 25, 2007 (behind paywall) - Ira Cohen: psychedelic photography master Slide show of Ira Cohen photographs.
- Ira Cohen, an Artist and a Touchstone, Dies at 76 New York Times obituary May 1, 2011
- Ira Cohen, poet, filmmaker, cultural icon Boston Globe obituary. May 3, 2011.
- Doyen of the Beat generation feted for his psychedelic photos from the underground Ira Cohen obituary in the Guardian (UK). May 13, 2011.
- Ira Cohen: Writer, artist and publisher who devoted his life to his alternative vision of the world Obituary in The Independent (UK). May 30, 2011.