Taking up the work of the online and on-the-ground artist collective Think Again–a collective that extends the work of HIV/AIDS graphic artists into multiple issues and venues–I want to consider a question facing those of us concerned with political art, both those who make it and those who critique it: by what means are political artists addressing the present historical formation of cultural, economic, and political tendencies? More specifically, how does graphic and digital political art command or develop the capacity for attention and critique, reroute control exerted by dominant media cultures, intervene in political practices associated with the globalization of capitalism, such as neoliberalism and structural adjustment, as well as the intensification of militarism and (bio)terrorism? I want to suggest that political artists such as Think Again are working in a tension between a politics of representation concerned with identity, signification, desire, and ideology critique and a politics of affect, which emphasizes the capacity to affect bodies directly in their capacity to mutate, shift focus, attend and display interest, follow flows, and coalesce in assemblages. I want further to underscore and to understand the extent to which the work of Think Again inherits the legacy of HIV/AIDS political graphics of which it is simultaneously critical. In the transformation of that legacy, I read a response to the present in which “queer” contributes anew to social criticism.
