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In both works, Berlant points to the effort subjects expend to be good citizens and to pursue “the good life” as well as the failure of meaningful reciprocation from political or economic structures. Cruel Optimism is a fitting successor to The Queen of America Goes to Washington City and its argument that engaging with the nation and its monuments will offer insight or understanding is ultimately delusional.
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A Marxist-Feminist stance informs the central critique in Berlant’s readings of these relationships, which focus on the inevitably failed reciprocity between citizens and their interlocutors in neoliberal cultures. Defining cruel optimism as desiring what actually hinders one’s flourishing, Berlant charts the way that culture circulates and transmits affects that call us to associate in intimate public relationships that do not produce fair dividends. Berlant gets to this conclusion through an argument that describes the current living environment as ultimately cruel. vii + 342.Ĭruel Optimism ends with neither pure cynicism nor hope instead, Lauren Berlant offers ambient citizenship as a mode of “political action as the action of not being worn out by politics,” specifically, politics in an era that she describes as being in constant crisis (262). These two articulations of what I will refer to as ‘the politics of wanting things’ underpin this critical reflection on the four U N N A W A Y exhibitions that form this practice led PhD submission.Cruel Optimism. In a contemporary US context, cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has named this longing, ‘Cruel Optimism’. The importance of this text in relation to my own practical research in the UNNAWAY curatorial project resides in what Steedman names her mother’s ‘proper envy’ of those who have the material possessions she desires associated with a socially middle-class life as she understands it. This material understanding will position the historical use of cheap, make shift materials in British sculpture.Ĭruel Optimism (Berlant, 2011)and Landscape for a Good Woman: A Tale of Two Lives (Steedman, 1989) articulate different forms of classed aspiration. This is exemplified in the work of Sarah Lucas Lucas’ art work understands and reworks sculptural histories using cheap foraged materials which is able to say something about her class position. The Young British Artists (1990’s) made sculpture with socially working-class materials that have the same significance of the traditional modernist sculpture they reference. The art movements of Minimalism, Anti-Form and Arte Povera and the exhibition Eccentric Abstraction curated by Lucy Lippard will inform an historical underpinning to the formalĬonsiderations of the art works presented in the practice led research.
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The thesis then discusses artist-led curatorial projects in relation to how they are being affected economically in contemporary Britain. The thesis contextualises this practice historically through examples of organisation by artists in the UK, the Artist Placement Group (Steveni et all, 1966 -89) and The Shop (Emin & Lucas, 1993). U N N A W A Y was affectively informed by the precarious conditions of its production. The exhibitions developed from the same aspirational relationship to material and form, contextualised through a unique site of a disused ballet studio in the town centre of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. This inversion of materials produced an aspirational use of materials which brought a socially working-class aesthetic into the art works. The precarity of the materials used revealed the economic precarity in which they were created. The ambitious project presented artworks that engaged with historical sculptural forms though created using cheap, foraged materials.
CRUEL OPTIMISM SERIES
This is evidenced in a curated exhibition series titled U N N A W A Y which contextualises the ‘politics of wanting things’ critical to understanding aspirational material and formal considerations of the artists manifest in the exhibitions. The practice-led research submitted for the PhD submission is evidence of my investigation into aspirational relationships to material and form.
CRUEL OPTIMISM LICENSE
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