Interview with Ira Cohen

It was suppose to be an interview, but meeting the legendary Ira Cohen ended up feeling a bit like a surreal cup of tea with a friend. The “father of Mylar photography”, the poet, film maker and photographer is a charismatic man, a natural story teller who loves people. A passionate multi-talented artist at the forefront of the Trance movement that has taken pictures of the likes of Jimmy Hendrix and Angus MacLise. He’s photos have also been used as album covers for Hendrix, John Mclaughlin and Pharaoh Sanders.

Jimi Hendrix

Ira Cohen: It’s very nice to meet you, where do you want to sit?

BCR: It’s nice to meet you too.

IC: Did you have a look at the exhibition?

BCR: Yes, I really loved everything. From the black and white work around this room, my favourite has to be the Johnny Dolphin pictures.

IC: Yeah that’s three shots of him dancing, I sort of like that one a lot too.

BCR: It feels like there’s movement in it, like a little clip of someone.

IC: And he’s also a guy that you don’t see dancing, but he’s also a dancer. He’s got a lot of personality. He’s actually behind this gallery, and the whole October movement, Theatre of all Possibilities, and Eco Technique. I started to have contact with the group from the first time I meet Johnny. I used to come to his plays and was into the plays, then I’d see Johnny and we would go somewhere, then one thing led to another. And of course this show is the result of those and other meetings and I had other shows here before. You know this gallery is really quite wonderful, and it’s lovely for me that it is in London, cause as you know I’m a hot shot New Yorker so London seems very sexy to me. In this gallery I am always at home. Right now it just feels very comfortable ‘cause I don’t live in the surroundings of my photographs on the walls of my cluttered apartment.

BCR: You have travelled a lot, so you probably do feel at home in many places now.

IC: Oh yeah, I mean compared to real travellers I probably haven’t travelled at all. But I’m old enough.

BCR: What do you mean compared to real travellers? You seem to have been everywhere?

IC: I mean compared to someone that is really travelling and that is constantly going places. They can go to 10 times as many places I’ve gone in a year, compared to 10 years in which I’ve travelled. I have travelled a lot, but I am not a consistent traveller. Though over the years I’ve gone places and I lived in places for years, like Morocco and Nepal. Mostly in Morocco and Nepal A year or so at a time and I’ve went back on many occasions. I feel very much at home at those places. As wonderful as they are, it is also possible to have shows there and I have done that. But it’s not a place where I think of so much as of having a show, but to make things, and then I can do the show somewhere else.

Julian Beck

BCR: You’ve done your ‘Starstream’ series of poetry during your time with the native craftsman in the Himalayas…

IC: I did the ‘Starstream Poetry’ series and several of my own books in there, Angus MacLise was a good friend and poet who lived there and a great drummer with the Velvet Underground and by himself. He would always be playing with his own hands on a suitcase and it could be mesmerising and he was really so good. So all that time I spent in Nepal and Morocco affected me very, very strongly and entered into my work life.

BCR: So it’s all about experience and inspiration.

IC: Definitely.

BCR: You went to the largest spiritual festival in the world, the Great Kumbh Mela Festival in India…

IC: The Kumbh Mela is the male of Aquarius, so it comes in Aquarium period. So it’s like every twelve years in 4 different places, which means that it happens every year in that place. But the twelve year one is really the big one, but there’s also a six year one, a three year one. And in between there’s a regular thing that happens in those places, so some people come and attend and do their regular rituals and worships.

BCR: Do you usually get involved or do you just watch?

IC: I do get involved in some way, ‘cause I have contact with certain people. I mean I could claim ‘yes I am a Naga’. What does that mean? I think it’s a false claim. But in some other more spiritual and personal level I do feel like I am a Naga. I have real roots in their beliefs and in what they think and feel and they are from the personality point of view in my work even if I’m an artist. Though being an artist is nothing to do with being a Naga.

BCR: Why do you say that? Is being an artist so wrong from a Naga perspective?

IC: It’s not a thing for artists or writers or something like that. It’s a certain spiritual discipline and whatever else you might be doing, if you are doing that thing, that’s what you doing. And because I am a poet, a photographer, and kind of take photographs of it, I’m kind of a cross over the boundaries of what that means. A real Naga has a certain absence and commitment to that way of life. I may consider that I’m expressing that discipline some way spiritually or in mind, or when I’m thinking about what I’m trying to accomplish today I kind of cover it with some Naga-hood. But I am not doing it with all the other personal things that it involves; the disciplines and the affairs that are part of it.

BCR: So you just follow the philosophy?

IC: Yeah, very much so.

Dr Mabuse

BCR: And do you take from other religions and spiritual beliefs?

IC: Yeah because they are all over the place and it’s very attractive whenever you come into contact with someone that is enlightened in those countries. You find there’s a lot in Muslim countries, so I have carried over from those experiences and from different Muslim practises or ways of life that have affected me. And I would say that is true in general. Those are the most inspiring situations you can be in.

