Icteric’s influence on the Sex shop t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!
//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.
//Cover of Icteric No 2, 1967. Image from revoltagainstplenty.com//
//Seditionaries version of You’re Gonna Wake Up design. Photo: Toby Walker//
These techniques may be traced to the Situationist International’s literary style, in particular that of the UK’s King Mob and specifically to a panel on the inside cover of the 1967 second issue of the short-lived and “often confusedly anti-art” magazine Icteric.
As detailed in King Mob: A Critical Hidden History – by the group’s founder twins David and Stuart Wise with contributions from Nick Brandt – Icteric sewed the seeds for the launch of King Mob in 1968, challenging both the status quo and the avant-garde in Dada-ist fashion.
//King Mob: A Critical Hidden History, Bread & Circuses Publishing, 2014//
//Icteric’s output 1967-69 from top left: Icteric, No 1; Icteric collective: Why not indeed toys incense and death; Icteric no 2; Catalogue for exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1969; Exhibition view; Stuart Wise, Photomontage after suggestion by Maurice Henry for replacing the Sacre Coeur, 1968. Images from artandeducation.net//
Taking its name from the clinical term for both jaundice and its remedy, Icteric was the brainchild of Ron Hunt, then librarian at Newcastle University’s department of fine art.
According to Wise, Hunt “bravely at the time delved into the history of modern art and began to put the record straight, beginning to place all the long-lost and forgotten (on purpose) radical experiments into the beginning of some coherent trajectory”.
An aspect of this was the nomination of “heroes”, whose names were scattered across an image of a mountain range on the cover of issue 2. “I doubt if many readers would have recognised the majority of names,” wrote Hunt much later. “Breton’s name (was) on high astride a volcano. The others showed that eclectic purview that was to be so important to us. There were plenty of Russians … various Dadas…”
Here were several well-known figures as well as more obscure objects of admiration, including a poet-boxer, a couple of early cinema pioneers, a Constructivist magazine, a chemist, a jazz musician, a minimalist composer and Carl Jung’s son Franz (who rejected his father’s career path and became an architect).
In the vein of the 2011 You’re Gonna Wake Up post, this is my attempt to shine light on Icteric’s heroes (click on the names for info links):
Period: 1900 to 1950
Evreinov for reconstruction of the audience/ de Chirico for his diatribes against modern art/ Buffet (Bernard) – for his honesty/ Aragon for throwing Maurice Martin du Gard‘s typewriter out of his window /Peret for spitting/ Morton (Jelly Roll) for snooker/ Eisenstein for the early things/ Parker (Charlie) – for dying with laughter/ Sherman* for eluding his followers/ Trotsky for Literature and Revolution/ Griffith for Intolerance/ Khlebnikov for his soup-lakes/ Duchamp (Marcel) for being Villon‘s brother/ Feks for factory for the eccentric actor/ Mayakovsky for not rummaging through yesterday’s petrified crap/ The rest for HEROISM and Jonathan Swift for today.
Among those named on the cover but not annotated above were: Antonin Artaud, Andre Breton, Arthur Cravan, Tristan Tzara, Vache, Raymond Roussel, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Buckminster Fuller, Richard von Foregger, Boris Arvatov, Viktor Rodchenko, Franz Jung, John Cage, Georges Méliès, Woyrow**, Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Picabia, Johannes Baader, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erik Satie, James Joyce and Blue Blouse.
Icteric was more than the two issues of the magazine (a third pamphlet was produced by Hunt in 2008). The participants staged interventions, created artworks and put on a retrospective exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1969.
Read Ron Hunt’s paper on Icteric for artandeducation.net here.
Visit the Wises’ website Revolt Against Plenty; the importance of Icteric is discussed here.
I recommend King Mob: A Critical Hidden History. Buy copies here.
Here is my dissection of the references compiled in the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt.
King Mob’s activities will be included in Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges, the exhibition I am curating with David Thorp which will be held at Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery this autumn.
*”Sherman” did not exist. He was an invention of Icteric contributor John Myers.
**Information gratefully received.