| dc.description.abstract | The work I look at here responds particularly to being part of a new class known as Generation Rent. Facing what critic Lauren Berlant has influentially termed the ‘cruel optimism’ of desiring something which actually inhibits their flourishing (Berlant 2011, 1), the artists whose work I discuss stage desire for but exclusion from the kind of ‘good life’ that might take them out of profoundly constrained conditions of living. Using strategies of urban intervention, poetic architectural distortion, narrative, embodiment, performance style, collaboration, affect, and more, these artists trouble relationships between property, propriety, the private, the public, and precarity. In the case of the performance makers I discuss in particular, they ‘optimistically’ stage alternative kinship and support networks; and perhaps angrily, they perform semi-comic scenarios perhaps more akin to situation tragedies than sit coms. These artists stage current problems but only partial ‘solutions’, emphasising how solutions to our current socio-economic impasse must be social and systemic, not simply the individual acts of some of those people whom this impasse most profoundly disempowers. | en_US |
