Opening: Thursday, Sept. 27, 6-8 pm
-- SHOW EXTENDED THROUGH NOVEMBER 18 --
*please note new gallery hours*
*Friday-Sunday, 12-6pm*
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Richard McGuire. Incident Instantly Becomes Memory (Ixnae Nix #1). 1979.
Spray paint and crayon on newsprint, 24 x 18 in. © Richard McGuire. Courtesy Alden Projects, New York.
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Richard McGuire: Art for the Street – New York
1978-1982 is a revelatory exhibition focusing on two strains of protean
artist Richard McGuire’s early work: the Ixnae Nix street drawings and his
original art created for band posters, including Liquid Liquid, the influential
downtown post-punk band for which he played bass and co-founded. The exhibition
opens September 27, 2018 from 6 - 8 pm at Alden Projects and contains 50+
original works in spray-paint, crayon, collage, and silkscreen (through
November 4, 2018). A newly released 144-page book published by Alden Projects, Richard McGuire: Art
for the Street – New York 1978-1982 (2018) accompanies the exhibition.
Edited by Todd Alden with a foreword by Luc Sante, this is the first monograph
on the artist’s early work, including black-and-white photographs (1979) which
McGuire commissioned his friend, Martha Fishkin to take alongside McGuire after
periodic nights of wheatpasting, registering the (formerly) gritty downtown New
York contexts the Ixnae Nix works occupied, including St. Marks Place, Houston
Street, and White Street. Organized by Todd Alden in collaboration with Richard
McGuire, the exhibition also includes archival materials indexing both the
early downtown New York contexts, and the artists associated with McGuire:
Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Al Diaz, ESG, Bush Tetras, Konk, Alan
Suicide, Y Pants, UT, Tseng Kwong Chi, John Sex, Test Pattern, and Samo Is Dead
Jazz Band.
Richard McGuire arrived in New York on July 3,
1979, and that same year, befriended a young Keith Haring, who quickly became
an early promoter of McGuire’s Ixnae Nix street works. Haring subsequently
included McGuire in several exhibitions he curated at Club 57 (1980), Mudd Club
(1981), and Danceteria. (McGuire’s 5 x 7’ Ixnae Nix drawing for Haring’s 1980
show at Club 57, Sudden Anatomy [1980]
is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.) The
artist also befriended Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979, whose band––later called
Gray––shared early stage bills with McGuire’s at a Broome Street loft space
called A’s (both shows 1979); Basquiat’s band was then billed as Test Pattern
and Samo Is Dead Jazz Band. Basquiat loved the music of Liquid Liquid,
according to Maripol, particularly the song “Cavern,” which was included in two
key scenes of the film, Downtown 81 (released
in 2000).
McGuire created the recurring Ixnae Nix avatar
by applying spray-paint through a hand-made stencil, itself ripped from a
newspaper sheet and surrounding this black, spectral silhouette with
elliptical, hand-drawn poetics in crayon and all caps on different-sized
newspaper sheets; ultimately, they were wheatpasted on the streets of lower
Manhattan between July 1979 and early 1981. The prankster-like character’s name
derives from the word “ixnae”––Pig Latin for “nix”––rendering his full full
name a double negative; like the tag “Liquid Liquid,” it also doubles as a
tautology. “…The Ixnae Nix drawings” [were], as Luc Sante writes, “posters that
advertised nothing but themselves. They followed a formula: newsprint sheets of
variable sizes that include a rectangle within, usually aslant…inside is a
silhouetted figure, generally in motion, surrounded by a brief text that, like
Latin inscriptions, is unpunctuated and paced without regard for the beginnings
and ends of words, so that reading it requires a bit of decoding (although most
of the phrases begin at lower left and run clockwise). Taken together, the
Ixnae Nix drawings might represent something like a subjective diary, one that
the passerby can identify with.”[1]
“A shadow is a strong and simple graphic,”
McGuire explains. “The titles evolved from a Burroughs-esque cut-up method —
just grabbing selected phrases that caught my ear. I would make lists. Later, I
made a stencil. I would see what worked best with that image as a ‘sound
picture’.”[2] Incorporating
cryptic phrases such as “Moved Then Set on Fire” (1979); “Holes and Corners”
(1980); “Doubles are Inevitable” (1980); and “Different Nervous Rhythms (1981);
McGuire’s Ixnae Nix drawings transmogrify the layout and content of quotidian
