The power of King Mob

For years the graffiti emblazoned along a west London Tube track issued an angry challenge to the deadening conformity of urban life: 'Same thing day after day - Tube - Work - Diner [sic] - Work - Tube - Armchair - TV - Sleep - Tube - Work - How much more can you take - One in ten go mad - one in five crack up'.

Its authors were a group of anarchic anti-artists named King Mob, whose stunts and visual manifestos flowered briefly during the late Sixties and early Seventies, in opposition to both the Establishment and the commercialised counter-culture of the Beatles and Carnaby Street.

King Mob's physical manifestations on the walls of Notting Hill have long faded with its gentrification. However, their leaflets and posters, recently acquired by Tate Britain, serve as a reminder of the bitter

artistic and political clashes which then seemed commonplace, but are mainly absent from today's celebrity-driven pop culture.

'Forget All You Have Ever Learned: Begin By Dreaming', declaims one leaflet. Another urges: 'Destroy the museums'. In the poster 'Luddites: 69', the cartoon character Andy Capp is re-drawn shooting a policeman. Slogans daubed on walls - 'Burn it all down' and 'The only race is the rat race' - heralded the strikes, riots and mass unemployment ushered in by the end of the long summer of love and the economic crisis of the Seventies.

King Mob was the vision of two brothers, David and Stuart Wise, who after a stint at Newcastle Art School centred themselves around the squats of North Kensington.

The brothers and their circle sought to combine anti-consumerist theories of the avant-garde