Enough Get Backery! Let’s celebrate Yoko Ono’s 70 years at the vanguard
//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.
//Ono in front of 112 Chambers Street, 2014. From @yokoono//
In 1956, the year John Lennon bought his first guitar, Ono eloped with the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (who introduced her in turn to his mentor John Cage) and gravitated to visual art. In 1960 she opened a gallery space in her fourth floor loft at 112 Chambers Street where she hosted dance performances, exhibitions and concerts by Ono’s collaborator La Monte Young, who co-curated programmes of events there.
//Announcement of piece by Simone Forti at 112 Chambers Street, 1961//
One of six pieces Ono made for her first show at Chambers Street was entitled Painting To Be Stepped On and was photographed by her confrere, the ‘central co-ordinator’ of the art movement Fluxus, George Maciunas. ‘I hoped Marcel Duchamp would notice when he came to the loft for a concert, but he didn’t,’ she explained a couple of years later.
As Inventing Downtown makes clear, by pushing the boundaries of accepted notions of art, 112 Chambers Street was an important place in the development of vanguard expression in New York. According to Rachleff one of the outcomes of the Chambers Street space was that Ono’s instruction-based paintings, music and poems there ‘laid a foundation for Fluxus’.
Inventing Downtown is available here.