Uncapture This Image

Abstract

“Uncapture This Image,” drawing on Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the event, argues that postmodern dismissals of the efficacy of the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde , miss how adversarial art, of which Dada is the prototype, devises strategies that slice, at any given moment, through the doxa in the historical chain of its articulation, cutting the signifying loops of colonialist representation and commodity exchange. The photomontages of the Hannah Höch in the early twentieth century, and the montages of David Wojnarowicz in the late, present images of non-normative sexuality, gender, ethnic otherness, and desire that unravel the reifications of (post)colonial capitalism. The essay examines Höch’s photomontages, the 1929 Fremde Schönheit [ Strange Beauty ], the 1930 Indische Tänzerin [ Indian Dancer ], and the 1931 Liebe [ Love ], alongside a photograph from Wojnarowicz’s 1979 series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York ; the 1983 montage, Untitled [Sirloin Steaks]; the 1984 montage, A Painting to Replace the British Monument in Buenos Aires ; the 1986-87 film, A Fire in My Belly ; and the 1991 narrative, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration . Contrary to the received narrative, this essay elaborates a century-long convergence of queer and anti-colonialist art. A “queer” avant-gardism contests the prefabricated identity categories and ideals of appearance on which the captivation of desire in consumer culture depends. Höch and Wojnarowicz show that now will always have been the time to break out of the capitalist ever-same.