Introduction
David and Stuart Wise were born in Jesmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1943. In the mid-1960s, as students at Newcastle University School of Art, they were associated with what they later called ‘ the often confusedly anti-art magazine’, Icteric.
Icteric’s purported aim was the ‘fusion’ of ‘art and life’. It was mainly the brainchild of Ronald Hunt, the librarian at the Dept of Fine Art at Newcastle University, who had been appointed to the post at the instigation of pop artist Richard Hamilton who taught at the university. Hunt was familiar with the more marginal art magazines and it was he who acquainted future Situationist member Donald Nicholson-Smith with the theoretical journals of the French Situationists. Hunt also read about the activities the Black Mask group in New York, such as their intervention at a meeting in a plush art gallery shouting, ‘burn the museums baby’, ‘art is dead’, ‘Museum closed’ etc.
Dave Wise recalls in King Mob: A Critical Hidden History:
‘Soon letters were sent out to New York and we got replies immediately: “brothers/sisters come and join us”! So two of us (Dave Wise and Anne Ryder) went from Newcastle to New York, and in the summer of 1967 engaged in some of the activities of Black Mask... Having by then heard of the Situationists in New York, Ben Morea gave us the personal addresses and telephone numbers of Sit sympathisers who resided in London. We duly contacted on them on our return to England. They were the people around the magazine Heatwave, some of whom initially formed the English section of the Situationist International. Heatwave was the first magazine of all to put the new revolt of youth into some kind of perspective, with specific reference to Mods and Rockers, Beats and the like; affirming their vandalistic acts of destruction as something which could have real future consequences.’
Initially, what resulted was a ‘meeting - if you like – between north and south’ between the Wise twins and friends, and the English section of the Situationists, consisting of, Chris Gray, Donald Nicholson Smith, Tim (TJ) Clark and Charles Radcliffe. In this new grouping the ideas of the Situationists and their predecessors were discussed in depth,
‘...finding out by word of mouth - from the horse’s mouth if you like - all the unknown history of post-Second World War cultural and political subversion and how we could no longer separate the two as they inevitably tended more and more to enmesh. Astonished, we heard about the International Lettrist interventions in the 1950s, particularly’s invasion of Notre Dame dressed as a priest incarnating a litany proclaiming “God is Dead” only to be set upon by the Swiss Guards with swords drawn ready to hack him to pieces, finally escaping with some nasty cuts. That all this information been withheld from us only confirmed what we’d felt deep down all our lives: England was a truly conservative shit hole!’
At that time a magazine was being put together containing new, original polemical texts, most of which – due to ‘unforeseen circumstances - have unfortunately been lost as the proposed magazine never saw the light of day:
‘We saved the only known one: The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution put together by Chris Gray and Don with occasional help from Tim Clark... In that text there are references to Black Mask couched in a comradely critical way. And then came Vaneigem’s bombshell communication after his meeting with Black Mask in New York in late 1967. Principally, Vaneigem objected to Alan Hoffman, a kind of mystical but political acidhead who’d started to show an interest in Black Mask... Also, Ben had a serious liver complaint and he couldn’t touch alcohol, thus acid went down very nicely... Ben was inevitably very upset about Vaneigem and started raving on in letters about the man of letters disposition he put across, accusing him of not knowing anything about those at the bottom of the pile and street life in general. This created quite a dilemma in London as Chris Gray and Don N Smith in particular wanted to keep all the newfound friendships here alive and kicking. Knowing our friendliness with Ben Morea, they didn’t want to cause too many upsets before things had really kicked in in terms of doing something together. Presumably because of their prevarication, they were excluded from the Situationists and the rest, as they say, is history... Out of this lacunae and initial disorientation followed by a kind of re-think, King Mob developed.’
Moreover:
‘It could be said that King Mob had created an opening out of nothing in these islands and that is something that adds up to la gloire! Aggressive tactics had split something asunder as basically we were absolute beginners without any immediate reference points to hand. It’s like as though we were forced into the quasi-terrorist address against a back drop of quite terrifying incomprehension. Hardly surprising therefore that it was followed by direct action terrorism in the form of the Angry Brigade even though both were heading clean up the wall. By 1972, we realised we had nothing to fall back onto. Nobody would possibly publish anything we’d done or would even propose to do so.’
As the texts in this volume will show, the Wise twins and their King Mob friends continued their activism and theoretical outpourings, separate from, ignored by, and indeed, despised by former associates who ‘survived’ by getting careers in journalism, publishing and academia. To physically survive and finance their publications, the ex-King Mobbers formed a builders’ collective called the Lascar Apprentices, who were all paid the same wage and were in constant conflict with the hated construction industry contractors.
On the website of Tate Britain there is an article by Hari Kunzru, entitled ‘The mob who shouldn't really be here: King Mob’ (1 May 2008). One suspects that this piece was commissioned by the Tate to ‘explain’ how some of the productions of group opposing the institutions like art museums ended up in ... art museums:
‘As revolutionary bullshit detectors and anti0art activists, King Mob despised one thing above all – culture, ‘the commodity which helps sell all the others’. To them Godard was ‘just another bloody Beatle’, and the elite of cultural consumers who looked to the avant-garde or the political underground for shock or novelty were just as duped by the spectacle as any mass-media-watching suburbanite. And that means you, readers of Tate Etc. One thing is certain. King Mob never wanted to find themselves here, in the house rag of cultural consumption, let alone locked away in Tate’s permanent collection. But these posters and magazines are just detritus, the record of past struggles. In the present day, the real action is elsewhere.’
Whatever ‘real action’ consists of, and wherever ‘elsewhere’ might be, is best left to Kunzru to explain. As for ‘detritus’ of ‘past struggles’, perhaps the detritus has more claim to relevance than what is today claimed in the ‘art world’ (and politics) to be ‘substantial’ (a dictionary definition of the opposite of detritus is ‘substance’); and perhaps past struggles have more to teach us than present-day capitulations to capital. It is hoped that this book, along with the other two titles published this year (2024) in the BPC/WisEbooks series will in some small (anti-academic) way, help to shatter the illusions of cultural recuperation; and, regarding the history of King Mob, break down, to use Edward Thompson famous phrase in The Making of the English Working Class, the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.
David Black