Richard McGuire
Listen
Marseilles, France: Fotokino, 2021
32 pp., 21 x 15 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown
This risograph booklet was published to accompany the exhibition Sound and Vision at Studio Fotokino, in Marseilles, which ran from December 4th, 2021 to January 30th, 2022. The exhibition featured projects from across the artist’s long career, from the early street works of Ixnae Nix and Liquid Liquid posters, to The New Yorker covers, to the Popeye and Olive Oil paintings. It also included a display of McGuire’s editioned works.
The small exhibition became the impetus for the larger career retrospective this year at Cartoonmuseum Basel − Centre for Narrative Art, and the book of the same name Richard McGuire: Then And There Here And Now, which is co-edited by Anette Gehrig of Cartoonmuseum and Vincent Tuset-Anrès, the artistic director of Fotokino.
Listen is available at Printed Matter, here, for $17.00 US.
"Listen is a sound book, a graphic score transcribing everyday sounds on 32 pages: a dog barking, the radio, a car door slamming… a few sounds among those that punctuate our daily life. During the first lockdown, Richard McGuire moved from downtown New York to Beacon, a small, quiet town in upstate New York, surrounded by nature. “There are 11 windows in my house, which allows me to capture the sounds coming from all sides. What you hear in Listen comes from there. Having lived in the city for so long, you become hypersensitive to all the sounds of the countryside, it’s like they’re amplified. That’s the starting point for this book, but there’s also the idea of graphically codifying sounds, which is a subject that has always interested me.”"
- Publisher’s blurb
"McGuire’s attention to our most immediate environment is echoed in Listen, published by Fotokino on the occasion of his Sound & Vision exhibition in Marseille, in 2021. In this book, he puts his ear to the ground and stages a narrative made of sound. "There are 11 windows in my house, which allows me to capture the sounds coming from all sides," McGuire explains of his home in New York’s Hudson Valley, north of New York City, where he moved in 2020 during the Covid lockdown. “ That’s where Listen comes from. Having lived in the city for so long, you become hypersensitive to all the sounds of the countryside; it’s as if they’ve been amplified. That’s the starting point for this book, but there’s also the idea of graphically codifying sounds, a subject that has always interested me."
- Vincent Tuset-Anrès, Richard McGuire: Then And There Here And Now
