Ira Cohen: (1935–2011) Art into Alchemy

Ira Cohen embodied a certain mystery and mythology in contemporary art.  For him, essence preceded existence. In the spirit of the avant-garde, the intersection of visual art and everything else was his area of focus.  Hanging out with the beat generation in the 60s, Cohen was a self-described “Electronic Multimedia Shaman.”  One might add, provocateur of phantasmagoria and America’s answer to Joseph Beuys.  In the early 1960s he was living and working in Tangier, Morocco with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Paul Bowles.  Later in the seminal year of 68 he made his first underground, now cult classic film, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda.

His artistic trajectory seems to be a template for a generation of contemporary artists whose work and interests are varied and shifting.  Throughout his life, Cohen had a seemingly endless imagination, taking wonderfully strange photographs of iconic figures, writing thousands of poems, and eventually operating the Bardo Matrix publishing house in Nepal; all the while realizing revelatory experiences into moments of ecstatic perception.

****For further reading please see the May 1, 2011 New York Times obituary article. Douglas Martin notes “He (Ira Cohen) published works by authors like William Burroughs and the poet Gregory Corso…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.’”