"the white man's malady, nostalgia."
Ze'ev Chafets, Devil's Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit
The Destroy All Monsters Collective consists of artists Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, and Jim Shaw. Strange Früt: Rock Apocrypha (2000-2001) is an installation made up of four mural-sized paintings on canvas flats in the manner of classic freak show banners, and videotape projections. The paintings (designed by Kelley and Shaw) are historical in nature and focus on entertainment and subculture personalities associated with the Detroit area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period in which the original members of the noise band Destroy All Monsters grew up. This is the time period in which Detroit was renowned for its alternative hard rock scene, and also the era in which local television fare was eclipsed by syndicated programs.
The paintings:
The Heart of Detroit by Moonlight (10 x 17 feet) features the radical White Panther-associated rock band the MC5 (Motor City Five) surrounded by comedian Soupy Sales, children's TV program hosts Captain Jolly and Johnny Ginger, wrestler George "The Animal" Steele, horror movie host Morgus "The Magnificent", the "godfather of soul" James Brown, shock rocker Alice Cooper, the Vernor's ginger ale (a local soft drink) gnome, blues great John Lee Hooker, and the rock journalist Lester Bangs, all set against a depiction of the skyline of downtown Detroit.
Greetings from Detroit (10 x 19 feet) is a similar composition in which local rock acts The Früt, Grand Funk Railroad, The Stooges, The Up, Scott Richardson of the SRC, along with free jazz great Sun Ra, funkmaster George Clinton, queen of the Ann Arbor freaks Pat Olesko, White Panther Zenta Minister of Religion Brother J.C. Crawford, and children's television program host Milky the Clown, parade in front of Detroit sculptural landmarks The Spirit of Detroit, the Spirit of the Dance, and a 1967- period race riot inner city landscape. The world's largest American flag, which once adorned the front of Hudson's department store on special occasions, has been replaced with the anarchist White Panther flag.
Amazing Freaks of the Motor City (8 x 11 feet, 6 inches) positions White Panther Party head John Sinclair in front of the landmark giant Uniroyal tire, whose whitewall has been replaced with a "rainbow coalition- wall". Surrounding Sinclair are the visages of Iggy Pop, Question Mark of the Mysterions, white soul man Mitch Ryder, afternoon movie host Bill Kennedy, Ted Nugent of the Amboy Dukes, and the Fundadelic trademark: the afro-zombie from the cover of the Maggot Brain album. Sinclair sports a sweatshirt with an airbrush painting by famed Detroit hotrod cartoonist Stanley "Mouse" Miller, who later went on to become one of the most esteemed of the San Francisco psychedelic poster artists and is especially respected for his graphic work for the Grateful Dead.
Mall Culture (8 x 11 feet, 6 inches) shows the original lineup of Destroy All Monsters (Kelley, Loren, Shaw, and artist and singer Niagara) posing in the West Court of the Westland Center Mall, in Kelley's hometown suburb.
The video:
Strange Früt: Rock Apocrypha,
was directed by Cary Loren. The tape mixes footage of interviews
with rock promoter and Grande Ballroom owner "Uncle"
Russ Gibb, R&B musician Andre Williams (famed for his hit
Shake A Tail Feather), underground radio disc jockeys Dave
Dixon and Ben Edmonds, and Motor City Wrestling promoter Ron Ruby.
It also contains archival television footage of Robin Seymour's
Swinging Time teen dance show, horror film host The Ghoul,
the preschool television show Romper Room, afternoon movie host
Bill Kennedy, and children's entertainer Poopdeck Paul, as well
as contemporary portrayals of Soupy Sales, Morgus "The Magnificent",
Sir Graves Ghastly and Milky the Clown. The tape also features
reenactments of period rock-oriented urban myths performed by
denizens of a contemporary Detroit-area goth nightclub, and John
Sinclair's White Panther pronouncements rendered by stoned-out
participants at the annual Ann Arbor Hash Bash (a mass display
of public disobedience protesting the prohibition of marijuana
usage). The tape has a soundtrack by Destroy All Monsters.
