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Kristi Ann McGuire

Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

Kristi McGuire, Adjunct Associate Professor, Visual and Critical Studies (2011). BA, Writing and Literature, 2002, University of Michigan; MA, Humanities, 2006, University of Chicago; MA/MFA, SAIC, 2010. Books: Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline (Routledge, 2012). Editorial Collaborations: Graham Foundation, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, DOMINICA, Sternberg Press, Soberscove Press, Semiotext(e), Artists’ Platform and Projects, Publication Studio. Publications: The Believer, Chicago Review, Chicago School of Media Theory, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, htmlgiant, Daily Serving. Blogs: False Flags. Residencies: Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange, Headlands Center for the Arts, ACRE. Awards: Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2017); Cranbrook Academy of Art Critical Studies Fellowship (2016–17).

Personal Statement

I often feel that my own practice eschews the bureaucracy of form for something like the laboring body as readymade conduit vis-à-vis the art world’s complicity with neoliberal late capitalism. My mediums are the immaterial discourses surrounding the performance of criticality and the production of the material subject in the capitalist imaginary. It’s there I’ve striven to produce meaning in spaces others might construe as non-discursive or otherwise attempt to institutionally make over in the image of the market. My “work” then circumvents and troubles the process of knowledge production in academic spaces, often through a performance of critique as an embodied artistic discourse. Here, and elsewhere, I challenge the rhetorical underpinnings that bolster our constitution as subjects in the spaces of capital; my tendency is not merely to document this or make another object about or around it, which seems a variation of legitimizing its presence—instead I continue to assert, a la Bartleby, that the illegibility of my own practice not only constitutes, but helps point to the aporia of “practice” itself.

My own experience of the world is very much cantilevered by expectation and contradiction, colored by the complexities of any current or ongoing fascination, shifting performance methodologies, and an attraction to the materialist history behind our mediations of contemporaneity. I get so very excited about things.

Experience at SAIC

SAIC is a wild place. The tightly associative, post-studio, and transdisciplinary nature of my courses emphasize the performative space of the seminar room at SAIC, where the immaterial boundaries between "research" and "production” are nixed to better acclimate students to a hybrid and embodied critical practice, i.e., thought as insoluble from action, and theorizing as indispensably bound to making. Someone wiser than me once said that the scenes from my courses are not those of knowledge being passed out, but political and ethical relations being rehearsed.

In pursuit of this, I ask my students to bring with them demanding intelligences that thrive on the marrow of experimentation; authentic enthusiasm that demands recognition for the immaterial and emotional labors surrounding the performance of any text; a commitment to pedagogical and student activism in its many guises, including those exhaustively devoted to dismantling pre-existing systems, hierarchies, and privileges; and an insistence upon drawing connections between seemingly disparate subjects and ideas, across platforms, media, and disciplines. This is how we think in public, I guess.

At SAIC, I’m attuned to the pressures placed on contingent categories of identity, and frequently advocate for the formal inclusion of marginalized voices, aesthetics, and techniques to expand the capacity of what—and how—a “text” can be. My research interests—thus my conversations in the classroom, or my performance of learning—ask urgent questions about contemporary social and political life, especially how, informed by the perversions of neoliberal capitalism and disseminated by both new and remediated technologies, we determine and organize ourselves into new classes of viewers (yet old subjects of history).

Publications

Things I Have Tweeted from the Official University of Chicago Press Twitter Account, 2013–15 [PDF]

Reading the Internet with Joan Jonas, 2012 [PDF]

Roman Numeral C, 2012 [PDF]

Imaginary Twin: The Reparative Narrative of Mark Lombardi, 2012–13 [PDF]

Revising the Pharmacist, 2010 [PDF]

