King Mob was an English radical group based in London during the late 1960s and early 1970s.[1]
Influences on the group included the Situationist International and the New York City group Black Mask / UAW/MF. It derived its name from Christopher Hibbert's 1958 book on the Gordon Riots of June 1780, in which rioters daubed the slogan "His Majesty King Mob" on the walls of Newgate Prison, after gutting the building.
Background
Twins David and Stuart Wise were born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in September 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, founded in 1966. The purported aim of Icteric was the ‘fusion’ of ‘art and life’. It was mainly the brainchild of Ronald Hunt of the Department of Fine Art at Newcastle University, who had been appointed as librarian courtesy of lecturer and pop artist, Richard Hamilton. Hunt was familiar with the more marginal publications of the international art scene. It was he who first acquainted future Situationist member Donald Nicholson-Smith with the theoretical journals of the French Situationists. Hunt also learned of the activities of 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.