"Hannah Hoch" by Erdrera Vendrell
In this chapter, we juxtapose—mash up and remix—delivery and memory with orientation in the service of productive play. Such play lets us develop and explore a critical consciousness that becomes aware of the orientations that shape memory and subjectivity as well as the potentiality to reorient them, even if through disorientation. As a techne, our call for such dis/orientation emerges from and extends a long line of queer aesthetic practice—from Arthur Rimbaud’s call for a “long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses,” to Dada and lesbian artist Hannah Höch’s early experiments with photomontage and her “wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve” ("Hannah Höch"), to David Wojnarowicz’s photomontages of “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” in which he places the French poet’s head on the bodies of street hustlers.