Animal Charm
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Contact Information*:
Portland Oregon USA |
Contact Type: Artist |
| Affiliation: Peripheral Produce | |
| web: http://www.peripheralproduce.com | |
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Bio:
Comprised of Jim Fetterley and Rich Bott, Animal Charm's tapes are mind-bendingly inventive experiments in uncanny, surreal montage that defy logical analysis. [Their work] is a tour de force of incongruous juxtapositions, startling dislocations and ingenious visual rhymes assembled from the banal detritus of late night TV." --Gavin Smith, 1998 New York Video Festival SINGLE CHANNEL VIDEOS By re-editing sounds and images derived from a wide variety of sources, Animal Charm scrambles media codes, creating a kind of tic-ridden, convulsive montage, their disruptive gestures often re-investing conventional forms with subversive meanings. "Animal Charm participates in video's rich legacy of media deconstruction. Their interventions - distillations of music videos, commercials and infomercials sampled from a reservoir of neglected or useless images - offer moments of resistance. If you took this text and scrambled the word order, you would stills have a sense of what it was about. But if you took a magazine article on physics, a chapter of "Pride and Prejudice", or instructions on how to apply cosmetics and merged them together, what would happen? This is precisely what Animal Charm do with television footage. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Works such as Stuffing, Ashley and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, in turn revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs 'nature', how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images, and so on. By forcing television to babble like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying." --Nelson Henricks (from film and video anthology 25 Years of the Pleasure Dome) AUDIO AND VIDEO PERFORMANCE Animal Charm dives the dumpsters of film and video production companies and scraps through countless hours of industrial documentary and corporate footage, often editing the tapes in a live mix session before an audience. They have been compared to the Tape Beatles and other groups experimenting in live video scratching and film looping performances in environments ranging from private parties and night clubs to media arts centers and museums. "Filmforum - Animal Charm Renegade filmmaker Craig Baldwin has dubbed today's generation of image-collage artists "media savages," and the term, with its gleeful hint of danger and destruction, certainly fits Animal Charm, the Chicago-based video duo composed of Rich Bott and Jim Fetterley. The pair returns to Filmforum after a great show last season, this time to perform live. In their unusual performances, Bott and Fetterley run weird and wacky found footage - images and sequences culled from the dumpsters of various production houses - through video switchers and audio samplers, and the result is an amazing tour through the edges of our image industry. Corporate videos and strange animal documentaries are just some of the sources sampled, and seeing the cacophony of uncannily familiar elements of Americana is both scary and illuminating. Bott and Fetterley find and celebrate with unerring eyes and ears the most insidious inflections of our culture, and then offer them back in these sublime media riffs and sound/image collages, which are not so much dark revelations of hidden desires and subtexts, but decidedly merry send-ups of the deadpan spectacle so often found in the mundane". --Holly Willis, October 22-28 1999, LA Weekly Filmography/Awards Info: VISITING ARTISTS & LECTURES Animal Charm have been visiting artists and guest lecturers at a variety of high schools, universities and multimedia festivals. Each presentation provides a specific context for discussion of the work in relationship to technology and mass media. Selected Lectures and Visiting Artist Program The School of the Art Institute of Chicago - University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee - University of St Denis, Paris - Taos Talking Picture Festival, Taos - Lowell High School, San Francisco - University of Illinois, Chicago - Impakt Festival, Utrecht - Universtity of California at Riverside - University of California at Los Angeles - Cal Arts , California summer school for the arts - Wexner Center, University of Ohio - Lux Center, London 'critical images devolution' Jurors , Thaw festival Iowa City - The Art Institute of San Francisco Selected Screenings - Vidarte Festival, Barranca del Muerto, Mexico - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago - Arc, Stockton-on-Tees, UK - Transat Video, Herouville-St-Claire, France - Television Festival, Bogota, Columbia - Darklight Film Festival, Dublin, Eire - Below 54, London - New York Video Festival, New York - Impakt Festival, Utrecht - Galerie Anton Weller Paris, France - Pandæmonium Festival, The Lux Centre, London - San Francisco International Film Festival - Dallas Video Festival, Texas - Whitney Museum, The American Century - Virginia Film Festival - Lux Cinema, screening of 80+miracles Selected Performances LACE, LA Film Forum - Galerie Montenay-Giroux, Paris - Impakt Festival, Utrecht - Taos Talking Picture Festival - Other Cinema, Artists Television Access, San Francisco - Chicago Filmmakers - Orgone Cinema, Pittsburgh - The Blinding Light, Vancouver - 5th Avenue Cinema, Portland - Olympia Film Festival - Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art - 911 Media Arts Center Seattle - Lux Center London 'critical images devolution' - Wexner Center, University of Ohio - UCLA Armand Hammer Museum - Grants & Awards - 1997 Golden Gate Award, New Visions Category, San Francisco International Film Festival - 1999 Silver Hugo, Experimental Video Category, Chicago International Film Festival - 2000 Jury Prize, Videoex Festival, Zurich, Switzerland This Contact appears in this database if Microcinema International has screened a film directed by the Contact, a film directed by the contact is featured in a DVD distributed by the Blackchair Collection Shop, or featured an organization or activity linked with the Contact. This database is used for commercial as well as informational, non-commercial purposes. It is a historical archive of Microcinema International's activities. Inclusion in this database and archive in no way implies a continuing formal relationship or affiliation with Microcinema International or the Blackchair Label nor an endorsement of its activities by the Contact. Contact details are not displayed in order to protect privacy. If you wish to contact this artist please see their website as listed above or write Microcinema International and we will be happy to forward your e-mail.
None of this person's films have ever been screened
Microcinema Interview/Article:
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