Purpose of 'Bad Art' for Artists

 I watched a lot of awful movies in film school. Some of the professors would even spoil the movie endings by telling us the entire plot before viewing it. They were trying to break our normal viewing habit of watching movies as escapist entertainment. It was cinematic bootcamp: shove more and more difficult and experimental films down our throats to either break us or to remake us as thinkers. We were there to improve our craft, not eat popcorn and laugh. I learned just as much from 'bad' or 'unenjoyable' films that taught me a technique in world building, time-shifting, character arc than from pleasing works that comforted me. 

I think the same rules apply in theatre... if you're working in this field. Of course I prefer plays that I think are 'good' or 'well done' but I don't shy away from messy, unconventional, difficult works. When I first arrived in nyc there were two plays closing on the same day: one work was a naturalistic two-hander about an oddball boy-meets-girl love affair. The other play was a recently translated experimental movement piece by a Jewish writer from the Weimar Republic that had a title like 'Great Exterminating Machine." I could see merits in both, but I've watched a lot more 'oddball boy meets girl' stories than an experimental German work that hinted at the rise of Nazism. Most of my friends went to the rom com. I ended up in some dirty underground theatre in the East Village watching people covered in chocolate syrup writhing around 'giant machine' made out of cardboard boxes. It wasn't 'good.' I would probably say it was terrible. But I processed the work, how I would do it differently, and what it has to do about my life right now.  Later on that year, I wrote "The Great Black Sambo Machine" about dehumanization box that processes Black identity through archetypes. The play got some attention and a workshop at Ars Nova and the Lincoln Center Director's Lab. It was totally influenced by the German Exterminating Death Machine-y thing. I can't tell you how I was influenced. All I was left with were the visceral sounds and feelings, the themes, and the dream-like images that stuck with me long after the plot had faded. I allowed myself to view the piece as a puzzle, meditation, a drug trip, a hallucination, and to see what stuck to the walls of my mind. Our craft is more influenced by the unconscious and subconscious delusions than plot points. 

Now in TV it's all about plot. TV is a story machine. It's important to know how to take apart and reassemble the plot engine. But I still let the hallucinations work their way in. I still let the illogical and absurd and sticky weird things be a speed bump on the road to strong storytelling. Often it's those speed bumps that the audience will remember long after they've gotten to the finish line of the plot.