Licking the Skull;
A Retrospectacle of Photographic Works by Ira Cohen

First Edition: 1,000 copies in 2000, published to accompany
Licking the Skull: A Retrospectacle of Photographic Works by Ira Cohen at Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York November 11 - December 23, 2000

Second Edition: 2,000 copies in 2006, republished on occasion of Ira Cohen's participation in the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day For Night
Whitney Museum of Art, New York
May 2 - May 28, 2006

With a corresonding exhibition at
Cynthia Broan Gallery: April 6 - May 13, 2006 Project Room
(catalog's available now through Gallery)

- introduction by Michael Rothenberg
- excerpts from Ian MacFadyen's critical essay: Ira Cohen's Photographs: A Living Theatre
- essay by Ira Cohen: From The Mylar Chambers
- essay by Allen Graubard: The Ritual Theatre of Hallucinations
- poem: Camera Obscura (for Man Ray), from On Feet of Gold, by Ira Cohen
- comprehensive biography
- Fifteen full color prints, eighteen black and white prints, 5.5 x 8.5", ISBN:0-9774221-2-7
 
Ira Cohen
introduction by Michael Rothenberg www.bigbridge.org
He uses phrases like: "Electronic/Multimedia/Shamanism" and Akashic Record and they are cool names if you know what they mean or can get past them. He is not a "Beat" and resents association with the Beats though he has been called "post-beat" which is important for our knowledge. But I see him as being in the heart and belly of the 60's doing the real work-camera, pen, dope, exploration of mysticism, a multi-faceted phenomenological mystic with real visionary powers. And I want to open people up to him. Bring them through a friendly door and then let them descend into Ira's world without knowing it is happening, and then finally find themselves in this mystic paradise of life and death, his "revolving door". And then ask themselves "how in the world could I have not known Ira Cohen?" Or have not known how key he is and was to the understanding of the old and the new, the hallucinatory mind-expanding layers of reality that frighten and amuse us, the panorama of the traveling circus of all physical and non-physical things.

Portrait of Ira Cohen by Gilles Larrain
Cohen is a true and unquestionable original innovator, friend of Gysin, Burroughs, Bowles, and Charles Henri Ford, the absolute geniuses of transformation, transmigration, and the cosmic joke. And then when the audience walks away they will say, where is that monument to Ira Cohen, the one we built for Rimbaud and Baudelaire, for Burroughs and Valery, for Genet and Gertrude Stein. Ira Cohen must be made accessible! But he has made it absolutely impossible to penetrate the organic construct of his spirit, without running the risk that you will sell him out in the process-or maybe not. Maybe something gentle to begin with, a pale lavender, a dash of blue and fluff of white, then the slow spinning of Gods and Gurus and Shamans and Mythologies, the painted faces, deformed limbs, the broken erections, the flaming corpse of his dearest friend Angus MacLise and then settling everyone down to say: Hey, it's alright. There is life, laughter, love and humanity in these strange visions, no need to come down from your trip, be cool with it, it is the inside of a beetle's shell, life in a termite nest, air rushing through the lungs and jaws of a lion, a hoot! 
Ira Cohen's photographs: A Living Theatre
excerpts from a critical essay by Ian MacFadyen
In Katmandu in 1979 Ira Cohen photographed the Tibetan Buddhist cremation of his friend Angus MacLise, artist, poet and original drummer with The Velvet Underground. The latent image reveals the burning pyre transformed into a monstrous head with MacLise's exploded skull as the eye: an anguished apparition of rage and loss as "unsatisfied cravings fly out of the pyre". This is Photography as Alchemy, the unveiling of hidden truths, the art of making visible. We think of the photograph as a record of the past, but the image may contain a prophetic significance that the photographer has divined and made apparent by an act of sympathetic magic. Man Ray discovered the same latent power of the camera in 1922 when he photographed the Marquise de Casati. From a blurred, poorly lit negative there appeared an astonishing "Surrealist version of the Medusa: the snake-mad Marquise with three pairs of glittering, staring eyes. The Marquise was enchanted, recognizing, as Man Ray put it, that he had "portrayed her soul". This kind of marvelous chance - the fortuitous, significant moment charged with seductive menace - cannot be called to order. Like Man Ray, Cohen creates theatrical tableaux, striking and dramatic situations where "the right moment, the kairos of desire", as Roland Barthes described it, may be courted and captured on film. In his poem 'Camera Obscura', dedicated to Man Ray, Cohen writes: "It is shapely desire which shows the significance of the image / struggling to unveil itself / in the startled mirror."
