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.
Dave Wise recalls: ‘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 via London, and in the summer of 1967 engaged in some of the activities of Black Mask. Ben Morea gave them the personal addresses and telephone numbers of Situationist sympathisers who resided in London. We duly contacted on them on our return to England. They were the people around the magazine Heatwave. [2] Four of them formed the English section of the Situationist International, namely: Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray and Donald Nicholson-Smith and Charles Radcliffe
Heatwave was the first magazine to put the new revolt of youth into some kind of perspective, with specific reference to Mods and Rockers, Beats, Dutch Provos and the like by Gray and Radcliffe; affirming their vandalistic acts of destruction as something which could have real future consequences, leading a 'positive project'. There were numerous articles on Dadaism, Surrealism, and on the Situationist concept of Unitary Urbanism.
What resulted was, in Dave Wise's recollection, was a ‘meeting - if you like – between north and south’: between the Wise twins and friends, and the English section of the Situationists. In this new grouping the ideas of the Situationists and their predecessors were discussed in depth. For a year plans were made and collaborators sought out; things seemed promising. Then after SI member Raoul Vaneigem report to founder of the Situationist International Guy Debord on a trip he made to New York in late-1967, the SI expelled the English Section.
According to Dave Wise: 'Principally, Vaneigem objected to Alan Hoffman, a kind of mystical but political acidhead who’d started to show an interest in Black Mask... [3] Also, Ben had a serious liver complaint and he couldn’t touch alcohol, thus acid went down very nicely... Ben was inevitably very upset... and started raving on in letters about the man-of-letters disposition Vaneigem 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 could really kick in in terms of doing something together. Presumably because of their prevarication, they were excluded from the Situationists and the rest, so to speak [again], is history... Out of this lacunae and initial disorientation followed by a kind of re-think, King Mob developed.’ [4] </ref>