e-ISSN 2385-2720 ISSN 0394-4298 Venezia Arti Nuova serie 1 – Vol. 28 – Dicembre 2019 Peer review Submitted 2019-07-19 Accepted 2019-09-24 Published 2019-12-11 Open access © 2019 | cb Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License Edizioni Ca’Foscari Edizioni Ca’Foscari Citation Murrieta Flores, David A.J. (2019). “Remaking the Body Politic Anew through Mob and Gang. King Mob Echo and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (1968-1970)”. Venezia Arti, n.s., 28, 109-124. DOI 10.30687/VA/2385-2720/2019/01/009 109 Remaking the Body Politic Anew through Mob and Gang King Mob Echo and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (1968-1970) David A.J. Murrieta Flores University of Essex, UK Abstract The aim is to analyse how the British, radical avant-garde collective King Mob (KM) and the American Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAWMF) developed an idea of the body rooted in the Gothic and Romantic imagery of the monster and the mob that emphasised the revolutionary potential of ugliness. The body bridged aesthetics and politics, co-extensive with organisational principles that confronted society at large. On the one hand, KM viewed the ugliness of the mob as a physical force whose imagery was strong enough to destabilise the State, while on the other, UAWMF understood the hostility of society towards the body of the hippie as the locus point of a new identity and discourse for it. Keywords Gothic. Avant-garde. Neo-avant-garde. 1960s radicalism. Aesthetics and politics. Revolutionary avant- garde. Summary 1 Introduction. – 2 Unnatural Ugliness: King Mob. – 3 Natural Ugliness: Up Against the Wall Mother- fucker. – 4 Conclusion. 1 Introduction 1 Wise 2003. In the 1960s, various radical avant-gardes emerged across the Western hemisphere, bringing to bear new critiques of social relations that rejected Cold War polarization and engaged in the creation of bridges between aesthetics and politics that did not depend on the modernism/socialist realism divide. Taking many elements from past avant-gardes such as Surrealism, Dada, and even Futurism, collec- tives such as King Mob (henceforth KM), from the UK (based in London), and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (henceforth UAWMF), from the US (based in New York), confgured new approaches to the question of art’s relation to the political. These groups organized around revolutionary ideals and critical perspectives that identifed cap- italism as the one true enemy, utilizing the for- mat of the periodical to press their projects into the social arena with the aim to instill libertarian perspectives in the population at large. While KM published its own magazine, appropriating the im- age of low-cost journals such as Daily Echo, 1 UAW- MF also produced images and articles for under- ground magazines, primarily Rat Subterranean News. The objective was to reach as many people as possible, considering their fnancial reach was limited, and their productions constantly outline