Cohen photographs the street magicians, religious devotees and divine gurus of North Africa and India: the 'otherworld'. And he makes portraits of the subcultures of New York, London, Berlin and Amsterdam, the seminal writers, artists and performers of the counter-culture: the 'underworld'. These are worlds of ritual and esoteric disguise and Cohen's subjects are all actors in a great spiritual drama, a masquerade where the "truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks" (Wilde). Cohen searches for what Baudelaire called the numen, "the emphatic truth of gesture in the great circumstances of life", the profound moment of "hysteria frozen, eternalized, trapped...pinioned by a long stare". And in Cohen's images there is something more than the invention and presentation of self at stake: here the mask and the mirror and the pose become ritual devices in the primal act of magical projection, the attempt to communicate with other worlds.
The Eastern adepts and Western initiates of Cohen's photographs enact the ritualized performances of the seer, the creator, the possessed, the venerated 'other.' As in Japanese Noh-Theatre and Indian Katha-Kali, an extremely stylized performance that is simultaneously an entertainment and the expression of psychic power: these actors seduce us, and yet they are entirely caught up in the re-creation of their archetypal roles. Spellbound, entranced, they are sealed off from us, their gestures frozen behind a wall of glass. Ira Cohen's photographs make us aware of the mortality of the subject, and the death that resides in the photographic medium itself. His sitters, 'the living dead', may turn away from us, lost in trance, or may gaze back at us with a look of recognition or detachment... they are all doomed, in the true underworld of the image. In 'The End', Jim Morrison sings: "He took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall..."
The ritual celebration of creative powers is also a confrontation with death: behind the saddhu's mask of ash, in the celebrated writer's gaze. Death lies too, in ambush in the photographic negative: the image promises an escape from the ravages of time, sealing the sitter off from the future and from death. But it also and immediately becomes the memento mori, reminding us that the sitter, in Peter Conrad's phrase, has "resumed the long-drawn-out business of dying". What is this image if not the already dead? In one image, Cohen shows us a man licking a skull with his long, living tongue, both mocking and embracing the definitive memento mori. Likewise, Cohen is exuberant, surreal and witty: he plays with the image, he plays with death, recognizing it, taunting it, and holding it at bay.
Jack Smith's early 60s underground movie Flaming Creatures is a pandemonium shadow-show, an unholy, rapturous homage to bad movies and the Dionysian spirit of ancient Greece. Smith and Ira Cohen were friends and they clearly share a similar aesthetic, creating a theatre of transformation where actors from a subterranean world revel in self-creation and rococo excess. Cohen's images do not focus on sexual ambivalence and hermaphroditism as Smith's do, but like Smith he reveals the ancient ritual beneath the surface. Ken Kelman recognizes that Smith's film transcends parodistic titillation, that it is always more than a pastiche of the vampire movie, the Black Mass, the Roman Bacchanalia, the celebration of the kitsch, camp pantheon. Kelman:
"The writhing figures which ornament this timeless place with splendid blacks and whites are reminiscent of Milton and Dante...myth is piled on myth and none insisted upon. It is an inferno where these creatures flame: but their fierce joy makes it a paradise, too...these are not only suffering mortal sinners doomed...but also triumphant gods, enjoyers of immortality...As gods transform themselves, they too have this power."
Here is the energy of the libido and the psyche, demonic and 'beyond good and evil'...and here is the trance, the meditation on mortality. Cohen and Smith follow the imperative of the Russian formalists, described by Amy Taubin: "Art is about 'making strange' ... the self resolves its terrors by plunging deeper within." Cohen and Smith play with surfaces, with cult images and the dramatis personae of the underground... and then they make it strange with the great archetypes, in the old underworld. Kelman: "Fan the Flaming Creatures. They're there in back of your eyes."