Current Interests

My recent courses have included those centered on bureaucracy’s anarchic relationship with performance, stupidity, and structural violence; the political economy of emoji and the institutionalization of object-oriented ontology; the poetics simulated by the collusion of global technocratic capital, the IoT, and new media theology; the role of conspiracy theory and meta-narratives in historical grief work; the art world’s remediated fetish of the 1990s and neoliberalism’s sensuous embrace of “the aughts” as an everything-or-nothing hyperobject; the commodification of queer forms by critical theory; and how we “faked” the internet as to save ourselves (from libertarian game theory). Upcoming research platforms deal with the shared mythic origins and historical framing of automation, the synthesizer, and the role of the “alien” in the construction of digital identity, as well as a history of the kill switch told through privacy’s core sociological dichotomy—as neoliberal bourgeois virtue and last-battered defense against the data-mining economy.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course plunges students into content and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school, as we consider the role played by the 'critical' in 'visual and critical studies.' For the past ten years, it has been referred to as 'a primer for the art world.' It will still, mostly, provide you with a working vocabulary and crash course as to bodies of knowledge integral to the study of visual culture. At the same time, to productively engage in a reflective critique of society and culture, it will consider 'texts' from as diverse and contemporaneous a group of scholars, theorists, critics, and cultural producers as possible, from both inside and outside the academic institution.

Class Number

2208

Credits

3

Description

This course plunges students into content and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school, as we consider the role played by the 'critical' in 'visual and critical studies.' For the past ten years, it has been referred to as 'a primer for the art world.' It will still, mostly, provide you with a working vocabulary and crash course as to bodies of knowledge integral to the study of visual culture. At the same time, to productively engage in a reflective critique of society and culture, it will consider 'texts' from as diverse and contemporaneous a group of scholars, theorists, critics, and cultural producers as possible, from both inside and outside the academic institution.

Class Number

2207

Credits

3

Description

This three hour seminar is a professional practice class which examines what it means to have a productive, critical practice. Students not only refine their own identity as generative artist-scholar-citizen but also learn to represent that practice professionally with CVs, portfolios, project proposals, artist statements, and scholarly abstracts. Students also work collaboratively on exhibition projects to experience how different creative roles such as artists, curators, writers, and venue directors interact in the art world.

Class Number

1849

Credits

3

Description

In 1976, as noted by a recent Viewpoint Magazine piece, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, a former sessions player for Frank Zappa, whose landmark West Coast funk compositions effortlessly fused his auto-theoretical 'gangster of love' persona with post-soul, pre-discotheque blues guitar, released the eponymous single from his album Ain't That A Bitch the same year Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And I quote: Everything is outta pocket! / Somebody do something! / The present situation is abstract! In 2015, James Franco committed to film the character 'Alien,' purportedly based on real-life Houston-based rapper Riff Raff (who has a giant tattoo on his chest of Bart Simpson holding a beaker that reads,'The Freestyle Scientist'). Right around the time of Friedman's victory speech (titled 'Inflation and Unemployment,' and dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel), Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton, the 'cool ghoul with the funk transplant') and his Holy Mothership began to hover around a new consumer class of Thumpasorus peoples, just as Parliament-Funkadelic's cosmological dispersion mirrored another kind of outsourcing?paraphrasing here, but why not put the jobs someplace they've never been perceived to be, like a spaceship. Funk, then the history of automation, then aliens. The shared history isn't some mute-poetic post-automatic ontological flirtation: it's embedded in Kurt Vonnegut's first novel Player Piano, and intertwined with the anomie registered by the twentieth century's increasing alienation of assembly line workers and e-commerce representatives. In 1963, Detroit autoworker and Marxist activist James Boggs wrote The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, about his experiences on the Chrysler assembly line, where he presupposed a new generation of the working class made obsolete by advances in heavy labor automation, left without a body to sell or their own labor-power to broker the deal. How did blip blip Marx's Labor Theory of Value 010101 Space is the Place Where I Go All Alone take us through deregulated technocratic neoliberalism and to the other side: via the simulated proprietary satellite mapping that Curtis Mayfield may or may not have fever-dreamed in 'Diamonds in the Back'? We know that it knows the Waze to your Uber Pool's rendezvous with the Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership (T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.). 'Abdul Jabar couldn't have made these prices/with a sky hook.' Long story short: funk emerged in the waning days of Fordism's hold on the American economy, before drums largely lived in machines and workers were brokered out of politics. Funk parallels Jimmy Hoffa, Wattstax, the death of Henry Ford's crony Harry Bennett, the arguments of Jefferson Cowrie's Last Days of the Working Class, Dock Ellis throwing a perfect game on LSD, the goddamned Deer Hunter, stagflation, the threat of nuclear annihilation and concerts mounted against such, pro-labor PACs, Betty Davis's 'Politician Man,' two energy crises, the Business Roundtable Lobby, Bootsy Collins dropping acid and flipping over the handlebars of his road bike in the middle of the woods triggering an out of body experience, and good ol' monetarist theory. P-Funk's Mothership is now in the Smithsonian Museum. 'Strike on Computers!,' as Watson suggested. I once climbed through a window of the abandoned Studebaker-Packard Plant one Detroit afternoon in 1996 and cut my foot on a shard of glass perhaps manufactured in the form of a Pepsi bottle at the Mack Avenue warehouse two blocks away or two decades before. I bled for a while through an anklet, but then we listened to the Fugees cover Roberta Flack's 'Killing Me Softly' on someone's CD of The Score (playback technology developed by the Advent Corporation) the rest of the ride home.

