Mythic Chaos: 50 Years of Destroy All Monsters at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills is a major retrospective of the work of this multifaceted art/music/film collective that formed in Ann Arbor in 1973. The comprehensive exhibit incorporates paintings, drawings, prints, flyers, sculptures, videos, multimedia displays, and ephemera-filled vitrines.

Deeply fascinated by 20th-century American pop culture and movies, Destroy All Monsters took its name from a 1968 Toho film that featured Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and other giant beasts. Often consisting of collaged-together elements, the collective's work satirized and/or celebrated life in the modern world. As co-founder Cary Loren notes in the Mythic Chaos program, “A sense of gloom, disaster, and apocalypse, mixed with doses of anarchy, comedy, and absurdity kept us together.”

The initial version of Destroy All Monsters (DAM) consisted of Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw, and Mike Kelley—all but Loren were University of Michigan art students—and was headquartered at 741 Packard, a two-story frame house a few doors down from the Blue Front party store. Dubbed “God’s Oasis” after a drive-in church sign Shaw had found and posted on the porch, the home became a hub of creative activity until fall 1976, when Shaw and Kelley left for graduate studies at CalArts.

After Kelley and Shaw left town, the group’s music side merged with local Ann Arbor resident musicians Benjamin and Laurence Miller. Soon after, Loren introduced Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and MC5 bassist Michael Davis into the band. Between 1977 and ’78, Loren and the Miller brothers left the group, and the band continued until the mid-1980s. Destroy All Monsters' music, which ranges from eerie electronic experiments to avant-punk rockers, has been reissued several times, with a 1994 CD box set co-compiled by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore featuring recordings from the God’s Oasis years.

Each of the founding members would go on to create unique bodies of work that contained elements of DAM's original found-art, avant-garde aesthetic. Kelley, who died in 2012, was perhaps the most successful, with his work presented worldwide at museums like the Guggenheim, Whitney, Tate, and Louvre. Over the years, the four founding members also continued to collaborate on various projects, keeping the original DAM spirit alive and carrying it on to younger generations of subversive artists.

Running until March 1, the comprehensive Mythic Chaos incorporates paintings, drawings, prints, flyers, sculptures, videos, multimedia displays, and ephemera-filled vitrines. 

Cary Loren, who owns the Book Beat shop in Oak Park, spoke to me about DAM’s beginnings in Ann Arbor.

Q: How did Destroy All Monsters come to be?  
A: Mike was leading a student orientation tour on a bus, and that's where he first met Niagara. She was there as a freshman, and he sensed she was an interesting person, plus they also shared a figure drawing class at the art school. During the summer, Jim and Mike came to our apartment to visit Niagara, who wasn’t home, and we talked and argued for a long time about art and music. They mentioned they did a “futurist ballet” Dadaist performance at the East Quad in Ann Arbor and posted fake flyers for it. I had returned from a 1973 stay with New York artist Jack Smith and was propagating his aesthetic on Hill Street, where we hosted midnight theater happenings with live actors and noise soundtracks. Kelley and Shaw invited me to jam with them in the basement at God’s Oasis that summer, and that was the beginning.   

Q: Was Destroy All Monsters only you and Niagara and Mike and Jim, or were there other people that came and went as participants?
A: Mike and I both had friends that played with us, and there were jazz artists and others who would just drop in. It was a kind of a freeform open-door policy. As it coalesced, Mike wanted it to be more defined as a group and said he didn’t want it becoming a “family affair.”

Q: What were these early music experiments like?
A: We would go downstairs and record for about an hour or so, as long as the cassette tape was running. Then we'd go upstairs, listen to our recording and critique it, each of us making suggestions or changes.  Jim once said that our method was similar to Amon Duul in that they recorded everything, but maybe only a fraction that came out was really good. In his book Missing Time, Kelley said our practice space was like his sculpture practice made in the flesh.  

This was an analytical way of looking at our sound, treating it more as art construction than music. Everything was improvised and accidental. At times, we’d introduce the bare structure of a song with lyrics that would always get further transformed as we played.   

Q: Did the four of you talk about visual aesthetics, too?
A: Yes, we talked about art all the time. DAM was basically an art project from the beginning, just connected with sound. We all took art and music seriously and had different practices, and DAM was our joint outlet/expression and a cool place to hang out.

Q: When we walked through the Mythic Chaos exhibit, you told me DAM would incorporate finds from the Kiwanis Sale into your work. This was when it was still in downtown Ann Arbor and only happened once or twice a year. People would line up outside to get first crack at the good stuff.
A: Yes, the Kiwanis Sale was very important and essential. It was where we would get most of our instruments, and where Jim would find oddities to decorate the house. God's Oasis became one of Jim’s major art projects. He would find all sorts of old ‘40s curtains and the ‘50s boomerang-style atomic patterns, weird lamps, kitschy knick-knacks, and used TVs. Everything there was super cheap and affordable.

Mike would race into the toy section looking for squeeze toys or anything that made sound. He had a collection of these things and used them in our performances. He was an expert at ripping out the electronic noise boxes in toys to hotwire them. He'd solder a quarter-inch out, like a guitar plug, so they could be amplified or distorted with effects to make outrageous sounds. We’d make short tape loops to play through these defective reel-to-reel machines we’d also find at the sale and use in performance.  

