Rich Bott, half of the video-making duo Animal Charm, wishes he “had a quarter for every naked ass or every naked person in a fetal position” he saw while studying at the School of the Art Institute. “I had a total opposition to that kind of art, performances about ‘myself and family’–therapy for rich kids.”

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Fetterley, 27, and Bott, 26, are both from less-than-wealthy backgrounds: Fetterley’s mom tended bar and cleaned houses while raising him alone in Rockford, and Bott’s parents ran a trailer park in Arkansas. Fetterley recalls the single moms in his apartment building “sitting out back, drinking beer, bitching about the guys that left them and about the rich people in town. But I always had a hot meal every night and didn’t realize we were as bad off as we were, until I tried going to the School of the Art Institute and realized my mother was making less than one year’s tuition.”

The two roomed together through most of their school years and collaborated on art projects from the start. “We took all the garbage in the house and hung it on the wall,” Fetterley says. “One night we came home drunk and decided to break everything that was glass in the garage–a TV, a bunch of bottles, storm windows.” Bott recalls an outdoor performance that consisted of a movie loop projected onto the wall of a house next door while he “chased Jim around the yard blurting out noise on a trumpet.” Fetterley responded with “two hours of somersaults.” They also made a video, Fetterley says, “where we just had the television on and had the radio next to it, and we were playing with the sound of the radio and TV and changing channels, in a kind of in-camera editing.”

Videos by Animal Charm will be shown in programs at the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Thursday, August 13, at 9 PM and next Friday, August 14, at 10:45 PM at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont. Admission is $6 per program. For more information, call 773-866-8660, or see the CUFF sidebar in the Section Two movie listings. –Fred Camper