Bad Art Nights
Eventually, a chatty group is seated around the table, digging into oil pastels, modeling clay, chalk, colored pencils, watercolors and - a wonderful discovery of Laurie's - fluorescent cattle markers, from a farm-goods megastore. The Bad Art Nighters are doing loopy abstractions saturated with color; they're making strange, three-dimensional paper-sculpture thingamajigs and neosurrealist collages. Laurie is working on a drawing of an enormous cat whose body is intersecting with a toucan and a map of Belize. To inspire the group, I am reading from a manifesto by the great and bizarre gay filmmaker and performance pioneer Jack Smith: "If you make perfect art you will be admired; but if you make imperfect art you will be loved!"
Ah, yes, this is Bad Art at its best - which is to say, its worst. One of our faithful attenders once asked Laurie why we use the b-word. Doesn't it imply low standards, low expectations, low self-esteem? No, Laurie explained. It implies no standards, no expectations, and very high self-esteem. Bad Art is all about conscious, dedicated badness - in community - as a tool of liberation.
The Tuesday gatherings are much more than art fests; they're mini-salons in which the Bad Art Nighters talk about politics, love, spirituality, and their next moves in life. (Nothing gets talk flowing like having something to do with your hands.) We inspire one another; if you're stuck on a prissy little drawing (as I often am) and afraid to make it wild, you can glance at your neighbor's piece, a riot of tropical color slathered over a cereal box, and immediately feel a dizzying sense of freedom. Professional artists, crafts types, dabblers, and doodlers, all are welcome at the double table. Only boldness counts - and, we say, if you can't be bold, at least be bad.
|
Sidebar: Making Art Around the Cities
Rebecca Wienbar |