Class Number

1771

Credits

3

Description

Conspiracy Theory and Other Metanarratives

The term 'conspiracy theory' has long been used to indicate a narrative genre that includes a broad selection of arguments for the existence of systemic furtive acts. Cautiously construing a space between the unwarranted and the unidentifiable, conspiracy works to situate grand narratives at the core of distinctions between the individual and the institution, public and private life, and visible and invisible architectures. At the same time, the events that sustain conspiratorial knowing are often articulated as the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public, actively questioning how concerns with collective memory, loss, and paranoia fuel both the desire for transparency and our projective urge to insert ourselves into our uncomfortable past and unknown future. From Wikileaks, the Cold War, and the Kennedy Assassination, nostalgia-driven television programs (Quantum Leap, You Are There), astrology, and the history of editorial redactions to the work of writers and artists such as Mark Lombardi, Pierre Huyghe, Dziga Vertov, Spaulding Gray, and Don Delillo, we'll examine how the sense of a 'master plot' shapes the way we narrate social and cultural experiences. What role do these narratives play in our struggle to assign meaning to events and artworks that are otherwise inexplicable? And how does our fascination with conspiracy--and its often melancholic and performative relationship to loss--address the potential of 'putting right what once went wrong'?

Class Number

2212

Credits

3

Description

This course is a continuation of Undergraduate Thesis: Research and Writing. Students continue to work on the drafts developed during the first semester and meet at times as a group and at times individually with the instructor. By the end of the semester, each student has a 20?0 paged superbly written paper, which will most likely (although it is not required) has visual content. Students also are encouraged to develop their essays for the publication Research Writing and Culture, which is released annually by the Liberal Arts Department, the Visual and Critical Studies Program, and the Office of Publications and Graphic Design Services. Students who elect to participate in the publication learn the final stages of publishing; checking sources, seeking copyright permissions, and developing the images for publication. Class meetings are used to discuss readings, share research methods and techniques, discuss research and writing problems and ideas for critique. Guest speakers and group visits to university libraries, bookstores, and writers' readings are also part of the class. Students are required to attend all meetings.

Class Number

1501

Credits

3

Description

This course is a continuation of Undergraduate Thesis: Research and Writing I. Students will continue to work on the drafts developed during the first semester and will meet at times as a group and at times individually with the instructor or teaching assistant. By the end of the semester, each student will have a 25-35 page superbly written thesis (maximum 45 pages), which will most likely (although it is not required) have visual content. Students will also present their thesis projects in the VCS Undergraduate Thesis Symposium at the end of the semester. Class meetings are used to discuss readings, workshop writing, share research methods and techniques, and discuss research and writing problems. Guest speakers and group visits to libraries may also be part of the class. Students are required to attend all meetings, participate actively in class discussions and workshops, present work in the symposium, and complete a polished thesis by the end of the semester.

Class Number

1770

Credits

3

Description

This course offers several graduate-level trajectories through visual studies, each with its own historical precedent, some drawn from neighboring disciplines and some manufactured sui generis, but all sharing one common concern: how power manifests and what it might mean to bear witness. Each week begins with a canonical text and extends its lineage to contemporary thinkers invested in how a schematic of power concretizes through the shifting context of our current moment. Contained here are multiple histories of ways of seeing, state surveillance and policing, biopower and state sovereignty, queer embodiments and the representation of gendered and raced bodies, time and its illusions, visual networks and otherwise occluded spaces of technology, and the spectacle of capitalism. The final half of the term will be devoted to your own work, in the form of shared research, lecture-conversations, and seminar papers. [This is a required course for first-year students in the MA in VCS program.]

