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This article discusses how we might formulate an account of William Blake’s avant-garde reception. Having dealt with Peter Bürger’s theorisation of the notion of ‘avant-garde’, it concentrates on a series of portraits, made from Blake’s life mask, by Francis Bacon in 1955. This ‘high art’ response to the Romantic poet is then contrasted with a series of ‘subcultural’ responses made from within the British counterculture of the 1960s. Case studies are presented from the alternative magazine production of the period (notably an illustration from Oz magazine in which Blake’s imagery is conflated with that of Max Ernst). An article by David Widgery in Oz on Adrian Mitchell’s play Tyger (1971) is also discussed to show how the scholarly literature on Blake of the period (mainly David Erdman) was called on by the counterculture to comment on political issues (e.g. Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech). The final section of the article shows how the ‘avant-gardism’ of Oz’s utilisation of Blake might be counterposed to the more activist left-wing approach to the poet in small magazines such as King Mob with their links to French situationism. In terms of the classic avant-garde call for a reintegration of art and life-praxis, such gestures testify to a moment in the 1960s when Blake may be considered fully ‘avant-garde’.
was a requisition by seventy-four members of the Church of England against the Dissenters’ petition for its ‘impropriety’ given that the Test and Corporation Acts were the ‘great bulwark … of our Glorious Constitution’ in ‘Church and State’. This cause was celebrated with toasts at dinners to the ‘real friends of the town and neighbourhood, members of the Established Church and firm in the Old Cause’. 117 In July 1791, Priestley’s chapel and home in Birmingham were destroyed by a ‘Church and King’ mob
, King Mob and the Sex Pistols, Psychic TV, Berlin and Xmal Deutschland’s European tour (on which I sold T-shirts), the JFK assassination and the miners’ strike. I attempted to explain the situationists in a ‘hip streetwise style’, summarising Gordon Carr’s book The Angry Brigade (1974), which was going around the Stoke Newington squatting scene; linking up the Situationist International and the enragés of May 1968 with the hippy terrorists, the radical Notting Hill graffiti artists King Mob, Malcolm McLaren and punk rock. In the epic Psychic TV interview, Genesis P
expanding old forms.’27 The syndicate provided some of the content and broadened the scope of Hapt beyond its own political thoughts and interviews, reprinting texts on the Situationist International, the Black Panthers, the Dutch Kabouter and Provo movements, as well as the original Diggers Manifesto of 1649. It also covered issues such as ‘the female orgasm’, parent and child relationships, LSD trips and personal recollections of the Roundhouse Gathering of Communes (2 August 1970).28 The magazine was described by King Mob as ‘exceptionally articulate’ in terms of its
intelligentsia who applied the theory-lite principle of recuperation to explain ‘the fate of all forms of avant-gardiste revolutionary dé-tournement [cultural subversion], whether aesthetic or political’.32 Due in part to the peripheral involvement of countercultural provocateurs Malcolm McLaren (who travelled to Paris during the events of May 1968), Bernard (Bernie) Rhodes33 (later manager of The Clash) and Sex Pistols’ designer Jamie Reid (who adapted détournement to British culture) with the anarchist clique of excommunicated UK Situationists, King Mob,34 the détournement
Revolution’ and welcomed Paine’s Rights of Man (Holt: 106, 110). It was a sermon by a Unitarian minister, Richard Price, welcoming the Revolution, which provoked Burke’s conservative Reflections (Holt: 106–7); at Bolton in 1791 an effigy of a Unitarian minister was burned together with one of Tom Paine (110) and in 1792, the year when Elizabeth Gaskell’s father became a Unitarian minister, ‘Church and King mobs attacked Cross Street Chapel, Manchester’ (114), where William Gaskell was later minister. From 1792, Unitarians were ‘singled out as special objects of attack
art and life seen in the 1960s that culminated with Paris ‘68. 25 On his intentions with the Suburban Press magazine, Reid noted, ‘From rather naive beginnings, it very quickly settled into a shit-stirring format, with thorough research into local politics and council corruption, mixed with my graphics and some Situationist texts.’ 26 Both Reid and his art-school friend Malcolm Mclaren were connected to the English branch of the Situationist International, King Mob
(1967) and other more politically orientated ones, Friends (1969) (which became Frendz in May 1971 and ceased publication in 1972) , Black Dwarf (1968) and Ink (1971). King Mob Echo , the outlet for the English branch of the Situationist International, started life in 1968, and all these publications, along with some of the anarchist magazines such as Black Flag (1971–99), 18 Freedom (1866–present) and Direct Action (from 1970) that espoused anarcho-pacifist ideas
Oldham and Ashton-under-Lyne.78 These actions also demonstrated a collective memory of political landmarks, and in some cases sought to subvert loyalist meanings associated with such sites. Hence in Ashton-under-Lyne, pro-Caroline supporters ‘planted a liberty tree to the pump in Old Street where radicals had formerly received a dousing at the hands of Church and King mobs’.79 The queen’s death in August 1821 marked the end of this heterotopy, and, coinciding with both the second anniversary of Peterloo and with the country folk rushbearing in the Manchester
The Philips were influential members of both the Cross Street Chapel in Manchester and the Stand Chapel in Prestwich. They were politically active before and after the restrictions were lifted on dissenters. The vocal support for political reform expressed by the powerful merchants of the Cross Street Chapel led to an attack in 1792 by a ‘church and king’ mob. 44 Nathaniel and