Bad Ideas

For the exhibition 'Bad Ideas' at Tallin Art Hall, Marc Hulson and Kristaps Ancāns created a multiscreen installation and exhibition concept incorporating 17 videos originally presented on the 'Bad Ideas Collective' online platform.

Bad Ideas Collective was born out of a desire to examine and document ways in which artists reflect on their own practices. Being incognito is useful during this analysis, as privacy allows for more insights and even intimacy in relation to practitioners' thought processes - discussions reflect on the mechanism, not just the outcome, and are more open or direct than artwork analysis. In many cases, humour or jokes also serve as an effective strategy to avoid responsibility or the pressure of self-confession: this endows the artists’ testimonies with a certain playfulness and in some cases they function as entertainment.

The artists involved produced short videos that reflect on projects which they held back from developing for reasons other than purely practical obstacles - for example, either because of perceived inadequacies in the concept or due to speculation over audience responses. The videos are presented without direct authorial attribution, as a means of shifting audience engagement away from questions of production and ownership. The emphasis is on the candid disclosure of the play and processing of ideas - how they are evaluated and either used or abandoned in the creative process.

The 17 videos included in the installation, displayed simultaneously across galleries 1 and 2, approached the subject of artistic failure or creative glitch in different ways. Each of them, as an account of an artwork that never came into being, documents a lost future.

Bad Ideas 1, 2, 4, 8, 11, 13, 14 & 16 focused on specific unrealised outcomes, sharing discarded concepts, contexts and motivations and reflecting on why these ideas never got past the planning stage.

Bad Ideas 3, 5, 9 & 10 were concerned with questions of process: how in general can we discern good ideas from bad? Are there certain circumstances where things are bound to go wrong?

Bad Ideas 6, 7, 12, 15 & 17 were more oblique or self-reflexive in tone – there is a hint that the video we are watching, the performance or act of disclosure it records, may itself be the bad idea.

The video booth in Gallery 1 opened the Collective up to new contributors – we wanted to hear from artists visiting the exhibition about ideas they had set aside, thought better of or downright rejected. We invited visitors to put on a mask, take a seat in the booth, close the curtain and confess to the camera.

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