The Bad Art Collective

Bad Art Aston Kutcher

2011-12-21T07:19:00.000-08:00

Laura Agustín has used one of my Bad Art drawings to illustrate a blog post about the Rescue Industry. Very proud.

Bombarded By Images gallery

2011-09-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

This is some of what we made at researching Feminist Futures at Edinburgh University. Many thanks to everyone who participated.

Bad Art + Fat Cartoons + Fat Activism = Life-Affirming Wonderousness

2011-09-05T07:39:00.000-07:00

Look what Corinna made:

Situationism forever!

Bad Art and Fat Activism

2011-09-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

I wrote about doing Bombarded By Images at Researching Feminist Futures on my blog about fat activism.

The Bad Art Collective and Irrational Fat Activism

I've barely scratched the surface of the amazing two days that we spent drawing and making things. Thanks to everybody who contributed.

Pictures, videos and accounts to come as soon as I can...

Bombarded by Badges!

2011-08-29T12:16:00.001-07:00

If you come and visit us during our residency you might be able to get your hands on some of these!

And in close up.

And a behind-the-scenes in the 'artist's' studio!

Bombarded By Images: One Week To Go!

2011-08-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

by Francis Ray

One week to go until the Bad Art Collective starts its artists' residency at the Researching Feminist Futures symposium. In honour of this (and to celebrate today's fresh crop of obesity "news") I've been doing a little practicing. I call this one BOOM! Sofapocalypse.

See you all in Edinburgh next week!

Bad Art Varieties: Painting By Numbers

2011-08-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

by Francis Ray

One of my favourite varieties of Bad Art is painting by numbers. I like almost everything about PBN, and am also fascinated by its status as art, and yet not art, and its ambiguous relationship to Bad Art in particular.

On one level PBN seems to promise the democratisation of art – you don’t need to be mystically ‘artistic’ to do it, or have any formal training. Nor does it require a lot of expensive equipment, a studio or vast amounts of time in a single stretch, yet at the end you get a beautiful painting! On the other hand PBN also seems to represent the very antithesis of artistic expression and only the illusion of creativity. It might be an accessible form, but all you can access are mass produced kits, pre-ordained colours and the distinct impression that you are not ‘good’ enough (read: sophisticated, inventive, talented) to make your own art.

And then there’s the subject matter. Country landscapes, animals, coastal vistas, heroic steam trains, sailing boats, flowers, the occasional wizard or unicorn, quaint village scenes and dolphins abound. This is also what makes PBN ‘bad’ art. Its twee, lowest-common-denominator images are not only ‘unreal’ but hallmarks of a lack of taste (i.e., things working-class people and women like) and consequently looked down on. The reappropriation of PBN as a kind of kitsch in some quarters is only another manifestation of this in my opinion: middle-class hipsters exercising a particular kind of cultural capital (and economic – vintage PBNs on eBay sell for more than ten times what it costs to buy a new kit) that does nothing to critique the way in which taste works to uphold structures of privilege. But isn’t PBN also ‘bad’ by the standards of our collective? The BAC is all about creating the images we want to see and embracing new (anti-) aesthetics. PBN appears only to encourage conformity to someone else’s ideas about what constitutes acceptable artistic subject matter. There are no PBN kits available depicting council estates, queer night clubs, Halal butchers’ shops, rioting, fat people having fun, laptops, or anything else to suggest life exists outside a rural mono-culture that even a century ago was anachronistic.

Oh, but I still love PBN. While it may be almost universally considered a pretender to ‘real’ art, I find the PBN aesthetic incredibly pleasing. My girlfriend and I have been painting PBNs on and off for five years and recently realised we had done enough to clad an entire wall of our hall with them. I trimmed them to fit the space exactly and they look so fantastic I can’t keep my eyes off them. I love the vibrant colours and the way you can see where the previously-numbered sections join. I love that, because of the limited palate of colours you get with a kit, scenes of nature and animals (my works are all of cats, my girlfriend’s of landscapes with water) come out looking anything but natural. I also love the process of creating them. I can literally sit for hours, totally absorbed in it while it induces a feeling of zen-like calm. PBN is a source of joy for me, and ultimately perhaps this is more important than whether or not it is bad art.

What is Bad Art?

