KING MOB. [Cartoons] The Following are a Collection of the Cartoons Which Were Rejected by the Committee of Public Safety……n.p. [London, United Kingdom]: King Mod / Black Hand Gang, n.d. [1968]. n.p. [8 stapled loose sheets]; ill.; 21 x 34 cm.; black ink on white stock
Posters produced by King Mob / Richard “Irish” Bell during the London School of Economics student occupation of 1968. However, “the cartoons were rejected by the Committee of Public Safety who patrolled the L.S.E. A stage managed repetition of the French ‘May’ posters – largely irrelevant to the English situation – were preferred…Posters were furtively taken down by the security guards – guards not only of a worthless property (the L.S.E. mausoleum) but a worthless morality too”. King Mob continues its critique of the L.S.E. occupation: “The L.S.E., like all other ‘English’ occupations so far, was a mere introjection of the bourgeois order. Who do we want: all the shit of the bourgeois society????? COMRADES, STOP BUGGERING ABOUT”
In presenting the posters in King Mob: A Critical Hidden History, David Wise writes: “There follows what was soon to be regarded as sexist and crude by the first wave of nice, refined feminists who alarmingly quickly dismissed King Mob in a simplistic way as male chauvinist. Had they never been in a public urinal (?) to find this is the type of stuff which goes down – often more in women’s toilets than men’s – though of most this now in our cleansed day and age is instantly wiped clean by hired firms of graffiti busters. These cartoons were of course a detournement of bog-wall style and deployed precisely for shock value in reaction to a fairly dire occupation at the London School of Economics, heavily manipulated by the paid-up intellectuals of the New Left Review … ” (p. 223)
We locate a copy at the Tate, part of the King Mob collection
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