Occupy the Fun Palace Britt Eversole

thresholds 41 Spring 2013, 32-45 OCCUPY THE FUN PALACE BRITT EVERSOLE During the 1968 holiday season, a dozen people and one Santa Claus impersonator stormed Selfridges, a Daniel Burnham-designed department store on London’s posh Oxford Street. Confused customers gathered when Father Christmas and his helpers pulled goods from the shelves and began giving them away. When clerks intervened, a melee erupted, arrests ensued, and police were forced to make crying children return unpurchased toys and candy. In the aftermath, Londoners found leaflets bearing an anti-consumer diatribe against the holidays as the palliative to another year of pointless labor ending in unaffordable shopping and perfunctory celebration (Figure 1). Chiding Britons that they did not deserve Christmas because they had not worked hard enough, this year’s festivities were a “punishment…a duty to be cheerful, to play the fool, let down your hair as soon as they switch on the lights and raise the curtain.” A call to arms ended the invective: Let’s smash the whole great deception. Occupy the Fun Palace and really set the swings going. Grab the gifts and really give them. Light up Oxford Street and dance around the fire.1 This vicious potlatch was one of many guerilla actions by the English Situation- ist-inspired group King Mob, named after the 1780 Gordon Riots in which revolt- ing prison inmates freed themselves by the authority of “His Majesty, King Mob.” During the late 1960s, they assaulted British culture with pranks, profane leafleting and poster campaigns, and by vandalizing buildings and infrastructure with erudite phrases, the most famous being a thesis on an Underground embankment: SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY–TUBE–WORK–DINER [sic]–WORK–TUBE–ARMCHAIR–T.V.– SLEEP–TUBE–WORK–HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE–ONE IN TEN GO MAD– ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP. More of an organic idea attached to anonymous actions by a changing cadre than an organized vanguard, this “street gang with an analysis”2 terrorized British culture and counter-culture with humor and bad deeds. King Mob was formed by Stuart and David Wise, the latter of whom edited the Newcastle review Icteric (1967), and Christopher Gray, who is counted alongside Timothy (T.J.) Clark, Donald Nichelson-Smith, and Charles Radcliffe as the core of the second-wave English SI centered on the pamphlet Heatwave (1966).3 Countless people orbited these circles, such as Malcolm McLaren, The Sex Pistols’s later-man- ager. Architects were also present, but at the margins: David Wise recalls—and not fondly—Nicholas Grimshaw and Terry Farrell distorting the Newcastle group’s anti-aesthetic writings toward updating architecture’s problems.4 King Mob arose after Guy Debord excluded the English SI in 1967 over a quarrel between the French SI 32 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00092 by guest on 27 September 2021 and the American activists Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker, led by Ron Hanhe and Ben Morea who edited the broadsheet Black Mask (1966-68).5 By its second issue, Heatwave was trumpeting Situationist condemnations of urban planning and spectacular society’s overcoding of daily life (especially Raoul Vaneigem’s writings), as well as the totalizing, revolutionary cultural critique advocated in the Chicago-based Wobbly pamphlet The Rebel Worker (1964-66).6 However, requiring different tactics in England and thinking Debord to be more committed to theoretical sophistry than direct action,7 the Heatwave circle grew increasingly receptive to the Motherfuckers’ anti-institutional activism against MoMA, Lincoln Center, and Manhattan’s art scene. Their excommunication by Debord for divergences punctuates a time when auton- omous, “pro-Situ” affinity groups formed, whose international exchange of tactics warrants greater study. Existing histories cast King Mob as an origin of punk rock or a short-lived inflection of Situationism.8 However, their assault on art and architecture, just when an English youth revolt seemed near, suggests that much remains to be explored of their war on the imaginary of the British neo-avant-garde—the “phoney avant-garde”9—whose embrace of technologies of control and mass media placed them at the center of the “spectacular commodity-economy.” So what to make of King Mob’s call to occupy Cedric Price’s idea for an automated, interactive performance and leisure pavilion? Superficially, it evidences broad aware- ness of the Fun Palace. Although Price and Joan Littlewood were still unsuccessful in realizing their university of the streets, it was well known to the general public due to opposition to the project, and among the increasingly militant students of design schools.10 Notwithstanding recent