newspapers into personalized tabloids in which the central silhouette appears
with “a crypto-mystical graphic style, a great touch,” to borrow Glenn
O’Brien’s 1981 praise in Interview magazine.[3] The
stream-of-consciousness poetics of McGuire’s Ixnae Nix drawings share explicit
aesthetic dialogue with Basquiat and his early poetics, but later, these
conversations arguably go both ways. McGuire’s Incident Instantly
Becomes Memory [1979], to name one, shared a pivotal stage with
Basquiat, Haring, and others at the New York / New Wave show,
curated by Diego Cortez at P.S. 1, Queens in 1981, and clearly anticipates some
of Basquiat’s later pictorial developments. The Ixnae Nix drawings also
confabulate with Keith Haring’s early street-based work, particularly with the
latter’s Xeroxed collages of cut-up newspaper headlines, which he began in
1980. McGuire stopped his wheatpasting activities in early 1981—around the same
time that Haring first began making chalk drawings in the subway.
To be clear, McGuire had seen Basquiat (and Al
Diaz’s) SAMO graffiti on the streets in 1978-79 before they ever met, and
decided to make the street his canvas. “The SAMO graffiti was different from
the work I saw on the subway,” McGuire remembers. “Instead of just a tag, it
had something to say; it was usually funny, occasionally a bit poetic. I saw
the SAMO graffiti as street poetry. It inspired me. I appreciated the word play
and the “sound” in Jean-Michel’s work.”[4] As Luc
Sante writes, “The Ixnae Nix drawings were, in other words, a kind of graffiti,
at a time when graffiti, city-wide, was evolving from simple tags to complex
statements. You could also make a case for how their evocation of the
petroglyphs parallels the music McGuire’s band was making: polyrhythmic
percussion and indecipherable chants. Both of them forego Western culture in
favor of something more ancient and physical and unmediated and wild.”[5]
Tallying the accomplishments from his first
three months in New York in his private journal on September 17, 1979, McGuire
noted that he had already: wheatpasted 48 Ixnae Nix drawings in four separate
batches; taken 80 street photographs of Ixnae Nix drawings; played a show with
his band, Liquid Idiot at CBGB; recorded a second acetate (never released); and
distributed his first self-published, 45 rpm record, the eponymous Liquid Idiot (1978)
at the artist’s book store, Printed Matter (edition of 300).
The second focus of this exhibition is Richard
McGuire’s band posters. Around 30 original collages and maquettes for band
publicity at Alden Projects were executed in a variety of techniques, mostly
collage, ink, and Letraset, but sometimes with airbrush and silkscreen.[6] In
contrast to the sometimes sloppy, DIY, “post-punk” approach so many other
artists deployed, McGuire’s band posters stand apart: first, they don’t eschew
professional techniques. Second, each is specific to its own task. Many are
steeped in history, evoking a myriad of references and different pictorial
approaches, ranging from the typographic and geometric emphasis of the
Productivism of Russian Constructivists to the collapsed spaces of Japanese
artist-designer Tadanori Yokoo. Luc Sante writes, “McGuire’s fliers were
noticeably more stylish than the bulk of the competition. You could tell that
he had spent a lot of time looking at El Lissitzky’s and László Moholy-Nagy’s
collages of the 1920s and had absorbed their geometry, their shifting
perspectives, their use of negative space. He never sought historical irony for
its own sake, but employed the past as a given, an available raw material, an
element of the landscape.”[7]
One highlight in Alden Projects’ show is a 34
x 22” silkscreened poster for Liquid Liquid’s September 17, 1981 show at tiny Tribeca
club on North Moore named the Cavern, which later became the namesake for the
song, “Cavern” so titled because it debuted at this specific show. “We are
mostly known in DJ culture for our song ‘Cavern,’ which was ‘appropriated’ by
Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel for their recording ‘White Lines (Don’t Do It)’
[1983],” McGuire recalls. “It’s now a hip-hop classic. When it was first
released on the Sugar Hill label, the song was attributed to Grandmaster Flash,
but that soon changed to Melle Mel, who was also part of the Furious Five and
did the rapping. The song relies heavily on my bass line. Since then, many
others have used this hook with a range of legitimacy.”[8] Before
Liquid Liquid could claim royalties, the Sugar Hill label claimed bankruptcy.