Class Number

1028

Credits

3

Description

In 1976, as noted by a recent Viewpoint Magazine piece, Johnny ?Guitar? Watson, a former sessions player for Frank Zappa, whose landmark West Coast funk compositions effortlessly fused his auto-theoretical ?gangster of love? persona with post-soul, pre-discotheque blues guitar, released the eponymous single from his album Ain?t That A Bitch?the same year Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And I quote: ?Everything is outta pocket! / Somebody do something! / The present situation is abstract!? In 2015, James Franco committed to film the character ?Alien,? purportedly based on real-life Houston-based rapper Riff Raff (who has a giant tattoo on his chest of Bart Simpson holding a beaker that reads,?The Freestyle Scientist?). Right around the time of Friedman?s victory speech (titled ?Inflation and Unemployment,? and dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel), Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton, the ?cool ghoul with the funk transplant') and his Holy Mothership began to hover around a new consumer class of Thumpasorus peoples, just as Parliament-Funkadelic?s cosmological dispersion mirrored another kind of outsourcing?paraphrasing here, but why not put the jobs someplace they?ve never been perceived to be, like a spaceship. Funk, then the history of automation, then aliens. The shared history isn?t some mute-poetic post-automatic ontological flirtation: it?s embedded in Kurt Vonnegut?s first novel Player Piano, and intertwined with the anomie registered by the twentieth century?s increasing alienation of assembly line workers and e-commerce representatives. In 1963, Detroit autoworker and Marxist activist James Boggs wrote The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker?s Notebook, about his experiences on the Chrysler assembly line, where he presupposed a new generation of the working class made obsolete by advances in heavy labor automation, left without a body to sell or their own labor-power to broker the deal. How did blip blip Marx?s Labor Theory of Value 010101 Space is the Place Where I Go All Alone take us through deregulated technocratic neoliberalism and to the other side: via the simulated proprietary satellite mapping that Curtis Mayfield may or may not have fever-dreamed in ?Diamonds in the Back?? We know that it knows the Waze to your Uber Pool?s rendezvous with the Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership (T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.)? ?Abdul Jabar couldn?t have made these prices/with a sky hook.? Long story short: funk emerged in the waning days of Fordism?s hold on the American economy, before drums largely lived in machines and workers were brokered out of politics. Funk parallels Jimmy Hoffa, Wattstax, the death of Henry Ford?s crony Harry Bennett, the arguments of Jefferson Cowrie?s Last Days of the Working Class, Dock Ellis throwing a perfect game on LSD, the goddamned Deer Hunter, stagflation, the threat of nuclear annihilation and concerts mounted against such, pro-labor PACs, Betty Davis?s ?Politician Man,? two energy crises, the Business Roundtable Lobby, Bootsy Collins dropping acid and flipping over the handlebars of his road bike in the middle of the woods triggering an out of body experience, and good ol? monetarist theory. P-Funk?s Mothership is now in the Smithsonian Museum. ?Strike on Computers!,? as Watson suggested. I once climbed through a window of the abandoned Studebaker-Packard Plant one Detroit afternoon in 1996 and cut my foot on a shard of glass perhaps manufactured in the form of a Pepsi bottle at the Mack Avenue warehouse two blocks away or two decades before. I bled for a while through an anklet, but then we listened to the Fugees cover Roberta Flack?s ?Killing Me Softly? on someone?s CD of The Score (playback technology developed by the Advent Corporation) the rest of the ride home.