analyses that detect anarchist and Situationist tropes in the design (ostensibly reflecting Price’s acquaintance with Alexander Trocchi),11 the Selfridges’s flyer underscores the skepticism that King Mob harbored toward Price’s cybernetic social condenser. On the other hand, occupying the unbuilt Fun Palace—seizing the building’s idea and not leaving it up to Littlewood, Price, or art-house literati to configure it themselves— points to the neo-avant-garde’s power and vulnerability. Similar to an inflammatory King Mob poster celebrating the Communards’ (unsuccessful) burning of the Louvre, to imagine fire-raising London’s commercial district while taking over the Fun Palace highlighted the false dialectic between commodity culture and artistic counter-culture (Figure 2). Obliterating the former would liberate—or kill—the latter. In the process, the Fun Palace—a high-tech empty signifier—would transform from a machine to be viewed into a machine for viewing London afire. Imaginatively occupying one of the neo-avant-garde’s most provocative images pointed to the militant potential of undermining architecture’s own spectacular imaginary. English Situationists and King Mob condemned sixties neo-avant-garde practices as Occupy the Fun Palace formulaic, professionalized radicalism valorized by a process of constant recuper- ation;12 in short, “art is what makes other shit sellable.” This attack was all the more Eversole 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00092 by guest on 27 September 2021 thresholds 41 Spring 2013, 32-45 Figures 1, 3 courtesy David Wise. Figure 2 Tate Modern Archives. Figure 4 Beinecke Library, Yale University. Yale Library, 4 Beinecke Figure Archives. Modern Tate 2 Figure Wise. David 3 courtesy 1, Figures Figure 1 King Mob handbill, “’It was meant to be great but it’s horrible,’ Confessions: S. Claus 1968.” Figure 2 King Mob poster, “The Communards burn the Louvre. The most radical artistic act of the nineteenth century,” 1968. Figure 3 King Mob cartoon, “I’ve been a good Irish Catholic girl, never sinned never...” 1968. Figure 4 Richard Brendan Bell, King Mob LSE Occupa- tion Posters, “Keep the Dialectic Open,” and “Puritan- ism will Castrate our Revolution,” 1968. 34 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00092 by guest on 27 September 2021 pointed in Pop Art’s homeland, where puritanism and class divisions perpetuated a dotty civility and canned eccentricity whose affectations lingered in the Independent Group’s progeny and artists associated with London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA).13 Similarly, social and political theory were frequently just a way of oxymo- ronically legitimating dissidence as cultural cachet instead of encouraging action. Theory had also become descriptive and incapable of confronting technological rationalism.14 This fall into description complimented British tendencies toward pos- itivism and empiricism, in which intellectual work was harnessed to solve problems, or dismissed for lacking immediate solutions. Aesthetics were at a dead end, too. The return of the historical avant-gardes in their most de-potentiated forms—technological anachronism and stylistic nostalgia—blunted what King Mob perceived to be Dada’s most powerful propositions: anti-aestheticism and revolt.15 Conversely, the drive to question and to provoke alterity had been abandoned in favor of art as entertainment and architecture as pragmatically predictive. King Mob arose, in part, from a need for new methods for confronting the neo-a- vant-garde’s tyranny. As Vaneigem wrote in Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (1967), you could not sit by like a “passive nihilist,” wallowing in the death of values and art; you had to act to move things along by any means neces- sary. “The active nihilist does not intend simply to watch things fall apart. He intends to speed up the process. Sabotage is a natural response to the chaos ruling the world.”16 Taking a cue from Vaneigem, King Mob situated direct action not in Conti- nental theory’s high-minded formulations, but in the irrationality of “juvenile delin- quency,” which provided a means and measure for developing tactics for defacing culture.17 Among them, three are worth considering further: graphics and aphorisms as attacks on the image; hacking theory; and satirizing the neo-avant-garde. King Mob often détourned cartoons and advertisements, overlaying onto found photographs poetic and erotic rants that collided with the image itself to produce “riot and shock through incomprehensibility” (Figure 3).18 Similarities to French Situationist techniques notwithstanding, they assailed British Pop’s celebration of advertising. King Mob acknowledged patrimony to the found images in Richard Hamilton’s collages. However,

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