McGuire’s 1981 poster for the Cavern announcing the only show Liquid Liquid
ever played at the Cavern “is pure Pop and echt-post punk––the price is the
dominant item.”[9] The
example at Alden Projects is one of five extant examples.
Another highlight with another surprising back
story is McGuire’s boxing style poster (17 x 22”) for the August 9, 1981 double
bill for the “Konk vs. Liquid Liquid” show at Tompkins Square Park, announced
in black and red silkscreened titles on yellow paper. Richard McGuire explains:
“I remember visiting a boxing center on East 14th Street called the Gramercy
Gym. It was like something out of the 1940s. I went there to study the posters
on the walls and take design cues. The idea, of course, was to have one member
from each band [e.g. Konk and Liquid Liquid] pose, with each person invited to
come up with a catchy stage name and costume…The show was in Tompkins Square
Park in the East Village, with an audience of well over five hundred people. A Village Voice reviewer
wrote that ‘the hottest thing next to the weather was Liquid Liquid.’ So I
guess we won that round!”[10]
The conceptual and graphic likeness to
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s boxing style poster, made for the latter’s collaborative
exhibition with Warhol at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1985––four years after
McGuire’s double bill––is unmissable. Shifting the axis to a vertical
orientation, Basquiat replaced the artist-antagonists––Liquid Liquid’s Scott
Hartley and Konk’s Shannon Dawson (who also played trumpet in Basquiat’s band,
Gray)––with Warhol and himself, who were correspondingly staged in boxing pose
and dress, photographed in black-and-white, and printed on a yellow background
with corresponding red and black titles (all caps). McGuire remembers: “In
1985, Al Diaz asked me, ‘Did you see the poster Jean-Michel just made for his
show with Warhol?!’…I can’t say if my poster gave him the idea or not,” McGuire
opines. “I do know that Jean-Michel was well aware of it. But hey, I was
riffing on some unknown designer at the Gramercy Gym, so there you go!”[11] The
history of art is littered with ideas and concepts that are borrowed, sampled,
or copied. But an inescapable irony remains: Richard McGuire is on the other
side of two cases of notorious cultural appropriation from around the same time.
McGuire’s sleek, typographical poster for
Liquid Liquid’s show (together with Mofungo and Y Pants) at CBGB, New York on
September 7, 1981 marks just how dramatically the artist’s affiches can vary in
style and approach from poster to poster. But it also clarifies how little his
posters resemble those by others. For McGuire who made all of the art for all of
Liquid Liquid’s records, posters (as well as two videos),[12] the
art for band publicity was always on par with, and indistinguishable from fine
art. Distinctions between high and low were erased: his art was for the street.
The exhibition at Alden Projects explores
Richard McGuire’s art for the streets of a very different New York City. He
dreams of “an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum”;[13] he
dreams of Russian Constructivists’ negative spaces; of petroglyphs from New
Mexico; and of Outsider art alike. McGuire’s art for the street was transmitted
in designs and signals for all, but through frequencies found
somewhere…left-of-the-dial. Even the distribution of the Ixnae Nix works
followed none of the codes of either uptown graffiti or downtown conceptual
street art. McGuire recalls: “My system was to always make two poster drawings
of each title: one to paste in the street and one to keep for my archive. After
making the two versions, I would never distinguish between the ones I made
first or second. I considered both as 'one.' But of course each is always
unique.”[14]
How is it possible that works of this finely
tuned wit, of this effortless originality, of this infinite variety and made
with this fully encompassing generosity…how is it possible that these Ixane
Nix drawings and those Liquid
Liquid posters––having visibly shared the streetscapes and other formative
stages of No Wave New York with Basquiat, Haring, and others––how is it
possible that these perfect secrets have been kept for so long?
