Richard McGuire | Puzzlehead

Richard McGuire

Puzzlehead

Brooklyn, USA: Areaware, 2014

19 x 17.5 x 2.5 cm. 

Edition size unknown

The artist’s first toy is a woodblock puzzle of minimalist cartoon faces, first produced in 1990 and reissued by Areware in 2014. The reissue is now itself out of print, but can be found on Ebay for between sixty and seventy dollars. The original is very scarce. 

Below are images of the prototype, the original edition, and a preparatory sketch, both from the book Richard McGuire: Then and There, Here and Now, by Vincent Tuset-Anrès and Anette Gehrig. 

"Puzzlehead started as a phone doodle made on graph paper and then I made a prototype. I had the good fortune of meeting Steven Guarnaccia (now the head of Parsons illustration program). He was putting together a book project of 'artists who make toys'. We traded work.

A toy designer named Byron Glaser saw the prototype at Steven's studio and called me up. Within a few months I was in Indonesia working with a team who were manufacturing my product. Byron and his partner Sandra Higashi had altready created Zolo, a hand made wooden construction toy that was distributed by MoMA. in the late 80's. They were looking for other products to keep the team working that they had put together."

- Richard McGuire, speaking with Greg Allen

Richard McGuire | The Orange Book

Richard McGuire

The Orange Book

Mantova, Italy: Edition Corraini, 2001

32 pp., 23 x 23 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Originally published 32 years ago today, The Orange Book was McGuire’s first title for children. It would be followed by Night Becomes Day (1994), What Goes Around Comes Around (1995), and What’s Wrong with This Book? (1997).

The book begins with an image of an orange orchard being harvested, and the sentence “There once was a tree with fourteen oranges”. The book then follows the fate of each individual orange, from tree to plate. One is given to a sick friend, the tenth is eaten by a famous pianist, the seventh is divided among construction workers working atop a skyscraper, the eleventh ended up on the train tracks, etc. etc. 

Inspired by a subway sighting, the story reminds me of my favourite John Cale lyric: “Ten murdered oranges bled on board ship”.  

Reprinted in 2001, the book is still available from the publishers, here, for €16.00.

"The idea came to me when I spotted an orange on the subway tracks and thought, 'Oh that poor orange, what a tragic fate! What happened to all the other oranges?' I thought about it more as a metaphor for the path of life and individual destiny.” 

- Richard McGuire, Then and There Here and Now

Richard McGuire: Then and There, Here and Now

Richard McGuire [Vincent Tuset-Anrès, Anette Gehrig, eds]

Richard McGuire: Then and There, Here and Now

Basel, Switzerland: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2024

144 pp., 22 x 29 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Richard McGuire began his career as a street artist in the burgeoning East Village art scene of the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties. Many artists who would go on to define the era began by taking their work directly to the public: Keith Haring was making chalk drawings on unused subway advertising spaces, Jenny Holzer was flyposting the streets with aphoristic texts, David Wojnarowicz was stencilling images of houses on fire onto the sides of buildings, and Jean-Michel Basquiat was spraying-painting graffiti under the pseudonym SAMO. 

"The art scene at the time consisted mainly of conceptual and performance art, and it didn’t seem as exciting as what was happening in the streets,” McGuire recalls now. 

Diego Cortez included McGuire in the influential MoMA PS1 exhibition New York/New Wave, in February 1981, at the age of 24, alongside Haring, Andy Warhol, Larry Clark, Lydia Lunch, Nan Goldin, Ray Johnson, and Basquiat.1

McGuire’s practice at the time involved guerrilla graffiti stencil drawings of a character named Ixnae Nix, a Pig Latin double-negation. He cites Bill Traylor, Martin Rameriz, Jean Dubuffet, and the early work of Claes Oldenburg as inspirations. 

"There were so many influences, I was attached to whatever packed a punch visually like boxing posters, supermarket signs, sometimes just experiments with type. I have never been overly concerned about creating a “brand”, the idea always dictates my approach and everything is filtered through my own sensibility, he told Print Magazine, in 2018. 

The East Village art scene at the time was a hotbed for cross-pollination between the visual arts and music, with both communities converging at CBGBs. At age 22, the band McGuire co-founded in college, Liquid Liquid2 would play the now legendary nightclub. 

The group would go on to release three highly acclaimed EPs on 99 Records, the last of which included the song “Cavern”, featuring one of the most iconic bass lines of all time, played by McGuire (see earlier post, here), who also designed all of the band’s covers and promotional materials. 

McGuire served as editor and designer of an issue of Martha Wilson's Franklin Furnace Flue (see previous post here) and soon found himself providing illustrations for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Le Monde, McSweeneys, and the New Yorker, where he has designed numerous striking cover graphics. 

He has published children’s books and children’s games, created interactive media, and directed and designed animated works. 