BCR: Ok, so let‘s go on to your work here in the gallery, the famous Mylar pictures…

IC: I started the Mylar images, which are probably the most dominant aspect of my work that you see here and for me, myself, that I undertook doing that was simple. It didn’t require spiritual experiences or some connection in that way. I had a good friend during the expansion of the Psychedelic Movement who started to develop a business of selling items that pertain to that movement. Which meant making and selling posters that were done in the sort of thing that responded to black lights and black lights themselves. So he discovered Mylar as a reflective material that could be used in all kinds of ways in advertisement and decoration and used them in another way that related to these other things. He would always give me samples of it ‘cause he thought that I was a person who could actually make use of these things in my work. I was not a serious photographer, I was a poet. But he knew that I had worked with people who made films, and so he thought that I would use it some way in film making. Which I did. And then I shot a lot of these pictures which are the most important part of my photographic work for me and attracted the most attention.

You see that picture there of me is actually a figure break of someone who worked for me. I directed by posing a lot. It was a luxury that I had to be in the pictures as well as taking the pictures, which I did a lot of both. So there’s a picture of me coming out of my head, and my head again growing out of my head. But then there’s also a reverse image of that of that head going out of the head going into another fore image. Those are just interesting images that are doing fine. They come out naturally because of that bendable mirror the picture was taken in. I found that very exciting and just put more of my energies towards making sessions on a regular basis. When I posed myself I enjoyed that as well as I enjoyed taking pictures of other people. I have pictures of all kinds of people and sometimes they create an atmosphere of some kind and I can put them together in a story. I love those pictures! People still look at them and think they are so contemporary and can’t believe that I did them twenty years ago.

BCR: The chance of doing these pictures with all these people must have been quite overwhelming.

IC: Yes and that’s how I worked out the ins of photography. And then much later if I had a camera with me I would take pictures and would do a conserved, much more normal sense and not set up a Mylar mirror and get someone to pose or dress up for it. If I wanted to take a picture of someone I might have pulled a top of hat out of the closet and put it on their head and use certain props that are around that I kind of collect.

Brion Gysen and Ornette Coleman

BCR: From the film making?

IC: Yeah. Otherwise I just like to take photographs, any kind of photographs.

BCR: So the Mylar was your way of experimenting and with that you became a photographer.

IC: Someone who works here, Jessie, is a good friend for many years. He says the Mylar pictures are here because they are exciting and that they are interesting for who the people were. Then the black and white pictures that are up are actually here to show that I am a real photographer. So the black and white will convey that, even though you don’t need any gimmicks around it and you are just taking a picture of someone in front of you. If I had my camera and my bag than I would take a picture of you. It would be nice to do that all the time with people that I spend some time with, sometimes they turn out to be particularly good and I am glad I took those pictures. Usually the people that I have been photographing in my life are very close people to me and people I care about. I think pictures are also invested with their spirits. Some of them were famous or relatively famous like Julian Beck great founder of the Living Theatre and his wife Judith Malina who’s a great actor and poet, they can do everything. And that’s Brion Gysin with his plaster foot which I made. I was making masks of people; you can see Terry Wilson holding a mask made of a mould of his face. Brion didn’t want his face done so I did his foot. It turned out he had a foot with four toes on, so he said ‘I give you my foot, but best of all I give my four toe foot’. It was just an interesting idea of doing his plastic foot, rather than his face. There he is again with Ornette Coleman both smoking cigarettes, just a natural photograph.

BCR: So you started out as poet, and you became a photographer, did movies, and contributed to several magazines around the world…

IC: I was talking to Johnny Allen who’s over there (pointing at the picture) I mean Johnny Dolphin as he is known. He was saying ‘When you do something well’ and he can say that because he does things well. You know he has written novels and other kinds of books, poems, on top of other things besides being the head of this all establishment sort of speak. ‘If you can do one thing well, you can probably do some other thing equally as well. You know if you put your head into doing something else.’ I feel that’s very true. I did a lot of different things and somehow it feels the same. But there are things that are first and most important to me and that’s the poetry and the photography that come very naturally to me.

BCR: So tell me about the magazine Gnaoua, which is one more of those things you seem to have done quite well.