2011-08-21T05:53:00.000-07:00

By Charlotte Cooper

When you make Bad Art you are creating your own aesthetic, and what you create is what you are, and it doesn't matter if you're not a success, in the big league, high-flying, you're already alright. Bad Art is creativity unfettered by anxiety that it won't be good enough – it always is. Bad artists enjoy and encourage that which is cack-handedly produced, amateurish, peculiar. It's about doing your thing, going your own way, having a go, seeing what you can make, and doing that without conforming to someone else's oppressive aesthetic code.

Bad artists bite off more than we can chew, The Bad Art Collective is unintimidated by the means and methods of art production, we sculpt giant blocks of granite, do action painting like Tony Hancock, and produce humongous canvases in oils. Bad artists see no distinction between formal and vernacular; crayons, lolly sticks and glitter are also viable. We are prolific, we churn it out and move seamlessly between style and media.

When you make bad art you are breaking the rules that insist that art must always be competently-produced, strive towards excellence and expertise, as well as the belief that its production must be reserved for higher-functioning beings. You're not just breaking the rules, you are laughing at them. Bad Art demolishes the industrial-art-complex, bad artists are not angling for a seat at the Master's table, we don't buy into the mythology of great art, which is so often a mythology of the market, we don't play those games (often there's little difference between great art and Bad Art in the gifte shoppes of the world's most sacrosanct art museums, for example Van Gogh's note cube with drawer, Joan Miro mug, Water Lillies tie).

To make Bad Art is to invest in freedom, fun, beauty. Bad Art is a reason to get out of bed, to keep going, it's a means of survival. We make art because it brings us pleasure and because we want to articulate our own lives autonomously. We deflate the pomposity of great art, serious art. Anybody can do this and, by extension, anybody can have a go at puncturing great power, serious power.

PS Do yourself a favour and watch Tony Hancock's wonderful proto-Bad Art comedy from 1961, The Rebel.

What is Bad Art?

2011-08-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

Becky Sanchez has created a beautiful photo essay. It's on Facebook, take a look.

What is Bad Art? by Becky Sanchez

Bombarded By Images - a multi media performance installation

2011-08-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

Facebook: Bombarded by Images: installation

What is bad art? It is joy

2011-08-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

The name 'bad art' can suggest judgement and piss-taking of people earnestly producing work that they deem worthy of sharing with the world. That's not what it is for me. Finding bad art in its many, varied forms and qualities, is such a joy. And embracing 'bad' in relation to art is actually bursting through hierarchical and snobbish opinion of what is and what isn't worthy of being called 'art', let alone good or bad.

But other people's art is not what I want to talk about in relation to the question, 'What is bad art?' Because my love of bad art by other people has grown ten-fold since I myself became a self-proclaimed Bad Artist. Now some may argue that labelling yourself a Bad Artist is not the same as labelling someone else who may want their work to be judged 'good'. But I would offer that self-labelling is both a rebellious and liberatory act. Yes, I'd go as far to say that labelling myself as a Bad Artist has had a similar impact on my life and identity as labelling myself as Fat and a Fat Activist. Others may not want to give themselves that label, even if they are that which is being described, but when one claims such a title for oneself, then it's quite the joyful thing.

Before my Bad Artist incarnation I loved and was fascinated by many forms of art and design but had one pang – I wished I could do it. I write a bit, have acted and made films. I can carry a tune. But what I really wished I could do was draw and paint and transform my love of something others can do really well into doing something I could do myself. But – I thought – I am not good enough. I could start from scratch, I could take classes, I could try and get better for years and years but I would never be good enough to feel ok about my 'art'. Looking back, I didn't feel any shame throwing my bad filmmaking, poetry, short stories and ballads out into the world, even though I knew they were sub-par. Actually, I did eventually embrace the low-fi, crapness of my films and hoped they might be looked on in the same vein as other schlocky, shit, cult films that I love and admire. But the art eluded me. I didn't know where to start.

That was until I met my partner, fellow bad artist and enabler Becky, who said: 'do it'. Yes I had some initial fears and embarrassment, but I overcame that pretty fast. Yes, I occasionally obsess over a minute detail (usually a mouth or a nose) and spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get it 'right' until I have to let go and remember, there is no 'right' or 'wrong' in bad art. Or rather, it's better to Embrace the Wrong. One of the things I enjoy most about making bad art is that I do care and I do try – a bit. If I just slap-dashed something purposely bad the joke would wear pretty thin, pretty fast. I take pride in my bad art and I love sharing it with others. I know everyone won't 'get it', but part of letting go is letting go of that. Call me trite, but it is like going back to that time when you were a kid and you drew or painted and put your all into it and didn't really give a crap about it being 'good' or 'bad' because those categories didn't have any real meaning. But now that you do know those meanings, the joy and hilarity of something coming out a little bit skewed, but wonderfully skewed, is what bad art and being a bad artist is all about for me.