In North Africa and India Ira Cohen photographs a spiritual theatre which exists despite the photographer: here the fantastic does not require his powers of invention. Philippa Pullar wrote of the Kumbh Mela, the great Indian religious festival, in 1977: 'it was as though I had entered a theatre, I sat back...and watched the play of life passing before me. I moved from being active to passive." Ira Cohen's imagination and invention are evident in his portraits of Western subjects, but in North Africa and India he is more passive, recording the ancient ritual as it passes before him. There are places and times that oblige the photographer to become a witness to other, just as there are occasions when he may actively pursue and create it. Always he is culturally bound. Cohen's position is complex since he photographs a counter-culture which for forty years has been immersed in ideas and images of the East: if his work records and preserves cultural difference, then he also explores that area where the boundaries blur, get broken and cultural identity becomes ambiguous, problematic. Cohen's work is a visual history of those artists who have sought to "escape the prison of the frontiers".
Ira Cohen has photographed and filmed the Kumbh Mela, the oldest and largest religious fair in the world, which dates from the 7th Century. The Festival occurs every 3 years, rotating between the holy places of Ujjain, Nasik, Hardwar and Allahabad. Millions of people gather in a ritual of purification and adoration: miraculous cures take place-and homage is paid to naked saddhus and the great yogis who have walked from their retreats in the Himalayas. The Kumbh Mela is the triumph of awe and faith over reason and Cohen's film, "Kings with Straw Mats", challenges our trust in vision, our belief that what we see may be readily understood. Can the Kumbh Mela be understood by rewinding the video and freezing the frame? Can the camera reveal the meaning of this ritual, the eye comprehend such magic? A swami may produce a crystal lingam from his mouth, symbol of Siva-Sakti, or an orange suddenly appears in the palm of his hand "out of nowhere", or vibhuti ash streams endlessly from his fingers...such manifestations may be shown, but can we really see them, comprehend their significance? For once we experience the powerlessness of media to convey an event of such size...the miraculous escapes the camera's "all-seeing eye". We must suspend our disbelief, liberate the imagination, and enter the ritual spectacle. The Kumbh Mela cannot be experienced from the outside. Cohen's films provide us with hints and guesses, but we cannot enter the unfolding images. "Eighteen million people!"
Cohen's color photographs are reflections in sheets of Mylar, images of reversal and transformation, the human form in fluid metamorphosis. These images split and coalesce and vibrate in phantasmagoric configurations, suggesting both the flux of psychedelic consciousness and the reconstitution of physical matter at the atomic level. Henri Michaux, in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, writes of this "disorganizing flux, the frenzied surge which overflows in every direction, which cannot be controlled, retained or contained". Cohen's photographs do in fact frame and fix this delirium to an extent, which Michaux saw as the function of the artist who has been there, and brought back evidence:
"For someone who knows how to deal with it...there exists a possibility of transforming the scattering, dissipating, dislocating, devastating, breaking, tearing, disco-ordinating convulsiveness into an ally, into the prop, the support of a future radiance and illumination, the very springboard of transcendence..."
Every few years we exist in a new body, down to the last molecule, and in these hallucinatory photos we see ourselves as shape-shifters, fugitive apparitions of life which dematerializes all around us, every day, in secret. Cohen's Mylar pictures reveal to us another world, an anti-world of anti-matter where sub-atomic particles spin in reverse orbit to the world we think we know. As in his swirling, vertiginous movie "The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda", the human form becomes pure image--stretched, twisted, continually in the process of appearing and disappearing. Significantly, Cohen refers to these Mylar images as "astral projections" and clearly they have emerged from the outer regions of photography itself - etheric specters of the Image, psychic apparitions and alien visitations. This is the photography of the seance, and the quantum photography of other worlds. In his Mylar images Ira Cohen again challenges the belief that what is seen can be grasped, possessed, and understood.
The human form, masked and scarified in other images, is here entirely transfigured...it is liquefied and spills over into some realm beyond limited human vision. Looking at these disembodied, seductive terrors is like observing someone else's heightened, hallucinatory consciousness. The filmmaker Jordan Belson has said, "I've always considered image-producing equipment as extensions of mind. The mind has produced these images and has made the equipment to produce them physically... it's a projection of what's going on inside, phenomena thrown out by the consciousness, which we are then able to look at". Cohen's "astral projections" are manifestations of consciousness put out there, where we can pick up on the reflections.