Allen Ginsberg

IC: Gnaoua is the name of a brotherhood in Morocco, a Muslim brotherhood. It means Black, and it refers to certain kind of Black Muslim brotherhood in Africa. I was very affected by meeting them so I invited them to my house. They would come to where I lived and they would perform and I invited other people to come as well. So we would have an entire evening of their music, dancing and whatever came with it. Of course that’s what they do amongst themselves, Moroccans and so forth. Though slightly different than when in my place. ‘Cause though they were still playing the same music, we were not making the same contribution exactly because we were not familiar with the style of the dancing. But I myself would get up and be dancing with them. And other people who came took part in these rituals even though they were new to them. So yeah, I was very excited by the Gnaoua and there were also other groups. But the Gnaoua I knew best. It was the first group I was involved with and that I brought them over as friends and they came in my house where there was enough space for them to do their thing. So of course because of how much I like them, when I did the magazine I just called it Gnaoua. The idea was that it was kind of a transformative explosion like their music and their rituals. I put together what it was that interested me, which touched on the life that I was living in Morocco. It was written mainly by people who either were in Morocco or had been in Morocco at that time and were writing with that inspiration.

BCR: All the work you do is it mainly inspired by experience with people in a spiritual level.

IC: I was thinking about that recently. The most transformative of experiences, the most exciting, the mind altering experiences that I encountered are my main source of inspiration. For example the experience of the Living Theatre had that affect on me. So I ended up making a movie about the Living Theatre called ‘Paradise Now’ which was basically made from various performances, from different pieces that were called Paradise Now. It was made between the audience and the Theatre in such a way that they became indivisible. They break down the wall between the audience and the theatre and instead of people watching something happen, they become part of the action. You know it was very, very exciting, every performance of that would be very different depending on the audience reactions. There were things pretty much in common between all of them, but there were differences. So I got together with a friend who‘s no longer alive, who was a movie camera man which I didn’t consider myself. I was still just doing still photographs and I had a movie camera, it was a Bolex movie camera and I lent it to him. We got some film, a lot of it was used film or old film that the NBC had and we got for nothing. Some of it turned out to be quite grainy and at the end of the film we were like ‘what is all that grain doing in there?’ But then we accepted it and now that’s a nasty part of the style of the film that is so gritty. And it has just recently been put together for a DVD, and is coming out with Arthur Magazine. They put out another movie of mine that I did in the 60s called ‘The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda’ which is a very experimental, mostly in colour and is shot in bendable mirrors like the Mylar, that somehow whatever I did came out as stories to me. Not conventional stories, but a very poetic and kind of complex story and allegory.

BCR: You say you have been inspired by mind altering experiences, so you must have done some mind altering drugs that influenced your work.

William Burroughs

IC: I was just reading an article in some magazine that came out here. I can’t remember the name, I think it’s Culture, but it is published inside some other much larger well known British press. I was reading the article the other day and they said a lot about geniuses and a lot about films. They also said I spent a lot of time with wackos and funny other kinds of things. Instead of just talking about the work itself and about me as an artist they dragged in all these other things and they said I must have been on LSD when I made the film and the costume person must have been on angel dust and the actors must have been on…

BCR: So they claim to know exactly what kind of drugs were going around…

IC: That’s the reaction and in one way that’s sort of irritating cause I’m really presenting the work and not talking about anything else that they might think I’m doing. Or that I am doing, and I can’t deny that I have experimented with all those things and they must have affected me like everything would affect me.

BCR: But that doesn’t mean you still wouldn’t have been able to create and do your work…

IC: Yeah that’s what I am saying. I can’t determine how it would have come out, there’s no doubt that it’s affected me and my position and my attitude towards visionary realities that I like to deal with. But it’s not like I am somebody taking a lot of drugs and then I go and start shooting something. As you can see that’s not the case. Smoking might be happening any time when I’m doing anything. In fact I don’t even have any on me now. But I have been smoking for so many years that I’m just prominently affected by that feeling. But I am not in any way looking for it, pursuing it, buying it, having it, anything else like that. And it doesn’t matter to me, except that when I do have it I share it and smoke it with somebody else that has offered it to me, I suddenly get a good reaction. I suddenly realise something and I go ‘Oh yeah I forgot.’ It can actually still provide me with some kind of enthusiasm and inspiration. It’s an experience I have and it’s different from a person who never had those experiences or is afraid of them or that never got anything out of them because a lot of times I did get lot.

BCR: Still it’s just like saying without the drugs there wouldn’t be art and the artist.

IC: Yeah, they just made this point so much that they started to talk about other people like Picasso and that he must have been on angel dust.

BCR: You are the artist director of Universal Mutant, Inc…

IC: Well you can make everything sound like that.

BCR: So you’re not?

IC: I used that title because I put out several things. And I used Universal Mutant Repertory Company as a name on a film. And I continue using it from time to time. Just as I will continue using Gnaoua press for something like that or certain other names. Because it’s a publishing company and I did a lot of self publishing and sometimes I publish something someone else has done and I put a lot in print.

BCR: do you see yourself as publisher as well?

IC: I could have been more of a publisher but I am more interested in getting my own books out there. I was just publishing a lot of books, but here and there you just get inspired by certain work and its right in your hands and I like to publish it rather then wonder how it’s going to be published.

for Big City Red Neck