20 March 2024 - BPC Publications (London) announces release of two titles this week in the WisEbooks Series, compiled by, and featuring, Dave Wise and Stuart Wise, founders of King Mob. Available on AMAZON
Beautifully illustrated with original colour photos, Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Greenwash and Rewilding the Commons -an Illustrated Derive, is a psychogeographical exercise in butterfly preservation as part of the environmentalist, anti-capitalist struggle against ecocide, The lifelong fascination of David Wise and his late twin, Stuart, with the ecology of butterflies goes back to their involvement in the mid-1960s surrealist-inspired radical arts scene in Newcastle. From their contact with the Situationist International the Wise brothers adopted the concept of ‘recuperation’ which they see exemplified in today's 'greenwashing' PR exercises. Their latter-day rewilding campaign is effectively a post-situationist Longue Dérive through the relatively forsaken terrains of derelict industrial sites and zones of autonomy in northern England; as well as the contested public space of Wormwood Scrubs in London.
Epigraph
“I feel so much more at home in a garden like this one here and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than at one of our party congresses. I can say that to you because you will not promptly suspect me of betraying socialism. You know I hope to die at my post, in a street fight or in jail. But the real deep 'me' belongs more to my butterflies than it does to my comrades. This is not because, like so many spiritually bankrupt politicians, I seek refuge and repose in nature. In nature I see so much cruelty at every turn that I suffer greatly."
Rosa Luxemburg, letter from prison to Sonia Liebknecht , 1 June 1917.
Lost Texts Around King Mob 1968-72, published as an ebook in January 2024, is now, by popular demand, available as a paperback.
King Mob was initially a coming together in London of members of the English section of the Situationist InternationaI and like-minded individuals from Newcastle associated with the anti-art magazine, Icteric, and the Black Hand Gang.
Following Guy Debord’s expulsion of the English members of the SI in December 1967, the King Mob Echo was co-founded in April 1968 by former SI member, Chris Gray and ‘friends from the north’, Dave and Stuart Wise.
The material in this collection by King Mob writers and their associates still has a power to provocatively invigorate and open up new directions of thought and action emanating from a subversive critique of culture. For the most part, these documents have been forgotten and therefore never archived in the libraries of art history and the ‘popsicle academy’ of media/music studies. Indeed, they had to be rescued from what Marx called “the gnawing criticism of the mice”.
Contents
(with notes on the origin of the texts)
Introduction: By way of an explanation…
Dave Wise and Stuart Wise
The Arts in Our Time: A Working Definition
Ronald Hunt (1968)
(Original document: A gestetnered A4 flyer handed out on the streets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne).
The Great Communications Breakdown
Ronald Hunt (1968)
(Original document: A gestetnered flyer/pamphlet which was circulated but never published in any journal).
Transform the World:
Poetry must be made by all.
Ronald Hunt 1968 (At the Moderna Museet, Stockholm)
Culture and Revolution
Dave Wise and Stuart Wise 1968 (Original document: transcript of a talk given at a conference of revolutionary surrealists in Devon in late 1968).
Art+Politics = Revolution
John Barker 1968
(Original document: The bulk of this article was written as a series of footnotes to ‘A Critique of the Study of English Literature’, in full in the Birmingham radical arts mag. Red Texts No 2, (distributed for 3/6d by the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation). The first section is a condensing to about third of this article to the points and concepts used in the main discussion).
Tradition: The Rewards of Punishment
Fred Vermorel 1970
On Whom Can the Workers Count?
Fred Vermorel 1970 (Original document: an A4 flyer sent by the author to Dave Wise)
Balls!
Chris Gray and Dave Wise (1970)
(Original document: “A piss-take… A bit of self-recuperation sent to a trendy mag who paid us good money - then used for King Mob publications” – D.W.)
The Gurriers (the 'Irish King Mob')
Phil Meyler 1968
(Original document: Published in the Dublin the magazine, The Gurriers)
Notes from the Survivors of the Late King Red
Phil Meyler 1972
(Original Document: flyer published in Dublin, 4th April 1972)
The book is dedicated to Stuart Wise, 1943-2021.
This looks really good. Coincidentally this week i’ve been sowing wild “Butterfly & Bee friendly” (& pollinator insects) flower and shrub seeds in my backyard, i stopped cutting the grass a few years ago and it resembles a little wildlife zone what with the foxes, hedgehogs, field mice, occasional badger and loads of small birds.