Elude, remain uncomfortable, refuse when necessary, and NEVER SETTLE!

Bad Feelings aims itself towards existing discussions on negation, negativity, and a bottomless catalogue of negative emotions.

Assembled therein is a set of materials for conflict and commonality. Despite some clear thematic concerns and constellations around which the contributions coalesce – hate, struggle, rage, anger, revenge, resistance, destruction, and so on – it forgoes asserting any coherent narrative, manifesto, or position on the subjects. Authors, whether collective, individual, or transmutable identities, flow from start to finish in a sequence determined by their emotion and subject of contestation. The texts, the contributors, the ideas, the aesthetics, and the arguments disagree, and so do we. Ordered against order, Bad Feelings attempts to manifest an experimental negativity, pushing beyond a mimetic economy bound to the targets it seeks to oppose. It may not work as intended, though no more sleep will be lost over it.

Arts Against Cuts (AAC) initially formed within the cloisters of the UCL students’ occupation of the Jeremy Bentham Room and Slade School of Fine Art in November 2010, with the minimal aim of overthrowing the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition Government. Since 2010 it has variously met nightly, weekly, monthly, and intermittently in order to self-organise, protest, and take action, to discuss what to do about our mutually shit situations.

This book is indelibly anchored to and must be regarded as a continuation of such histories.

For readers with any access requirements, please contact artsagainstcuts@gmail.com.

Published by Book Works as part of Common Objectives, guest edited by Nina Power; edited and designed by Louis Hartnoll, Lucy Killoran, Robyn Minogue, and Sophie Carapetian in an edition of 1,000 copies, soft cover, 192pp, 119 x 171 mm.

Common Objectives is a series of quick-fire, rapid-response projects from artist/writer collectives or individual art practices engaged with emerging political struggles, rejecting the idea of culture as a playground for the elite, engaging in the potent mix of free discourse, solidarity and the production of new desires and prepared to break open old worlds, either in the virtual space of communication and networks, or in the concrete world of action, discourse and distribution. Other projects in the series include: After The Night by Everyone Agrees; The Counsel of Spent by Inventory; Even the Dead Rise Up by Francis McKee; Move…ment, a new issue of the journal …ment, edited by Federica Bueti; The Night by Michèle Bernstein, translated by Clodagh Kinsella and edited by Everyone Agrees; Pre-enactments by Victoria Halford and Steve Beard; and Shy Radicals by Hamja Ahsan.