His first comic, Here, began life as a modest 6-page black and white strip in 1989, and twenty-five years later was expanded into a 300-page book. McGuire describes it as “an artist book disguised as a graphic novel about one location over time.” Another ten years later, and the work is being adapted into a feature film, staring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, with a screenplay by Eric Roth directed by Robert Zemeckis, reuniting the foursome behind the smash hit Forrest Gump. It is slated for release a month from today, on November 1st.3 

Set in a single room, the book travels back and forth in time with years spanning 500,957,406,073 BCE to 22,175 CE. It has been translated into 20 languages, and was awarded the Fauve d’or. Portland author Douglas Wolk wrote that its "influence has echoed through art comics for decades.”

The book functions as the starting point for a current exhibition at the Cartoonmuseum Basel: Centre for Narrative Art., and this handsome book of the same name. 

Richard McGuire: Then and There, Here and Now is the first comprehensive retrospective museum exhibition and the first monograph overview of the forty year+ career of the acclaimed artist. 

In her introduction, Anette Gehrig (Director and Curator of the Cartoonmuseum) describes McGuire’s practice as an "inherently round but open circle”. She highlights the intersection of sound and image in his work, from the early days when his street art dovetailed with pasting promotional posters for his post-punk band, to his most recent bookwork Listen, which transcribes the sounds of the Covid19 pandemic into images. 

It’s rich terrain to explore, even if the communities share less overlap than they did during the East Village art scene of the eighties. Generations of music fans obsessed over album cover graphics, which often served as an entry point into the world of visual art. Many of my favourite artists (Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, John Cage, Rodney Graham, Christian Marclay, Martin Creed) exist at the intersection of music and art, or make music the subject of their work (Cary Leibowitz, Candice Breitz, Jeremy Deller, Milan Knizak, Meg Cranston, etc.)4. 

Gehrig also notes that Then and There, Here and Now arose from her visiting the 2021 Sound and Vision exhibition at Studio Fotokino in Marseille, curated by Vincent Tuset-Anrès, the centre’s Artistic Director. Tuset-Anrès is her co-editor here, and provides a thoughtful and detailed overview of McGuire’s life and work, peppered with insights from interviews with the artist.5 

Their texts are printed in both German and English, and the book features over 100 illustrations, most of them in colour. These include album covers, magazine covers, a puzzle and card game (see posts later this week), early sketches, sound drawings, the excellent recent shoe project and the evolution of Here from a six page b&w comic to a graphic novel to an animated film. 

It’s not difficult to understand how the conceptualism of the time left a young McGuire cold and seeking elsewhere, but a conceptual streak runs through most everything he does. As an artist, musician, animator, toy designer, children’s-book writer and illustrator, graphic designer, and a comic artist, each of these different roles informs the other. 

Richard McGuire: Then and There, Here and Now is a long overdue look at how these roles overlap and intersect. It is available from Christoph Merian Verlag, here, for 39.00 EUR/CHF. It is also available from Amazon.com for $53.61 US, here. 

The Cartoonmuseum Basel exhibition concludes its five-month run on November 3rd, two days after the film adaptation of Here opens in cinemas. For more information, visit the museum website, here. 

This post will be accompanied by a dozen more, over seven days, featuring Richard McGuire books, records, multiples, a wristwatch, a calendar, a puzzle, and a card game. 

1. Jean-Michel Basquiat was twenty at the time, and the exhibition is often credited as helping to launch his career. 

2. The band was originally called Liquid Idiot, two random words pulled out of a hat.

3. I saw a trailer for the film at the cinema last week, which was followed by a trailer for another film about deep time. The idea of location and history was also explored earlier this year in Steve McQueen’s excellent Occupied City. The 266 minute film (there’s reportedly a 36 hour long version!) recounts stories about buildings in Amsterdam while under Nazi occupation during World War II, while presenting images of the city in present day. It is based on his partner Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945.

4. One of the first books of theory that I owned was Simon Frith's Art Into Pop, which I bought from a remainder store in my mid-teens. The 1987 title explored the idea that a disproportionate number of important musicians (from John Lennon to David Byrne to Kim Gordon) attended art school. 

5. Vincent Tuset-Anrès has also published several bookworks with McGuire. 

"Today, his work has gained international recognition and is present in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Nonetheless, McGuire continues to explore, experiment, and research, without worrying about the boundaries between genres but, on the contrary, with a desire for fusion, between sound and image in particular. Then and There, Here and Now reveals the diversity and richness of his output, tracing the extraordinary career of an unclassifiable artist."

- Vincent Tuset-Anrès

Richard McGuire | Sequential Drawings

Richard McGuire

Sequential Drawings 

Pantheon Graphic Library, 2016

584 pp., 15.5 x 10.5 x 3.75 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

A spot drawing is an industry term for a standalone illustration designed to complement a publication’s content. The small, caption-less drawings are distinct from cartoons that may appear elsewhere in the issue, and are often used to break up large blocks of text on a page or screen.

The New Yorker is famous for its ongoing commitment to the spot illustration. The first spot drawing appeared on page three of the first issue, almost a hundred years ago. It was a small graphic by Peter Arno1 and became the template for the next eighty years. The little rectangle drawing appeared at the bottom of the middle column on the Talk of the Town page. It was unsigned, and resembled a woodcarving. 

