“Kooks, Eccentrics and Oddballs: California Artists” March 20, 2010

Event: “Kooks, Eccentrics and Oddballs: California Artists”. Guest curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of documentary films profiling three exceptionally eccentric California artists. Chris Burden, the infamous performance and installation artist who explores ideas of personal (and interpersonal) danger and the taboo, Fredric Hobbs, the San Francisco creator of rolling sculpture (perhaps the first “art car”), and musical genius and visionary Harry Partch.
Date: Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 8:00PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco 94110
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or [email protected]
Web: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/Eccentrics_2_PR.pdf

"Kooks, Eccentrics and Oddballs”
California Artists
Screens at Oddball Films

On Saturday, March 20, Guest Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of short films focused on those lovable kooks, eccentrics and oddballs that make the world a bit more interesting. Some may be geniuses, others are just a bit off- but they all are fascinating subjects. Tonight’s program focuses on three especially eccentric Californian artists. Showtime is 8:00PM and admission is $10.00. Seating is limited so RSVP is preferred to: [email protected] or 415-558-8117.

Highlights Include:

Chris Burden (Dir. Peter Kirby, Color, 1989)
One of the most intriguing, sensationalist performance artists of the 1970’s and thought-provoking installation artist of the 1980’s, this 30 minute documentary covers all his major events and installations up to 1989. Burden, critics and friends are interviewed, revealing the ideas behind such infamous performances such as Shoot (Burden is shot with a .22 rifle), Transfixed (Burden is crucified atop a VW Bug) and installation pieces The Reason For The Neutron Bomb (50,000 nickels with match heads- each representing the number of Russian tanks along their eastern border) and Samson (a 100-ton jack that that slowly pushed against the load-bearing walls of the museum, activated by visitors entering via turnstile) and many more.

Trojan Horse (Prod. Ronald Bostwick/Robert Blasdell, Color, 1967)
Documents the creation of the amazing rolling sculpture designed by outsider artist Fredric Hobbs, unleashed on San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Clad in an orange jump suit, Hobbs drives his creation all over our beautiful city from Haight Ashbury to North Beach, Lincoln Park to downtown, culminating in a final, ignominious act: the issuance of a parking ticket by one of San Francisco’s finest.

Arriving in San Francisco in the late 1950’s after studying in Madrid, artist Fredric Hobbs Goya-inspired paintings “were populated with demons performing sacrifices and contemporary witches’ Sabbaths… his grotesque figures gradually became translated into sculpture. In the early 1960’s- inspired by the folk idols used in pagan rituals and primitive religious processions- Hobbs began adding wheels to his mutilated Everyman and deformed Earth Mothers and rolling them about the streets. His most ambitious “parade sculpture” was The Trojan Horse, a horrendous tableau of mythological monsters that rose from Procrustean slags of plexiglass attached to a stripped-down auto chassis. Wearing an orange jump suit, Hobbs drove the creation to Los Angeles, where it exhibited at several locations”. (Thomas Albright- Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980).

Hobbs went on to make several insanely bizarre, Bay Area-based cult films in the early 1970’s, including Roseland, Alabama’s Ghost, and Godmonster of Indian Flats.

The Dreamer That Remains (Dir. Stephen Pouliot, Color, 1973)
“Harry Partch is an American visionary. He has built his own musical world out of microtones, hobo speech, elastic octaves and percussion instruments made from hubcaps and nuclear cloud chambers.– Newsweek
A portrait of Harry Partch, one of the most innovative and influential composers of the 20th century. Partch invented instruments (cloud chamber bowls, cong gongs, the harmonic canon, more), experimented with drama and ritual and created a live ensemble utilizing dozens of invented instruments.
Partch influenced virtually every forward thinking composer and experimental musician of the 20th century. A fascinating artist, Partch lectured, performed and rode the rails as a hobo for eight years.
“The work that I have been doing these many years parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found sound-magic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he involved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.”-Harry Partch

Further Reading:
Chris Burden
http://www.volny.cz/rhorvitz/burden.html

Fredric Hobbs
http://thelastexit.net/cinema/hobbs.html

Harry Partch
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/essay_partchworld.html
http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/JanFeb01/archive-partch.html
To “play” his instruments:
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/feature_partch.html#
Curator Biography:
Pete Gowdy (aka DJ Chas Gaudi) is host of San Francisco’s Shellac Shack, a weekly 78 rpm listening party and a DJ specializing in vintage sounds: soul, jazz, country, punk and new wave. A graduate of the Vassar College Film Program, he is an associate producer of Marc Huestis Presents, the long-running movie legend tributes at the Castro Theatre.

Upcoming Programs
Fri March 12 Weirdsville 12: Oddities From The Archives 8:30PM
Sat March 13 2 Shows! 8:00PM Beyond Edification: National Film Board of Canada 10:00PM American Trance: The TRYPPS Series
Sat March 20 “Kooks, Eccentrics and Oddballs: California Artists”
Fri March 26 Soul Food 2 Benefit at Gallery 16

About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.  
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educationals, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.