Ira Cohen, an Artist and a Touchstone, Dies at 76
by DOUGLAS MARTIN, nytimes.com
May 1st 2011
Ira Cohen made phantasmagorical films that became cult classics. He developed a
way of taking photographs in mesmerizing, twisting colors, including a famous
one of Jimi Hendrix. He published works by authors like William Burroughs and
the poet Gregory Corso. He wrote thousands of poems himself. He wrote “The
Hashish Cookbook” under the name Panama Rose. He called himself “the conscience
of Planet Earth.”
But his most amazing work of art was inarguably Mr. Cohen himself. NY Arts
magazine in 2008 called his life “a sort of white magic produced by an
alchemist who turned his back on the establishment in order to find God, art
and poetry.”
He died of renal failure in Manhattan on April 25 at the age of 76, his family
said.
Mr. Cohen made his Lower East Side loft an artists’ salon, then left to spend
many years on pilgrimages to Marrakesh, Katmandu and the banks of the Ganges.
He hung with Beats but rejected being called one. He was an entrepreneur of the
arts who didn’t care about money.
Clayton Patterson, a photographer and historian of the Downtown scene,
suggested that if Mr. Cohen couldn’t be easily summed up, that was pretty much
the whole idea: “On the one hand he was part of everything, but on the other he
was an outsider to everything,” Mr. Patterson said in an interview.
In certain artistic and literary circles, Mr. Cohen was a touchstone. “Ira was
a major figure in the international underground and avant-garde,” Michael
Rothenberg, the editor of Big Bridge magazine, an Internet publication, said in
an interview. “In order to understand American art and poetry post-World War
II, you have to understand Ira Cohen.”
Mr. Cohen was born in the Bronx on Feb. 3, 1935. Both his parents were deaf, as
were most of their friends, and he learned early to communicate with signs. “I
grew up constantly surrounded by these wonderful, loving people with strange
voices like doves cooing in the eaves of a country house,” he said.
He graduated from the Horace Mann School at 16 and attended Cornell, where he
took a class taught by Vladimir Nabokov. He smoked marijuana and imagined how
wonderful certain great writers might have been had they had the opportunity.
He dropped out of Cornell, then enrolled at the School of General Studies of
Columbia University but did not graduate.
He married Arlene Bond, a Barnard student, in 1957, and they had two children.
By the early 1960s they were divorced, and he had taken the same Yugoslavian
freighter to Morocco that Jack Kerouac had jumped a year earlier. In Tangiers,
he lived and worked with Mr. Burroughs and Paul Bowles, the composer and
author. He started a literary magazine called Gnaoua, ostensibly dedicated to
exorcism. A copy can be seen on the mantelpiece on the cover of Bob Dylan’s
1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.”
In the late 1960s, he returned to his loft and perfected his technique of
photographing reflections on the surface of a polyester film with the trade
name Mylar. Jimi Hendrix, of whom Mr. Cohen made a famous picture, likened the
effect to “looking through butterfly wings.”
In 1968, Mr. Cohen made a 20-minute film using the Mylar technique, “The
Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda,” which has steadily risen in popularity. The
original drummer of the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise, improvised the
score, a smorgasbord of Tibetan, Moroccan and Druidic trance music. A Village
Voice reviewer said one left the film “perched full-lotus on a cloud of
incense, chatting with a white rabbit and smoking a banana.”
Also in 1968, Mr. Cohen’s name popped up in newspaper articles when he was
arrested and fined $10 for obstructing a police officer trying to shut down a
performance of the avant-garde Living Theater company for obscenity. Mr.
Cohen’s production company, Universal Mutant, soon produced a movie of the
questioned play, “Paradise Now.”
In the 1970s Mr. Cohen went to Katmandu, Nepal, where he started a
hand-operated press to publish manuscripts, some on black rice paper with red
ink flecked with gold powder. Mr. Corso had left a poem in Katmandu, and Mr.
Cohen published it.
He returned to New York in 1981 and moved in with his mother in an Upper West
Side apartment. In 1982 he married Carolina Gosselin; they divorced seven years
later. After his mother died in 1993, he remained in the apartment until his
own death.
Mr. Cohen wrote countless poems; had photographic exhibitions around the world;
did poetry readings; helped edit small literary magazines; released a movie
about a Hindu religious festival; and became the president of a nonprofit
corporation dedicated to preserving “the hidden meaning of the hidden meaning.”
He is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage, David Schleifer
and Rafiqa el Shenawi; a daughter from his second, Lakshmi Cohen; a son from
his relationship with Jhil McEntyre, Raphael Cohen; a sister, Janice Honig; and
several grandchildren.
A self-described multimedia shaman, Mr. Cohen compared writing to “pushing a
peanut with my nose.” But a postscript to one of his poems marveled at the
beauty that could inexplicably blossom: “Sometimes when I pick up my pen,” he
wrote, “it leaks gold all over the tablecloth.”
Original Page:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/arts/ira-cohen-an-artist-and-a-touchstone-dies-at-76.html?src=recg&pagewanted=print
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