Class Number

2029

Credits

3

Description

Buzzfeeds is a course in experimental cultural production, open to MFA/MA graduate students and upper-level undergraduates with an interest in the poetics of speculation (futures, speculative fictions, simulated histories), the politics of contemporaneity, and the possibilities of post-internet aesthetics and interventions. It combines group speculations, individual performance lectures, research-based poetics slideshows, and readings that range from Tung-Hui Hu¿s Prehistory of the Cloud, Legacy Russell¿s Glitch Feminism, and Aimee Bahng¿s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, to sci-fi shorts, McKinsey Consulting white papers, the films of Adam Curtis, 19th-century art historical analysis of the intertwined rise of morgues and history paintings (both genres of ending and becoming), and engages the work of Hito Steyerl, JJJJJerome Ellis, Debit, Diane Nguyen, Bernadette Corporation, Philip K. Dick, David Graeber, and others. If you find yourself ¿ or your studio or critical practices ¿ interested in theory as a medium of performance and what it means to think (together) in public, or if you see the seminar room as a space to get weird and rehearse one¿s political and social relations with the world, this might be a good course for you. We measure our days in death and social media metrics and watch the very first episode of Days of Our Lives. We are Danny Brown and Murphy Brown and Dan Brown and Barbara Browning and Brown University¿s Department of Media and Mass Culture and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown¿s undoing and the unincorporated community of Brown, Oklahoma; we are also the reason why ¿disambiguation¿ appears in print twice as often as ¿solidarity¿ (Google NGram already owns your rhetorical frequencies). Never forget: The Sopranos started with a single psychotherapy session, and the world ends not with a bang, but a laser printer.

Class Number

1033

Credits

3

Description

What if I told you that trendcasting was all we had left? What if, like Adam Curtis in his most recent documentary Hypernormalisation, I whispered to you that we had been sold a fake world so glossy that the very real bait-and-switch democratic entanglements that sold politics and principles for the corporate bank bailouts and B-movie Good vs. Evil narratives necessary to produce it seemed more the provenance of speculative science-fiction. This course considers the order of the simulated (the stuff of Baudrillard, but be honest: any modernist fable of progress will do) as a system of poetics, a sort of new media infrastructure meets lo-fi aesthetic inquiry, and all the impossibly perverse combinations in between. It looks to filmmakers like Curtis, who in works like the aforementioned Hypernormalisation and Bitter Lake, mines an archive of BBC footage lost someplace in the chasm between the techno-developments of VHS tapes and streaming UK proxy iPlayers, to dredge up a maximalist narrative of finance capital at the end of the world that resembles the PowerPoint that ate your YouTube playlist. It wonders about the shark that bit into the fiber optic telecommunications cable artist Trevor Paglen (see also: cinematographer for the Laura Poitras Snowden doc Citizenfour) took scuba lessons to document off the coast of Guam (and later it wonders about the Richard Branson-esque, $500 private tours Paglen offers of this 'artwork'). That's sort of poetic, right? It builds off the course 'How to Fake the Internet' and further pushes the algorithmic order of our inquiries into the crevices of the conceptual equivalent of Buzzfeed listicles, as we contribute to a dialectic of progress/regress and our language turns into solipsistic Bitmoji hieroglyphs and the myth of a Dana Ward poem. What do we read? We read Aristotle and Schopenhauer, Rhizome and e-flux and all that bad `80s theory that introduced 'the virtual' and 'the cyber' and 'the simulacra.' We read Samuel R. Delaney and NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney and the history of internet aesthetics and AOL brand management. We read POEMS (p-o-e-m-s). We watch Rachel Rose vids. We read interviews with casual ornithologists turned darling novelists and early labor relation theorists turned polymaths turned government informants. We measure our days in social media metrics and watch the very first episode of Days of Our Lives. We are Danny Brown and Murphy Brown and Dan Brown and Barbara Browning and Brown University's Department of Media and Mass Culture and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's undoing and the unincorporated community of Brown, Oklahoma; we are also the reason why 'disambiguation' is more widely circulated as a Google Ngram than 'solidarity.' Don't forget that The Sopranos started with a single psychotherapy session.

Class Number

1763

Credits

3

Description

This independent study course is a continuation of Thesis I and is taken with the student's primary thesis advisor to facilitate completion of the thesis. Research and approval (by the advisor and the rest of the student's committee) of the thesis topic and approach should have been completed during Thesis I. Students work closely with a thesis advisor during this semester in addition to scheduling meetings with other faculty on his or her committee whose input may prove useful in their research. This course covers the final completion and submission of the master's thesis. It is required for the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies.

Class Number

2449

Credits

3

Description

This independent study course is a continuation of Thesis I and is taken with the student's primary thesis advisor to facilitate completion of the thesis. Research and approval (by the advisor and the rest of the student's committee) of the thesis topic and approach should have been completed during Thesis I. Students work closely with a thesis advisor during this semester in addition to scheduling meetings with other faculty on his or her committee whose input may prove useful in their research. This course covers the final completion and submission of the master's thesis. It is required for the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies.

Class Number

2452

Credits

3