“What would it mean to have that thought?”
—Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011)
There’s an illusion that we’re in the driving seat, pursuing “the good life” as solid, unchanging entities who move through time somehow separate from the physical world. Hallucination that has us striving towards a beautiful horizon, because it’s there that there can be, may be, a life in full sail. But our entire lives are spent, more or less, dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure. I could be wrong. But at every second in time, we seem to be chasing that which can never be attained. In other words, our pursuit of “the good life” and its relation to fantasy is a cruel optimism that leaves us wanting more. Refusing to lie in wait, lavishing endless attention to detail on objects of desire, is American sculptor Nancy Lupo; her pull towards affect in materiality and language makes clear what we don’t want to be true; we’re too occupied to think about how we’re being occupied. Our choices and decisions are conditioned externally, entangled with social forces, emotional attachments, structural limitations, and their every iteration. What her synthetic pearls, traditional Erzgebirge pyramids, porcelain candelabras, crystalware, and decorative papers invade and jeopardise is the illusion of free will.
In the shadow of white men raising light blue placards with increasingly unlikely answers, Nancy Lupo issues a rule change that might bring back down to earth those whose wires have been crossed and confused. In Princessletthewind, her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, Lupo draws attention to our presence amidst everyday materials and spaces, collating data about cruel optimism—a concept introduced by the profoundly influential American scholar and cultural critic Lauren Berlant. In their affectual theory of cruel optimism, Berlant critiques societal (infra)structures that promote unattainable ideals of success and ultimately perpetuate harmful systems of power and inequality. Joining in the great run. It’s what harms us the most. Before the exhibition I left to spend some phoney time in the grounds of Schweriner Schloss which, now, doesn’t seem so ironic. The drop-down options for a city of 90K are not many, but here I am, I sin, (un)wittingly occupying, and being occupied by, the disney+ fantasy.
The Queen of Hearts decides that all attachment is optimistic “if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.” Which is to say, optimism is tied to the belief that fulfilment comes from things outside of ourselves. Optimism is cruel when the object or scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person risks striving. Estelle Hoy sheds some light on this for us: “we’re duped by the fantasy bribe of capitalistic abundance that’s built on shifting goalposts and quicksand. The scenes are many: the pursuit of stability in a politics of pernicious instability; the pursuit of instability—the freelancer’s signifier of emancipation from zombie managerial enthusiasm; the pursuit of financial success in a politics of obscenely uneven wealth distribution.” The idea is, we’re moored to a utopian future that will never come.
Relieving pressure from uneasy (infra)structures, Lupo impales us with seven wooden Weihnachtspyramiden—Christmas pyramids balancing figures from the Nativity, a tiny wise man, an angel here and there. The erected beacon of light and tradition is a nostalgic feast for anyone who grew up in the Erz Mountains. The warm, flickering candlelight that powers the pyramid’s rotation no doubt conjures comfort and connection to a familiar festive glow. But hers is an architecture that shakes hands with, so firmly, the altercations necessary for dogmas to lose their assertiveness—motorised, Lupo’s pyramids are an indictment of human desire.
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This text is published on the occasion of “Princessletthewind”, Nancy Lupo’s solo exhibition at the Kunstverein für Mecklenburg und Vorpommern in Schwerin, Germany, 2025, curated by Hendrike Nagel, Artistic & Managing Director.
Nancy Lupo (*1983, USA) lives and works in Berlin.
Robert Frost is a writer, editor of émergent, and host of Divine Transportations.
