1 March 2025 
Our (B.P.C.s) WiseBooks Series continues to gain traction, with an excellent review by Lawton Browning just off the press in Fifth Estate magazine (radical publishing since 1965), of Dave and Stuart Wise’s King Mob: the Negation and Transcendence of Art.
We now announce the fifth in WiseBook Series: Building For Babylon: Construction, Collectives and Craic.
Ironically, the Wise Twins, Dave and Stuart – both talented young artists – developed an anti-art ethos while at art school in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the mid-1960s, under the influence of the Surrealists and the Situationists. When prospects for social revolution faded in the 1970s, the Wises – being artisans as well as former-artists – dug out their tools and formed a building workers collective. Inspired somewhat by Robert Tressell’s classic novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the Wises offer various irreverent ‘true life’ accounts of life on the ‘buildings’ 100 years later. They also reflect on how what passes for modern Art lives on in the phantasmagoric, commodified world of the construction industry and its rackets.
EXTRACT FROM BUILDING FOR BABYLON
Convinced by 1967 that a revolution was imminent – a belief underscored by the thunderclap that burst over an unprepared world in France 1968 – we had handed our power tools, planes, chisels, saws, metal and wood files, etc, over to a local auctioneer to sell. But come 1973-4 we started once more to build up an inventory of tools. What in the meantime had happened? It was not just that the revolution had failed – it had – but bit by bit the old class polarities were beginning to reassert themselves. Without exception all of us from lower down the social scale felt profoundly betrayed by our erstwhile, much better off, comrades-in-arms of only two/three years back. From the new the old reborn: with social democratic consensus beginning to unravel right at the heart of the revolutionary movement itself. Without so much as the batting of an eye, a perfidious public school elite was now rapidly reverting to type. Back in the early 1970s the first building jobs came as a blessed relief, for it was a pleasure to get away from the internecine “revolutionary” bickering over nothing. The groupuscule phenomena that marked the decade was essentially a sign the revolutionary impulse was on the wane. Building sites were also a healthy corrective to this decadent revolutionism. Working alongside simpatico comrades on building sites provided a more grounded space on which even revolutionary thoughts could flower. Many is the time we returned home tired but high from the day’s debates. For building sites were beginning to turn into forums where everything was up for discussion.
Paperback
(Also available as EBook)
Other titles in the BPC WiseBooks Series published in 2024-25 as paperback and ebook
In 1966, King Mob founders Stuart and David Wise were students at Newcastle School of Art, publishing the avant garde magazine Icteric. A Newcastle Dunciad, the latest in the WisEbook Series, recalls the ideas and practices of the Tyneside radicals and how they were ‘recuperated” by the developers for the post-industrial ‘regeneration’ of Tyneside. This volume also has a Situationist critique of their art school contemporary, Bryan Ferry.
BPC Title: King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art (illustrated).
Lost Texts Around King Mob by Dave and Stuart Wise with contributions from Ronald Hunt, John Barker, Fred Vermorel, Chris Gray and Phil Meyler (BPC WisEbooks Series No. 1 – Jan. 2024).
For more books published by BPC see HERE
