User:Kennethrowntree

Dave and Stuart Wise Re:King Mob

Dave and Stuart Wise were prominent members of the British King Mob situationist group in the late 1960s. What part they actually played is difficult to assess as few, if any, of the group’s participants have written on the subject. Not much is really known about them. These two guys (twins) seem to be deliberately elusive – having little or no profile – disparaging all professional roles, shunning the media and publicity in general. They never give talks or lectures though often invited. It seems they’ve preferred working on building sites for well over three decades provoking strikes and even, along with other operatives, completely destroying one site in London’s Maida Vale. Indeed nobody even knows what these guys look like yet they have written profusely throughout the past four decades – often anonymously – and many of their often trenchant pamphlets have achieved coveted rarity status. They are perhaps the only participants of the King Mob grouping who’ve written critically but continuously about the KM experience often as lengthy asides in pamphlets and latterly on two quite voluminous websites: www.revoltagainstplenty.com and www.dialecticalbutterflies.com Dave and Stuart Wise came to latter day prominence through a pamphlet written in the late 1970s called The End of Music which marked the interregnum between King Mob theory and practise. The pamphlet though revealing certain aspects of King Mob was basically a critique of punk rock signalling the movement as a form of manipulative recuperation moving away from revolutionary intervention to staged musical representation. This essential shift in emphasis was roundly condemned especially in the pages of the New Musical Express. The Wises’ referred to punk as “musical situationism” having had a formative though profound influence on Malcolm McLaren (manager of the Sex Pistols) and Fred Vermorel who helped the Wises’ create the King Mob Santa Claus intervention in Oxford Street’s Selfridges’ store in the Winter of 1968. The End of Music period was characterised by another Box number address - BM BIS - and was basically oriented around the revolutionary explosions in Portugal and Spain. These guys helped produce a book by another ex King Mob member, Phil Meyler whose book, Portugal: The Impossible Revolution became the classic text on these times and ironically has now become obligatory reading for Portuguese school kids as part of  the official educational syllabus. Another contribution was Wildcat Spain Encounters Democracy and largely a translation of fellow Spanish situationists. BIS (for some reason) was quickly followed by BM BLOB which was very worker/unemployed oriented. The Wises’ initial publication was a long incendiary, even apocalyptic pamphlet on the huge wave of urban riots that swept throughout England in the summer of 1981 called Like a Summer with a Thousand Julys, though it seems a woman from Liverpool was also involved in its production. They saw in these riots the realisation of King Mob’s wish fulfilment of a permanent, enlightened mayhem though behind all applause for such raw incendiarism, the text is very subtle with many allusions only the clued-in can catch. The title is derived from a Billie Holiday song and the imaginative graphics on the front cover something of a lift (or ‘detournement’ as these people like to call it) of a painting by the Victorian ‘lunatic’ artist Richard Dadd who himself was jailed for burning down part of York Minster. (Incidentally, it is alleged the Wises’ were jailed for burning down part of Newcastle art school in the late 1960s, so there was perhaps something of a deliberate overlap in this allusion). Throughout the text juxtapositions, even misspellings in translation, are lifted from Jacques Vache. (Vache was of course the guy who first clearly spelled out to Andre Breton, the future pope of surrealism, that art was dead and a thesis absolutely essential to the life and times of King Mob.) “The Summers” as it came to be called had an immense impact and was the unspoken theoretical undertow of the future anarchist organisation Class War. Moreover the pamphlet has been translated into most European languages including Russian. Other pamphlets followed like a kind of sophisticated derive called Once Upon a Time there was a Place called Nothing Hill Gate published in the late 1980s and which is interspersed with references to King Mob. A few years previously there was another blurb on international dockers’ struggle entitled Workers of the World Tonight a straight quote lifted from the New York Motherfuckers (a kind of American counterpart to King Mob) and set within the context of the British miners’ strike of 1984-5. One or two other things followed this time in collaboration with Nick Brandt (son of the famous Mass Observation photographer Bill Brandt) of Spontaneous Combustion including a further publication on riots – Rebel Violence versus Hierarchical Violence - plus France Goes off the Rails a densely packed pamphlet on the French public sector strike of 1986 and later, a pamphlet on the Kurdish uprising of 1991 produced with an ultra leftist former peshmerga urban guerrilla who was (or so it seems) then living in London. This collaboration continued for quite sometime concluding with a pamphlet '''You Make Plans. We Make History''' on the anti-globalisation uprising in Genoa in 1991. The Wises’ also were involved somewhat in the Here & Now collective in Leeds where they lived for a while and some of their texts were published by the group

In recent years the main input of the Wise brothers has been through the world wide web including an extremely provocative cyberspace publication called The Hidden History of King Mob on www.revoltagainstplenty.com Despite its intended brutal and often crude shock value and thus well within the former modern art tradition, undoubtedly it is also the most complete account yet of King Mob insurgency though it does condemn, most likely unfairly, the largely public school situationist elite very harshly emphasizing the individual aggro of ‘the working class’ element at the time which never received any kind of  visible profile. It seems it is an unfinished text still awaiting completion. (Why?) Alongside this is a one page web, Lost Texts around King Mob that is also very interesting. The introductory blurb to Revolt Against Plenty does call for publishers to come forth and put some of these things into dead tree format. Nothing on these lines as yet seems to have occurred though perhaps this is only a matter of time. It seems the brothers recently have also (typically) got into trouble with various eco conservation bodies who’ve steadfastly refused to show some films they’ve recently completed. Indeed after a punch-up and some minor chair throwing they were thrown out of a recent nature conservation meeting after they’d more than forcefully show camcorder footage together with voiceovers on the failure of conservation measures on Yorkshire colliery spoil heaps. Since that incident their films have been denied all further screenings because the main message that comes across is that conservation organisations today are nothing more than the green wing of a “suicide capitalism” unwittingly but brutally promoted by developers. The Wises’ openly call for insurrection against conservation greenwash and in their leaflets liberally deploy the obligatory fuck expletive. The cinema voiceover scripts are on both their webs and hark back finally to the old King Mob days with an aggressive anti art disposition roundly condemning the greats of installation art from Gormley to Emin by way of Jeremy Deller pointing out that a lucid King Mob precursor in Newcastle going by the name of Icteric was the foundation of much of the eco land art prevalent everywhere today. In relation to this, recently the Wises’ have enumerated a ‘new’ theory; a critique of the aesthetic economy, based on the bubble of fictive capital which they now reckon is the main capitalist form which must be overthrown especially in Europe and the USA.