Destroy All Monsters

In today's media landscape, a book review is often a slap on the back. A handshake among colleagues that says, “well done.” But we have never been afraid to offer critique when critique is due. In our print section Berlin Reviews, we've always tried to take the propositions of a book seriously and push them to their extremes.

Archive Berlin Review from our issue #22.

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS – David Mamet’s Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources (2000) details the futile efforts of the editors of a certain Bongazine to reconstruct human knowledge in its entirety from the downloaded, garbled and spotty memories of former president Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Ginger, after the accidental destruction of the internet in 2021. Destroy All Monsters, the zine published by the University of Michigan band/collective of the same name between 1976 and 1979 can be seen as the harbinger of a similar approach to art and knowledge in the information age. DAM started out as an Ann Arbor-based horde of pranksters, originally comprising of Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Cary Loren and singer Niagara. They physically and conceptually butchered everything they loved about music and performance – which mostly led to prematurely broken up concerts. A similar aesthetic informs the zine’s six issues (and “lost” seventh issue), which are assembled in the recently released Destroy All Monsters Magazine (Primary Information: 2011). This limited edition anthology combines Xerox art with Bizarro World and Antonin Artaud’s incendiary manifestos, onto one massive literary LSD blotter sheet. Destroy All Monsters’ screwball, samizdat approach to information distribution established on the eve of the coming of the World Wide Web forecast the artistic practices and media technologies that would take hold of the late 20th century ... and beyond.

Destroy All Monsters is published by Primary Information, New York, in an edition of 3000 copies, 2011