Cohen's photographs operate according to the "successive phases of the image" as defined by Jean Baudrillard in his essay 'Simulacra and Simulations': "1. The image is the reflection of a basic reality. 2. It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3. It masks the absence of a basic reality. 4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum." Disguise, revelation and disappearance: Cohen's subjects are caught at strategic points of this complex process where the self confronts itself, recreates itself, hides behind the mask of Other, rubs itself out, disappears entirely, becomes nothing but image. For Baudrillard the world of the image has passed a `dead point' into a No-Man's Land where history is no longer real or possible. The death, which resides in every photograph here, manifests itself as the hallucination of catastrophe, suspended apparitions of slow-time disintegration. Cohen's portrait photographs correspond to Baudrillard's ideas of Simulacra and the reproduction of the image. More importantly, his Mylar pictures are hallucinations at the edge of annihilation, catastrophic dematerializations of the image, a process, which Baudrillard describes as "like the perfect simulacrum of our own death". It may be that Cohen's mutations of the human form, "the slow refraction of faces and gestures like the strokes of a swimmer in heavy water", are the perfect simulacra of the human after the `dead point' of erased history. Disembodied ghosts of the image machine, they materialize only to disappear before our eyes.
Ira Cohen's photographs propose a theatre that takes the world for its stage, where actors act out their parts as they go along. As Ken Kelman has written of this kind of performance: "those who acted these pleasures and raptures must, looking at themselves in black and white, have known themselves transfigured." Here the photographer is literally in the business of "redeeming life from darkness", which Kerouac believed to be the purpose of art. Marianne Faithfull: "You realize that the state we should be in is perfection, that we're not in it, and the reason we're here is to find it." Cohen's pictures show us the search for such perfection, but also acknowledge the vanity of this pursuit. Marianne Faithfull: "I think it's very important to stay in the world and do things, but I think it's a beautiful thing, death." Endless possibility, certain mortality. Cohen's images are necessarily part of that process of bringing the world to us, and simultaneously distracting us from it. What is certain is that we recognize the image as another world, where everything is possible, and through which we can live vicariously: the subjects of Cohen's photographs enact mythic scenarios on our behalf, and show us the magical projection of the psyche into alien lands, and times.
A Greek proverb, taken over by the Romans, was applied to anyone who acted strange, dreamers with weird ideas, misfits who refused to put their shoulder to the wheel: "He should visit Anticyra, that one!"... "Send him on a little trip to Anticyra... that should fix him for sure." Anticyra was a real place--near Mount Parnassus--dedicated to Artemis, sister of Apollo, a specialist in dangerous drugs: she was depicted carrying a burning torch, dressed entirely in black as Robert Graves says, "an Earth-Goddess with Underworld affiliations", a witchy girl in widow's weeds who went into the underworld to score. Anticyra was bleak and desolate. Underworld priestesses guided the rituals and administered the drugs and poisons (white and black hellebore, the vomitory and the purgative) to the apparently crazy, the socially 'maladjusted' who were sent to Anticyra for 'the cure'. It was a place of exile, but also of psychic renewal and transformation: the rituals and the narcotics which were intended to turn the revolutionary dreamer into a solid citizen in fact conferred upon him the signal status of 'Outsider' and initiate of the Mysteries of Artemis. Looking at Ira Cohen's images, we become witnesses to the persistence of this ancient ritual of descent into the Underworld, and see the 'untouchable ones' in quest of other lives, of other ways of being in the world. A distant, ancient cry echoes down the years: "They've gone...to Anticyra, really, it's the only place for people like that!"
From The Mylar Chamber

Color Photographs by Ira Cohen
A Historical Perspective 1966-71
These are archetypal images, images of the unconscious. Once Lionel Ziprin said these images should be taken to Jerusalem for safekeeping. But where is Jerusalem? We are speaking of the hidden city, hidden to those who do not know how to open the door. These are Tantric images, healing images. As Ganesh Baba has said on the subject of the healing property of arcane pictures, "Anything we look to with intent produces a psychodynamic effect in our minds striking the unknown chords in our memories which by their resonance bring out those healing frequencies which are necessary to our cure & wholeness."