To celebrate the magazine's 80th anniversary issue, the periodical changed its approach.

"The spot drawings are part of the delight of the magazine," editor David Remnick told the New York Times in 2005, "but I thought they needed a little something new. We've been running some of the same windmills, toasters, umbrellas and shoes in six-month rotation for a long time. And so we've let some contemporary artists take a shot at it, and some of the new spots are individuals and some have a recurring theme or joke or tell a kind of story."

Rather than have the spots that dot the pages be drawn by a variety of artists - as the cartoons are - Remnick approached artists to contribute every spot drawing in a single issue. 

"As someone who makes little drawings all day, I've always loved the spot drawings in the New Yorker,” said Tucker Nichols, who contributed spots to the magazine in 2021.2 "I see them as an exhibition of artwork you aren't supposed to notice on display in the most prestigious gallery.”

Remnick contacted Richard McGuire, who was in Paris working on some animation, and asked him to provide an entire issues worth of illustrations, for the inaugural issue of this new approach. "I think it was because I was working on the animated film,” McGuire said, "that made me think of it as a sequence.” 

After contributing cover graphics and illustrations for many years, McGuire became one of the most celebrated contributors of the spot drawings, and possibly the most prolific. 

“[The drawings] exist outside the text and tell a story, like little visual poems, a bit like haikus," McGuire tells Vincent Tuset-Anrès, in the new monograph Then and There Here and Now (see next post). 

Sequential Drawings collects a decade worth of these - from 2005 to 2015 - and presents them a single image to a page, arranged sequentially and given titles for the first time. 

The first series in the book is a homesick homage to the streets of New York, drawn when the artist was still in Paris. Titled "Three Friend"s, it features a tableau of a mailbox, parking meter and trash can, altered over the course of a season. 

In “Scenes from a Table”, items atop a restaurant counter become a family of sorts. A ketchup and muster bottle, salt & pepper shakers are anthropomorphized by their context, not by the addition of facial features, or arms and legs. 

“The Hallway” - not unlike McGuire’s celebrated single-location graphic novel Here - presents a fixed perspective on a space: a hall and three apartment doors. We see notices left under the doors, parcels left outside them, a pizza delivery, a sofa delivery, loud music, a lone balloon floating in the centre of the frame, a fire, and flood. In the final frame, the neighbours happen to be arriving home at the same time, curious about the other whose existence was previously only gleaned through what was seen in the shared space around their homes. 

At almost six hundred pages, the book is like a small brick. “I think my sculptural background makes me think of books as objects,” McGuire said. 

We first saw the title in Mexico, so have a Spanish Edition (the Chinese is below). It didn’t seem to matter as the introduction is fairly short and the rest of the book wordless. 

In a glowing review in the The New York Times James Yeh wrote “McGuire’s singular, virtuoso approach to storytelling is again the star….McGuire has given us another original and pleasurable work, as freewheeling, artful and exuberant as the artist himself.” 

Sequential Drawings is available from Amazon for $15.60, here. 

1. Peter Arno contributed 101 covers to the magazine, from 1925 until his death in 1968. New Yorker contributor Roger Angell described him as "the magazine's first genius".

2. Tucker Nichols produced small line drawings of a everyday objects used as flower vases (a teapot, roller skate, tube television set, measuring cup, spool, bowling ball, etc.)

"Consider the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page. It is small; it does not call attention to itself; it is missed by many insistent readers as they chase the progress of a story across columns and ads. It is kin to the textual space filler at the bottom of a page, but its language is visual, so it is there to make a spark as well as to balance out column inches. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the protean Richard McGuire has been quietly reveling in the form. McGuire, who wrote and drew the ineffable, time-traveling Here (2014) and is also an animator, author and illustrator of children’s books, maker of toys, creator of singularly memorable covers for The New Yorker, and indelible bass player (with Liquid Liquid), looms very large in the comics world while slaloming along a career path that hardly resembles those of any of his colleagues. He is the form’s Duchamp—a conceptualist with formidable skills who is disinclined to keep to any one routine but whose every move would make a lifetime shtick for any lesser being. He sometimes employs the spot sequence as if he had been handed a seven-panel strip in the Daily Bugle with no restrictions except a ban on words, sometimes as if he were putting up Burma-Shave signs along a highway, sometimes as if he were unveiling sample frames from a flip-book animation.”

- Lucy Sante, Inroduction

“Spot drawings are small, and McGuire’s combine the clean lines of comic art, the charm of a good idea, the pleasure of scientific observation, and a hint of story. In each drawing, and in each sequence, there are observations and connections that delight….Why are the drawings so appealing? Because they pay close attention to detail, to the many ways in which humans have invented small, useful things, and because they’re drawn simply and gracefully, with what feels like affection, despite being almost exactly realistic….Removed from the text in which they first appeared, [the spots] allow us to focus on the delicious works of art that they are—subtle, rewarding stories that once complemented other stories….Excellent.” 

—Sarah Larson, The New Yorker