Ira Cohen
(Note : I don't know when this interview was conducted, but apparently before 2003 )
Romy Ashby : One of the people Ira and I have in common is Vali Myers, the beautiful, wild Australian artist. She is absolutely the most inspiring, extraordinary person I know. When I met and befriended her in the early nineties at the Chelsea Hotel, I felt that I had tripped and fallen into a pot of majoun. Over the years, on my many visits to her in her magical mountain garden in South Italy, she's always spoken with enormous affection of Ira, "Big Ira" she calls him, always said smiling or laughing.
Ira Cohen : I met Vali in a very simple kind of way. Sheldon Rochlin was editing a film he had shot about her in Italy, called The Witch of Positano. I was with him then, and through watching the film I became quite enchanted with her, which wasn't too difficult to imagine. Then she ended up coming to New York for the first time, having been in Positano for fifteen years or so, and she pitched a tent in the loft of the painter Mati Klarwein and was living in it. I went to see her there with Sheldon, and we became very fast friends.
I had a loft downtown then, a big beautiful place, and she spent a lot of time there. I took some nice photographs of her and we were always very close. She was the first one who mentioned the fantasy that we should get married and have a giant gypsy wedding.
A while ago I wrote to her and said let's do it now, in Australia. I'm speaking here more of the spectacle and the drama and the joyous explosion of the whole thing than the idea of having a serious marriage. It would be like King and Queen of the Gypsies, a grand, theatrical spectacle. The whole beautiful thing about my relationship to Vali was that it was really a love story in my life, one that is significant. But I never got it on with Vali, you know, I'm a little bit shy. Not that she doesn't understand being shy, she can be shy herself. I think it was very lovely that we both understood that wasn't what was happening, although it was very affectionate. When she would visit me in my loft she'd always treat me in a certain special way, she'd make Turkish coffee and say, "Here baby, I don't even make coffee like this for Rudi, you know, hahaha."
She lived with Rudi in Italy, but she was sowing her oats while she was here. She's never made any big pretense about being Miss Faithful exactly, or of being easy to possess. She was always a bit wild to say the least. Ching and she had this incredible affair (In her book, Vali wrote of her first trip to New York City: "There I met a young Chinese painter, Ching ho Cheng, and with him rode a dream voyage on the Great Chinese Wall"), because Ching was really homosexual. But then he ended up adopting Vali's handwriting exactly and changed his whole style of painting.
They were like two little foxes, they loved each other and they had a real affair. She tattooed a black spade on his dick. Which I never saw, but I remember asking him how they did that, and he said he kept an erection while she was tattooing. I asked what happened when he didn't have an erection. I imagined you probably couldn't even see it. He'd have to pull it out or have an erection to see the spade. He just laughed.
Vali gave me my first tattoo, which was a small heart on my arm. I asked for it when I had to think of what tattoo I was going to have. Being a tattoo virgin, I wasn't too sure and didn't want to get too complicated. I was very into hearts in a way, and maybe it's a little sentimental, but I was thinking about the Heart Chakra, and it was Valentine's day. I got a big box of candy, and for a long time I would carry that big heart-shaped box around with pencils and things in it. Anyway she had a nice heart with the bottom twisted a little in some Italian style, sort of gypsy, on her belt which was made of brass. I said, "Put that on my arm," and she did, with three little dots on the bottom, as a sort of protection sign. One time Petra drew two eagles fighting on the heart with each other. We were actually having certain problems at the end of our relationship when she did that, so I took it as a kind of rapacious thing, these two eagles, fighting on the heart that Vali had put there. I had them tattooed with the heart, so now I have a tattoo with Petra's eagles on top of my heart.
Later I got another tattoo from Vali when she was in Amsterdam, living in a gay bordello where they loved her and gave her a room. I saw her walking in the street from behind and screamed out "Vali!" We spent a lot of time together in Amsterdam. I told her that I wanted a tattoo over my heart, and I was saying that I wanted flames. But the way she did it was as waves, which was brilliant because I needed something more to cool me off than to ignite me at the time.
Just to know Vali is enough to make one's life that much more worthwhile. What a piece of work. Everybody is "love" whether it's a fat pig or a wolfhound or a chubby little bald guy, she always sees the beauty in everything, every person, every living thing. Everything is adorable. It's not a question of which breed she prefers. Whenever she loves somebody, that's it and there's no other question about it. Is my hair okay? You know, which is pretty down to earth. That reminds me, there is a movie called Gone to Earth, made by Michael Powell with Jennifer Jones as this wild girl who's in love with a real macho nasty guy, and then there's a priest who really loves her in another way. She's absolutely wild, and she has a pet fox. One day I asked Vali if she knew that movie, and she said, "Of course I know that movie!" And then she told me that it influenced a lot of her whole trip about the fox. That was very interesting to know, because I couldn't see that movie without thinking of Vali. We talked about it and she asked me, "Can you get a copy of it, baby?" I tried, I called around but finally gave up. So much for Gone to Earth. Once it showed at the Museum of Modern Art. That together with one of the films about Vali would make a nice double feature.
I'd like to say something more perfect about Vali, that would actually shed light on her beauty and how important she is to me. She's really a great artist, and she's always followed her own star, which is to me the most important thing. Especially when you're talking about authenticity, a word which doesn't have a lot of play in the art world. For me Vali is both a great artist and a great person, absolutely unique. Anyone who has ever seen her or knows her can tell that. But she herself is her greatest work of art. I never really saw her when she was drawing, although I have a tiny doodle she made on an envelope and gave me which I put in a little frame.
A link to the whole fabulous interviewhere.