“If the psychedelic experience is anything, it is spectacle, theatre, science fiction, the spiritual idea of death and rebirth, the word and painting revealing itself. It’s seeing the hidden meaning in language, the opening up the seed of consciousness to unlock the key to self.” - Ira Cohen
"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. 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." (NYT)
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