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.
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
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