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Ira Cohen’s retrospective From the Mylar Chamber was on view at October Gallery, London in January.
Courtesy of the artist.The press release for Ira Cohen’s retrospective contains a saying by Jimi Hendrix, Ira Cohen’s friend from bygone times: “Looking at these pictures is like looking through butterfly wings.” This major show is devoted to an unusual American artist. An exhibition of photographs of “reflected human forms in fluid metamorphosis” created by Cohen in the late 60s at his Lower East Side loft, this show mirrors his poetry, also included in the exhibition, which very much echoes the author’s very life. An ongoing miracle that has never stopped, his life can be compared to a sort of white magic produced by an alchemist who turned his back on the establishment in order to find God, art, and poetry.
Ira Cohen’s life is like a well-kept, illuminated manuscript that consists of many internally and externally sparkling events, mythical voyages, and legendary encounters. These experiences have endowed him with the simultaneously real and poetic privilege to call each and every important artistic and literary figure of the second half of the 20th century by his or her first names. The last poem in his book Poems from the Akashik Record evokes in an ancient Roman style the poet’s intimate relationship to life and poetry, or, rather, an attitude underpinned by the radical freedom of his verse that feeds on the peculiar spontaneity with which he can exclaim: “Farewell Burroughs, Ginsberg, Huncke, and Leary too/ We who are about to die salute you…/ Return to that light which once you knew/ Before you wrote yourself out of this human zoo.”
Broadly speaking, one can say this recent photo retrospective could be seen as a meaningful dialogue with those ordinary, and less than ordinary people who shook the soul of the 20th century’s intelligence. As a prolonged dialogue with oneself and with the others, it consists of visual recordings of highly energized conversations, observations, and monologues. Eventually, the photographs could be viewed as one long image that does not allow for further divisions. That’s why some of his books were largely divided into two large sections “Poems” and “Photographs” as if a great deal of subtlety were needed to convince the reader that the photographs were not Ira Cohen’s poems and vice versa.
These photographs were not taken by someone who had a revelation or a prophecy while thinking about the Twin Towers to be destroyed soon after. They were taken by an authentic New Yorker who was born with the doom theory up his sleeve and has seen too much art, too much life, too much death, and too much poverty in a single lifetime, and who was at his best while describing the following situation in his book from the Poem Akashic Revelation: “On 23rd Street waiting for the N train/ a black child sings to his robots/ I am going to see the IRIS prints and then to the SoHo Guggenheim…/ And now I see that death will ride the N Train/ To the end of the line/ And for a moment I feel safe as feet pass/ Over the blue gratings above Broadway…”
A true artist always feels safe in the company of numerous other fellow human beings. As a matter of fact, it is his lonely quest for the Holy Grail that places him on a cloud made of dreams and poverty, but also of exceeding humanity. That frozen moment of revelation or epiphany is the only one left to those who have always had a lot to say but did not die young. Case in point: Ira Cohen. Nevertheless, he has left the whole fleet of admirable admirals, great visual artists, and talented poetic captains. He counted among his friends John McLaughlin, William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, Jimi Hendrix, Vali Myers, and Angus MacLise, as well as some other members of “the interzone mob.”
What I find really fascinating about the photographs in this show is their steady Surrealist pace—autonomous and wild at the same time—yet still continuing on in the best Surrealist tradition in this or any other country. We should not forget that Ira Cohen is someone who has showed his photography with Man Ray in Paris.
Cohen is the artistic director of Universal Mutant, Inc., a foundation established with the help of Judith Malina, Gerard Malanga, and Will Swofford to promote and protect the work of occult and alternative writers, filmmakers, and interdisciplinary artists. In 2006 Cohen’s Mylar photographs were included in the exhibition Summer of Love organized by Tate Liverpool, touring throughout Europe and at the Whitney Museum in New York.