The Kiwanis Sale fed into the whole thrift store aesthetic of the band. Niagara and I always browsed in thrift stores to find costumes and props for the films and theater things we did, and Jim began collecting thrift store paintings around that same time. 

Q: At this time, Destroy All Monsters wasn’t really a commercial venture—you weren’t getting paid for music gigs or getting your work into art shows, were you?
A: No! Although we tried getting shown in galleries, none would have us. There was one place on South University, called Middle Earth, where I sold photo postcards, mostly stuff shot off the TV. At one point, Jim had a large Xerox exhibition at the student-run Union gallery.

Q: The 2011 book Destroy All Monsters Magazine collects the six issues of the collective's zine. Were there other zines that influenced you to start one of your own? I thought 'zine culture was pretty minimal then.
A:  Zine culture didn’t really exist except for homemade comic books and mimeo press poetry. Meeting Jack Smith was the biggest influence. He showed me The Beautiful Book, a book of tipped-in photos he did in 1962, and that has always stayed in my mind as one of the greatest art books I had ever seen. It was one of the models I had as I was making the zine. I spent years trying to find a copy until I met Billy Name around 1990, who gave me an extra copy he had.  

When the first issue of Destroy All Monsters magazine was done, I sold them at Schoolkids’ and David’s Books and later through record stores like the Drome in Cleveland. When punk culture emerged, copy machines were less expensive to use and zines were everywhere.  

What got me thinking about doing a magazine was the Xeroxes, art, and photography we were making. Jim began by making flyers for DAM, like ones made for the futurist ballet. I always made collages, but with the copy machine, it became connected to faster reproduction, and still creating unique art. Somehow, Niagara and I had access to a machine at night, and we’d go in with our folders of photos and magazine clippings and have the machine to ourselves for hours while nobody was there. Jim had access to a machine at the Student Union, where he worked in the art department. That machine produced these amazing, rich, black carbon prints.

Xeroxing was an important process. Niagara often delicately hand colored them like fine art prints. Xeroxing led me into taking a vocational class to learn high-speed offset lithography and how to use a copy camera. Reproductions could be made faster and cheaper by offset. All the DAM issues were made on offset machines, with most of the covers and some inserts reproduced in Xerox.

Q:  How long did it take to produce, and how many did you make?  
A: The first magazine took a year to make. I had to learn how to use the machines, and to save on paper costs, I’d go into area shops and take entire stacks of free flyers and would print over these—the superimposed images became part of the aesthetic. I had some money by working at Domino's, delivering pizzas, but it took a year to build up the paper stock. Eventually, I had a thousand copies for each page. It was a 25-page magazine, and I suppose doing a thousand copies for the first issue was overly ambitious. It took years to sell them off—mostly for a quarter each. Later issues were a dollar or two, and most were given away, sometimes through the mail art network. All the later issues were 100-200 copies each.  

Q: Now I assume that they're somewhat valuable.  
A: Yeah, they're hard to find. I have one or two sets that are used for display.

The interest in zines and artist-made books has returned as a kind of analog revenge or maybe protest to everything being consumed on the internet. There’s a physical beauty to handmade books that’s underrecognized and available to make for low cost, even in color. The first museum exhibition of zines as artwork was Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines held at the Brooklyn Museum a couple years ago, and I’m grateful the curators included Destroy All Monsters.   

Cultural historian Frank Uhle writes about the people and stories behind beloved film and music projects, with an emphasis on his adopted hometown of Ann Arbor. He’s also the host of a long-running radio program on WCBN that highlights Michigan music, and a frequent contributor to Pulp, Ugly Things, and other publications where he writes about film, music, business, history, and culture. His book Cinema Ann Arbor (Fifth Avenue Press/University of Michigan Press) was named a 2024 Michigan Notable Book.

"Mythic Chaos" is at The Cranbrook Art Museum, 39221 Woodward Avenue, Bloomfield Hills, through March 1. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, and Cary Loren is giving a public tour on January 29 at 6:30 pm (reservations required). On Saturday, February 14, at Buffalo Prescott in Detroit, Loren will present "Destroy All Hearts," a talk and workshop on collage, zines, and sound, and on Thursday, February 19, at 6:30 pm, he'll give a free talk, "Artist Books & Zines: On the Graphic Underground & Beyond," at the Cranbrook Museum’s DeSalle Auditorium.

A sister satellite exhibit to the Cranbrook show is being held now on the third floor of the Detroit Public Library, with a closing performance set for Friday, February 27, at 4 pm featuring Loren’s band Monster Island alongside a reading by poet Anne Carson.

In 1995, Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Jim Shaw, and Niagara reunited, and three concerts were recorded featuring early tracks such as "You Can’t Kill Kill," "That’s My Ideal," "Take Me With You," "TH Queen," and "I Love You But You’re Dead," as well as newer works. The best moments of those concerts are featured on the 1996 album "Silver Wedding Anniversary."