How to do things with pictures in the museum Photography, montage and political space

J.L. Austin’s How to do Things with Words explores everyday speech as dynamic and transformative communication. Through close readings of selected artworks, I propose how Austin’s concept of performative speech can be expanded as a “toolbox” for thinking about political art generally, and the uses of montage as a rhetorical strategy in particular. Photomontages by John Heartfield are revisited, and the combative is proposed as a speech act mode that seeks to negate the status quo. The collage work of Hannah Höch and Martha Rosler is examined through the integrative, proposed as a social imaginary that insists on inclusivity and a reappraisal of gender boundaries. The operation of the contemplative in museum spaces is the focus of the examination of Hans Haacke’s Voici Alcan. The projections of Krzysztof Wodiczko are presented as instances of the interpellative, drawing citizens to the public arena to confront repressed elements of the past and to (re)mediate the present. Through constructed mise-en-scène tableaux featuring oral history, actors, sets and props, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge animate the declarative, inscribing subjecthood into public discourse for political outsiders. Gilbert and George’s monumental Dirty Words assemblages form a spatial and ideological occupation contesting a disturbing national rhetoric through the politics of citation, a speech act mode proposed as the imperative. Through these examples, my study proposes ways in which the performativity of art is a transformational conduit to awaken ethical responsibility, to participate as a collective community, to make space for, and to enjoin in refusal of injustice.