//Painting To Be Stepped On, Yoko Ono, 1961. Photograph: George Maciunas//

“People said Yoko Ono ruined the Beatles, but I think the Beatles ruined her in many ways”

Anne Bean, artist, to The Guardian, 2021.

Saturated as mass culture has recently been by Get Backery, I note the lack of celebration for another significant anniversary: 70 years since Yoko Ono became the first female student to be accepted onto the philosophy course at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University in 1952.

As noted in Inventing Downtown, Melissa Rachleff’s incisive history of New York’s artist-run galleries from the early 50s to the mid-60s, Ono left Gakushuin after two terms to join her parents in Manhattan, where she promptly enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College to study poetry and composition.

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Tags: 112 Chambers Street, Fluxus, Gakushuin University, George Maciunas, Get Back, Inventing Downtown, John Cage, John Lennon, La Monte Young, Marcel DUchamp, Melissa Rachleff, Painting To Be Stepped On, Sarah Lawrence College, Simone Forti, the Beatles, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yoko Ono

//Explanatory text panel which appeared on the inside cover of Icteric No. 2 with 2004 note, from King Mob: A Critical Hidden History//

//Extract of text on 1974 t-shirt by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein//

A few years ago I attempted a dissection of the intriguing elements of the culture-shock t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!, produced by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein for sale in Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974.

In You’re Gonna Wake Up, the declamatory tone, aggressive punctuation, satirical bite and use of basic typographical emphases such as the repeated forward slash and random capitalised text combined to detonate a densely packed cultural device.

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Tags: Antonin Artaud, Arthur Cravan, Bernard Buffet, Blue Blouse, Boris Arvatov, Buckminster Fuller, David Wise, Erik Satie, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Francis Picabia, Franz Jung, Georges Méliès, Giorgio de Chirico, Icteric, James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre, Johannes Baader, John Cage, John Myers, Jonathan Swift, Kazimir Malevich, Leon Trotsky, Louis Aragan, Marcel DUchamp, Maurice Martin du Gard, Nick Brandt, Raymond Roussel, Richard von Foregger, Ron Hunt, Stuart Wise, Tristan Tzara, Vache, Viktor Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Woyrow, You're Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You've Been Lying On!