Even though Strange Fruit: Rock Apocrypha is a historical project that focuses on a particular moment in Detroit history, the members of the Destroy All Monsters Collective wish to update the project to include current musical developments in Detroit. Thus, we will have a number of famed Detroit techno DJs reedit and mix elements from period rock recordings, as well as Destroy All Monsters material, into a new soundtrack for the installation. Techno, which is considered a musical form indigenous to Detroit, and the noise music of Destroy All Monsters have similar roots in late psychedelic music, especially such German bands as Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, as well the electronic dance music developed in the Seventies by Giorgio Moroder. In a playful commentary on the usurpation of rock music by hip hop and techno, we will present a new videotape that is a, scrambled until it is unrecognizable, "mix" of the film Still Crazy. This comedy about a washed up Seventies rock band, appropriately named Strange Fruit, will be randomly cut up into short bits and reassembled to produce a feature-length techno beat track.
The large-scale paintings in Strange Früt: Rock Apocrypha obviously reference the tradition of grand historical painting, but substitute minor local personalities and subcultural figures for the "major" historical heroes traditionally featured in that genre. The Destroy All Monsters Collective grew out of a specific historical period and cultural milieu; these works point out that fact. They are not meant to be a nostalgic looking back to a better time, nor do they claim that the period they represent is any more important than other localized cultural scenes, then or now. They are simply a play with historical form, designed, in part, as an ironic comment on our current "postmodern" period - one that is generally dominated by ahistorical tendencies.
These works also ironically comment on the current popularity of the "Art Band" phenomenon. Museums and galleries in America and Europe abound with "sound" shows at the moment. Most of these exhibitions focus upon artists who utilize tropes associated with the pop musical forms of rock and techno, and rarely do these shows attempt to present such artworks within a historical framework. Instead, in the spirit of much neo-pop art, the focus in on the work's fashionable and timely attributes.
The so-called Art Band phenomenon goes back to the mid-Sixties, and was contemporaneous with the Pop Art movement. Warhol's involvement with the Velvet Underground, and the fact that many "psychedelic" bands had avant-garde pretensions (and were often made up of artists) proves this point. The Art Bands of the late Seventies (Throbbing Gristle, Devo, Talking Heads, the no wave bands, etc, etc.) could be understood as sharing certain concerns with the concurrent appropriation art movement, yet they were never accepted within the gallery or museum system. The artists who made up these bands came to be considered as musicians and their practices were not considered through art discourses. Only now have such activities begun to find acceptance in the mainstream art world. For example, the band Fischer Spooner is sponsored by art world agencies and presented as an art work, in a manner similar to the promotion of the earlier non-musical group Art Club 2000. The peddling of a band as an artwork would have been unthinkable until recently.
This fact reveals our current moment in art history, where mass culture and the entertainment industries (MTV for example) have absorbed tropes associated with the historical avant-gardes. Critical aspirations, questions of authorship raised by appropriational strategies, a counter cultural stance (as in punk rock), have been replaced with a general embrace of pop culture as the new standard of beauty. One need only look at the success of the Brit Pop movement to see the truth of this observation. Destroy All Monsters still embrace the avant-garde position. We started off as an anti-band, questioning the mindless pap produced by the culture industry for the youth market by adopting the form of the rock band, and fucking with it. Even though such a position is no longer tenable in the current environment where noise music is simply another form of pop music, we still strive, as artists, to examine pop culture through a critical and analytical mindset albeit one with a sense of humor.
The project's title Strange Früt was derived from the name of the lowest of the Detroit psychedelic bands: The Früt of the Loom. This bands aesthetic was so shoddy and anarchistic that their singers were often picked, at random, out of the audience, and their stage act consisted of inept covers of Fifties rock standards and displays of nudity. It also puns upon the famously dismal Billie Holiday song, Strange Fruit.
Mike Kelley, 2001