You should have been there, man. That’s the vibe upon entering Cranbrook Art Museum’s exhibition “Mythic Chaos: 50 Years of Destroy All Monsters”—the feeling that you missed out on a cool thing. All around is evidence of what must have been a wild and crazy scene going down around the University of Michigan in the mid-1970s. Tacked up near the entrance are Xeroxed flyers for phony lectures (“On Squares Interceding with Isosceles Triangles Throughout Art History.” “Theraputic Uses of Necrophilia,” etc.), that take the piss out of campus life while advertising strange theatrical performances. There are also actual flyers for midnight offerings of “insane music,” “crazy movies,” and “bizarre entertainment,” plus video clips and Polaroids documenting just such happenings. There are drawings hanging on the walls—portraits of Rat Fink-inflected weirdos by Mike Kelley and slinky, mysterious femmes by Niagara—plus mass media-mutilating collages by Jim Shaw and Cary Loren. And there’s a cluttered vitrine, standing in perhaps for a college apartment’s coffee table, one of a number of tableaux in the exhibition brimming with 20th century pop detritus/treasure: lurid horror comics and pulp crime novels; “Cootie” bugs, creature feature figurines, and corny rec room sculptures of pin-up girls and hobos; psychedelic rock show bills, and a looseleaf sheet sporting a hand-scrawled band logo and multiple cigarette burns. To the layman, it’s clutter; to the artists, grist for the mill. You probably think you had a good reason for not getting in on any of this, for not making the scene. Maybe you were nowhere near Ann Arbor or Detroit in 1974. Maybe you had to work the next day, or school—possibly grade school (I couldn’t go because my dad wouldn’t give me the car, mainly because I was seven). Maybe you were too cool, or not cool enough, or maybe you had “good taste.” Excuses, excuses. The fact is, you blew it, man—you should have been there.

        Destroy All Monsters took its name from a 1968 Toho kaiju flick in which Earth’s most famous behemoths—Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, et. al.—are summoned to demolish the cities of the world. Likewise, Loren, Niagara, Kelley, and Shaw rose from the depths to stomp hell, artistically speaking, out of conventional societal norms. A countercultural arts collective formed during America’s post-hippie cultural doldrums, a proto-punk “anti-rock” band at a time when rock music was decidedly overripe (“We wanted to kill James Taylor,” said Kelley), DAM set itself up in a Victorian house dubbed “God’s Oasis” (a moniker swiped from a previous occupant) and proceeded to take up seemingly every medium they could get their hands on. Musically, they took inspiration from iconoclasts such as John Cage and Sun Ra, and from Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto “The Art of Noises,” which urged musicians to explore the sounds of machines and urban life to create new forms of music suited to industrial realities. DAM’s earliest music was a screeching, droning, lo-fi cacophony layered with B-grade horror movie monologues and sci-fi warbles and whoops (search for their 1974-76 album on YouTube). Films shot by Loren to accompany the band’s music (as seen on a DVD compilation, Grow Live Monsters, released in 2007) were equally frantic: 8mm approximations of drive-in exploitation flicks starring costumed band members, Frankensteined together with found footage and embellished with psychedelic video effects. Loren’s photographs here from the God’s Oasis era reveal, among other oddities, a near-naked Shaw wearing an ersatz space helmet with a long plastic tube dangling between his legs, and Niagara sprawled on a cellar floor beside a kitchen knife, her bare midriff smeared with stage blood. (Cranbrook kindly warns visitors entering the gallery that the show contains images of sex and violence.)

        DAM’s visual art continues the chaotic theme, as seen in Destroy All Monsters Magazine, a promotional vehicle for the band that also functioned as a record of the collective’s graphic activities. A sampling here of thirty pages from the original zine’s six issue run features Niagara’s trademark drawings of elegant vamps; irreverent collages (e.g., Jesus summoning a fleet of 1950s gas guzzlers from the Samaritan well); and of course zombies, vampires, werewolves, and mutants borrowed from movie magazines and comic books, all crammed onto the page, overlapping and fighting for space in classic cut-n-paste zine style, where legibility sometimes comes in second to attitude.