It was in the Jefferson Street days around 1966 when we began to record the astral fluctuations of our individual and collective imagination, what has been called by Pohl & Kornbluth the Snowflake Syndrome in their Science Fiction masterpiece Wolfbane,. With me were Bill Devore, Robert LaVigne, Jack Smith & Panama Rose. Thus began The Universal Mutant Repertory Company. Many were to join their energies, Marty Topp, Don Snyder, Angus & Hetty MacLise, Sheldon Rochlin, etc. Among the participants were the Jimi Hendrix Experience, William Burroughs, John McLaughlin, Peter Max, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Charles Ludlam & his Ridiculous Theatrical Company whose GRAND TAROT provided an unparalleled inspiration. Vali Myers, Ching Ho Cheng, Jhil McEntyre, Kenneth Horito, Petra Vogt, Loren Standlee, Ziska Baum, & Fantuzzi were among the others who participated in the dance of the shaking mirrors in New York somewhere East of Chinatown.
THE IMAGE RISES TO TELL US IT IS NOT TOO LATE
There were many cycles of narrative story influenced by Chinese Sword & Sorcery films, the great mythologies, & by Marvel Comics. It was a truly Jungian adventure which ran the whole gamut of the electromagnetic spectrum. From Black Light to Infrared, past Electrical Anaesthesia to Deep Space and World Resonance. There was BRAIN DAMAGE, a kind of phantasmaglorical slide show and THE INVASION OF THUNDERBOLT PAGODA, an award-winning film at Oberhausen. A page in the LIFE Magazine Special Double Issue on the 60's said, "From Beatles lyrics to Masters' theses few came as close to explaining the euphoric distortions of hallucinogenics as did the photographs of Ira Cohen."
A THEORETICAL RIBBON GROOVES
ON CONCH SHELLS
& RECORDS THE HISTORY OF THE PLANETS
The Ritual Theatre of Hallucination
essay by Allen Graubard, September 2000
...something visionary and with a certain flair for the theatrical..."
They would gather at his loft, friends and acquaintances in the know -poets, painters, dancers, musicians, actors, set designers, costumers and more- simply to play, to initiate the "great adventure" of the "play". He had built the Mylar Chambers, 16 large wooden panels hinged together, eight sets of doubled panels, and hung dichro and color spots to define the stage.
They would don elaborate costumes, fabricate masks or make up with costumes to distill the essence of the rococo estrangement. From Marvel Comic Book heroes (Baron Mordo, Electromagneto, Dr. Strange) and sword-play movies seen at random in Chinatown, to his work with Jack Smith, Angus MacLise, the ever fecund audacity provoked by psychotropics, and more, they founded the ambiance that marked them.
Here they would evolve, day by day, a social space for a hidden theatre given over to rituals played with all the grace of explorers on the run; poet explorers inventing for themselves a parallel reality, despite and because of the games they lived. If a certain form of artistic desperation found its haven here, so did the magnificence, humor and contretemps of comedia d'ella arte. If demons rose here to command with mock attack, so did erotic allurements to embrace in sibylline flight. If the reflected image suddenly burst into stunningly complex, but no less apt, portraits of the created cast, conjured from a gesture caught in mid-arc, so did the sensibility of objective revelations.

Au Harem
If in the sweet chaos of the momentous fun the players found their doubles equal to themselves, so did they find themselves equal to their fantasy. If from the Mylar Chamber several fates blossomed, having recognized themselves no where better, and in whose arc years later they would still refer the several truths and illusions they discovered or reaffirmed or cast off along the way, and that made them what they are, those still with us, and were, those not, so does their genius in doing so compel us.
The ritual theater of hallucinations was not, and never can be, a solitary dwelling place. Nor is there anything obscure in this theater. In the photos that Ira Cohen has returned to us as witness, we find a privileged place, where the hallucinations we hold of ourselves, our friends and our enemies, find us amidst their reflections.
Madness is not the apotheosis of reality by hallucinations, but the eradication of reality from the hallucinations we have, however subtly or tenderly or brutally they appear to us.