Richard McGuire | Art for the Street: New York 1978-1982

Richard McGuire

Art for the Street: New York 1978-1982 [Deluxe]

New York City, USA: Alden Projects, 2018

144 pp., 33 x 24 cm., boxed

Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies

A common thread that runs through curator and gallerist Todd Alden's work is the ephemera generated from collaborations between artists and musicians. Alden Projects has presented exhibitions about Ed Ruscha's work with Mason Williams, and Andy Warhol's partnership with the Velvet Underground. When I was at Art Metropole we hosted his touring exhibition Sonic Matters, Sonic Kollaborations, which featured gig flyers, posters, zines, album cover art and other printed materials, highlighting the band's frequent collaborations with visual artists such as Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Gerhard Richter, Dan Graham, Lydia Lunch, Christian Marclay, Rodney Graham, Yoko Ono and Jeff Wall. 

It makes perfect sense, then, that Alden would work with artist and musician Richard McGuire. 

McGuire's diverse output includes graphic novels, children's books, cartoons (and countless cover illustrations) for the New Yorker, comics, sculpture, painting, and music. He was a founding member of the No-Wave/Post-Punk band Liquid Liquid, playing a number of instruments including guitar, percussion and "plastic melodica". He was primarily the group's bassist, and his contribution to the band's song "Cavern" is one of the most iconic bass lines ever recorded. 

Sampled and looped, his bass part formed the crucial backing track to Melle Mel's hiphop classic "White Lines [Don't Don’t Do It]" (which I heard earlier today in a YouTube ad for the film Cocaine Bear). Subsequently, it has been used in songs by the Notorious B.I.G., Art of Noise, Ghostface Killah and about two dozen others. 

Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name, Art for the Street: New York 1978-1982 documents McGuire's street interventions from the end of the seventies to the early eighties, a particularly fertile time in New York for "guerrilla" style street art. 

This was the era of pioneering graffiti work by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat (both of whom were friends with McGuire) and the pasted posters of Jenny Holzer (the subject of an earlier Alden Projects retrospective). 

The book presents promotional posters for Liquid Liquid designed by the McGuire, alongside his personal practice of stencilled graffiti, street collages and drawings, and wheat-pasted works. 

Edited by Alden, with a foreword by Luc Sante (who also wrote the introduction to McGuire's 2016 book Sequential Drawings), the title is the first monograph to focus on the artist’s early work, including black-and-white photographs which McGuire commissioned his friend, Martha Fishkin to take of his street interventions. 

The deluxe hardcover boxed edition is signed and numbered, and includes a fold-out poster as well as two vintage 7” records that McGuire self-published in 1978 and 1980. 

"The exhibition consists of the posters I designed for my band but also of the “street art” I was making at the same time. A few days after I arrived in NYC (moving from NJ in July 1979) I started pasting up original drawings on the street. I was in my early 20’s when I was making these stencil-drawings with spray paint and crayon. They featured an alter ego character named Ixnae Nix. Even though I was creating these drawings and the band posters at the same time and often pasting these up on the same night stylistically the two things were very different.

The band posters were usually printed in editions of a hundred or so. I usually wheat pasted them up in the neighborhoods I frequented: the East Village, SoHo, Tribeca. Thats where all the clubs and galleries were. I had a system for making the stencil-drawings, they were always in an edition of two, one for the street, and one for me to keep for my archives. Thank God I had the foresight to have them photographed in the street the following day after a night of pasting them up. They would soon be covered up by other posters in the course of the next 24 to 48 hours. The gallery produced a portfolio of these photos taken in ’79. It’s great to see them hanging next to the drawings I saved."

- Richard McGuire