By a Bad Artist.

Feast your eyes on Bad Art from Corinna and Becky's collection

2011-07-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

Yippee! Bad Art Collective residency, September 2011

2011-07-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

We are delighted to announce that The Bad Art Collective will be Artists in Residence at the Researching Feminist Futures symposium, the University of Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2011. Yeah! Bad Art forever! Come along and join in.

Here is the proposal for our residency. We wrote it in a stuffy way because we didn't know how serious we had to be in order to convince the symposium organisers to let us do our thing.

Bombarded by Images: A multi-media performance-based installation

As scholars and activists engaged with critical discourse concerned with fat/'obesity', we have become frustrated with the often-repeated sentiment that fat hatred and people's problematic embodiment has come about because we are 'bombarded by images in the media'. This phrase suggests that through the helpless consumption of media imagery we are driven to develop a disordered consumption of food. Whilst the cliché 'bombarded by images' is most often found utilised by 'The Media' itself, its sentiment – and often exact wording – can be found littering academic enterprises, from undergraduate essays to published scholarly texts. 'The Media' is portrayed as an omnipresent entity making women – or more specifically 'vulnerable girls' – into passive consumers who hate their bodies. We consider 'bombarded by images' as a reductive statement that fails to consider the multiplicity of the media, transforms people into helpless complainants and fails to develop discourse about fat or bodies in any productive way.

Taking the punk ethic 'Don’t hate the media, become the media,' as our credo, Bombarded by Images takes power into our own hands and proposes that we are more than capable of developing our own cultural production as part of wider liberation strategies. We believe that anyone can do this, regardless of assumed artistic talent, and through making our own art we seek to critique notions of expertise and artistic value. Our art includes humorous aspects, but we are very serious about the wider ideals of agency and cultural production by marginalised people that demolishes artistic exclusivity and talks back to a mainstream that diminishes us repeatedly. We think that fun is radical and revolutionary.

Bombarded by Images will take the form of a group hang out around a big table, where we will sit together, talk and make art over the course of the conference. We will aim to produce as much art as possible in many different media, a massive volume, we will bombard visitors and viewers with our own images. We will present our art as a group show, with separate wall space dedicated to each of us. We will invite onlookers to take part and add their art to the walls. We acknowledge that conversations and friendships and intimate space is an important aspect of fat activism in the UK.

Who we are

2011-07-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

The Bad Art Collective has developed from networks and friendships within UK fat activist circles – and found its first tentative incarnation at the Bad Art Workshop featured in the Carnival of Cultural Feminist Activism at the University of York, March 2011.

Charlotte Cooper is currently a Government of Ireland Ph.D scholar at the University of Limerick, courtesy of the Irish Social Sciences Platform, where she's writing a thesis about fat activism. Charlotte is a DIY cultural producer, making zines and films, putting on events, and being in bands. Her background is in journalism and she is widely published. Charlotte published Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size (1998) and an award-winning novel, Cherry (2002), and she blogs about fat at obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com. In 2011 she was Artist in Residence at Villa Magdalena K, in Hamburg.

Dr Francis Ray White teaches gender studies and sociology at the University of Westminster. Their research interests are in feminist and queer theory, fat studies and media discourse analysis. Francis Ray also makes zines under the name Bill Savage and is involved in a range of fat and queer activist projects.

Corinna Tomrley is co-editor of Fat Studies in the UK and has been researching women, fat and celebrity gossip for the past five years. After spending the majority of her life in fear of attempting any art because of a lack of ‘talent’ she has fully embraced a bad art ethic and persona and now produces bad art on a regular basis. She co-convened the Bad Art Workshop when she received an invitation with Becky Sanchez by the organisers of the Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism.

Becky Sanchez has studied History of Art for almost a decade, during which she has finely honed her appreciation of and enjoyment of ‘Bad Art’. Since meeting the above Chubsters, her (Art) work and studies have taken on an enjoyably fatty approach, and looks forward to disrupting ‘the canon’ with the Bad Art Collective.