Our society, while prizing reason and progress, has brought about environmental destruction and triggered a mass extinction. Despite promising connection, advancements in information technology have instead unraveled our communities, making us more isolated, depressed, and anxious than we were before. We are increasingly alienated from our desires, and digital surveillance and algorithmic tracking are stripping away the privacy we need to determine our lives.
This same society positions queer people as abnormal, evil, perverted, diseased, and dangerous. While we have seen "progress" since the beginning of the century regarding marriage and the military, these policy changes have functioned in practice to do little more than privilege those of us who conform to heteronormative forms, once again positioning queerness as something deviant—as something bad.
If we live in a society where what is good is valorized by systems that beget destruction and poison the Earth, we compromise our integrity by supporting such systems because they are oriented against our wellbeing. Yet, if we act up against that system, we risk our safety. Any act of resistance carries the risk of social backlash and institutional violence. Surely, it is no coincidence that the United States has created the largest prison- and military-industrial complexes in the world.
Given these dynamics shaping our lives at this contemporary moment, the Bad Art Collective sees collective artmaking as a means of survival. We understand badness to be a generative concept, one that allows us to create art that exposes the faults and fractures in the systems that structure our world. In doing so, we are able to better understand our lived experiences within those systems, accept the precarity of our present-day world, and embrace new possibilities for ourselves that those we care about.
Queers, like all marginalized people, are no strangers to the shadows. We have learned to survive in spaces and contexts that are detached from our public selves. As a result, we carry deep reservoirs of wisdom that are difficult to access through the public roles we perform under the institutional gaze. By making and doing in collaborative spaces and teasing out what it means to be bad in a toxic world, we are able to connect the wisdom we have honed in the shadows to our public roles and the structural forces mediating them to live more fully and wholeheartedly.