        By 1978, personnel changes had left Niagara the only charter member of the Destroy All Monsters band (she was joined by members of the Stooges and MC5, who took DAM’s music in more straightforward punk-ish directions). They disbanded in 1985, but the original lineup returned in the ’90s for a series of concerts and re-releases of their ’70s material. DAM has persevered in one form or another since, sometimes producing new works such as the sculpture toward the center of the gallery—a foamy, yellowish glob of goo. Conceived of by Loren and Kelley and first built according to their faxed instructions for a show in Japan in 1996, this version (there have been a few around the world) was made by Cranbrook students specifically for this exhibition. It consists of a pile of plush and plastic toys, plus a small video monitor, glopped over with polyurethane foam. A wall plaque calls it “part structure, part landscape, part mediation on memory, the psyche, and spirituality.” In the context of a Destroy All Monsters exhibit, though, it can’t help evoking for me the titular alien from the 1958 horror picture The Blob, an unstoppable entity that swallows up whatever it encounters and incorporates it all into its monstrous matrix—not-unDAM-like idea, after all.

        With many comebacks, reprints, re-creations, and compilations over five decades, the precise timeline of the whole DAM project sometimes got muddled for me—but then, that’s what Wikipedia is for. The fun of the Cranbrook show is in swimming through the sensory overload—that “mythic chaos” of the title. If anything, I wonder if the exhibit might have benefited from being half the size and thus twice as dense. Artworks that would feel intense in an intimate setting (a show in a crowded bar, or a zine in your hands) seem less impactful in this bright, mediated space.

        The last room of the exhibit, however, is indeed more intimate and dimly lit—it feels almost reverent. Inside are three large canvas murals created by Loren, Kelley, and Shaw for a 1998 festival in Rotterdam devoted to Detroit’s countercultural musical legacy. The canvases, looking like a cross between circus sideshow advertisements and picture postcards, feature tribute likenesses of Detroit luminaries: musical heroes probably well-known to a European audience—George Clinton, Ted Nugent, Iggy Pop, etc.—but also local celebrities such as wrestler George “The Animal” Steel, kids’ show host Captain Jolly, and product mascots Milky the Clown and the Vernors gnome, of whom the Dutch were likely oblivious. A documentary film by Loren playing on a nearby monitor stitches interviews with Detroit music experts together with clips of hometown oddballs such as late-night horror movie host The Ghoul blowing stuff up with M-80s, and strangest of all, re-enactments of local programs featuring amateur actors portraying the likes of comedian Soupy Sales. As usual, Destroy All Monsters’ brand of reverence for the things they love doesn’t preclude running those things through the irreverent blender of their anarchic imaginations.

        So, what’s the appeal, especially for anyone too young (as presumably the Cranbrook curators are) to catch the references or share in the nostalgia for all the cultural artifacts the Destroy All Monsters crew masticates and regurgitates? First off, the specifics don’t matter so much—whatever your pop culture touch points are, what’s infectious and inspiring is the idea that they can become the raw material for one’s art. Detroit-area performer “Renalien,” rather younger than the DAM folks but a fan of theirs, comes to mind as someone who follows in their footsteps, using outmoded computer tech and her own voice, along with Halloween decorations, Pee-Wee Herman dolls, and other such personal treasure to create her dreamy video art. (More highfalutin examples might be the Star Wars and Matrix films, self-conscious remixes of the filmmakers’ various youthful obsessions.) Such enthusiasms can’t be ginned up artificially by machines either, which is another appealing thing about DAM’s work today: its decidedly analog quality (insert vitriolic anti-AI screed here). As the digital sphere becomes increasingly “enshittified” and less hospitable to creative pursuits, maybe Destroy All Monsters is the prod we need to ditch the screens and get our hands dirty again. You might be late to the party, but it’s never too late to cut up some magazines, shoot some Polaroids, or cocoon an old TV in a few cans of Great Stuff. Put on a cardboard monster mask, stomp on some sandcastles, and make some noise.

Note: Sean Bieri works at Book Beat, a store in suburban Detroit run by Cary Loren and his wife Colleen.

Sean Bieri, a cartoonist and graphic designer, has written on art for the Detroit Metro Times, Wayne State University, and the Erb Family Foundation among other outlets. He received both his BFA and a BA in Art History—28 years apart—from Wayne State. He is a founding member of Hatch, an arts collective based in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, where he lives. He is currently assisting Hatch in the renovation of the “Hamtramck Disneyland” folk art site.