© Todd Alden 2018
***
Richard McGuire was born in Perth Amboy, NJ in
1957 and received a B.A. from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. McGuire’s
Ixnae Nix character was developed in a series of shadow performances at Rutgers
and elsewhere, including one P.S. 1, Queens on April 30, 1978. He wheatpasted
Ixnae Nix drawings on the streets of New York between July 1979 and early 1981,
also exhibiting them in numerous group exhibitions including: Club 57, Mudd
Club, Fashion Moda, South Bronx, Franklin Furnace, White Columns, P.S. 1,
Queens, Danceteria, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Selected early solo
shows: Franklin Furnace (1981 and 1982). Two-person exhibition: Tony Shafrazi
Gallery (with Philip Smith) (1982). Selected recent solo exhibitions: The
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (2018-19); Museum Angewandte
Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2016); and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
(2014). McGuire’s work has been recently included in group exhibitions
including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York;
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; and the Reina Sofia, Madrid. Museum
collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Morgan Library
and Museum, New York. McGuire is a founding member and bass player of Liquid
Liquid, the post-punk, New York band for which he produced all of the art for
the band’s records, posters, and videos. He directed two short films, Peur(s) du noir
(Fear[s] of the Dark), (2007, Prima Linea) and Micro Loup (2003)
for the omnibus feature film, Loulou and Other
Wolves (2003, Prima Linea). He is the author of several children’s
books and the highly acclaimed graphic novel, Here (2014,
Pantheon Books) which has been translated into at least 20 languages. This is
McGuire’s first solo exhibition at Alden Projects, New York.
***
***
The fully illustrated book, Richard McGuire: Art for the Street – New York 1978-1982, edited by Todd Alden with a foreword by Luc Sante, is published by Alden Projects, New York (2018, 144 pp.) in a first edition of 1000 softcover examples. Available for purchase from Alden Projects. This book is also printed in a deluxe hardcover edition of 100 boxed, signed, and numbered examples containing a unique painted and drawn work by Richard McGuire as well as two vintage pressed 7" records self-published by Richard McGuire (1978 and 1980).
To purchase the soft cover or deluxe hardcover edition, please email books@aldenprojects.com.
To purchase the soft cover or deluxe hardcover edition, please email books@aldenprojects.com.
[1] Sante, Luc. Richard McGuire: Art for the Street – New York 1978-1982. Ed. Todd
Alden. New York: Alden Projects, 2018, p. 4.
[2] Richard McGuire as cited in ed.
Alden, op. cit., p. 11.
[3] Glenn O’Brien, Interview (April 1981, p. 71).
[4] McGuire as cited in ed. Alden, op. cit., p. 13.
[5] Sante, op. cit., p. 5.
[6] The band posters themselves were
typically off-set printed or Xeroxed in a quantity of “around 100,” according
to McGuire. Conversation between Todd Alden and Richard McGuire, August 28,
2018.
[7] Sante, op. cit., p. 4.
[8] McGuire as cited in Alden, op. cit., p. 17.
[9] Sante, op. cit., p. 4.
[10] McGuire as cited in ed. Alden, op. cit., p. 21.
[11] McGuire as cited in ed. Alden, op. cit., p. 23.
[12] McGuire discusses his two videos:
“The first was for the song ‘Groupmegroup’ [1981], which was inspired by Bruce
Conner’s A Movie (1958), and
constructed by collaging found footage of gymnasts and acrobats, films of
underwater life, and a documentary about Berber drummers. MTV rejected it! I
made the second in 1997 for ‘Cavern' by licensing and adapting a
black-and-white film by Oskar Fischinger, which had lost its original 1927
soundtrack. It fit like a glove
to our song and it played at many festivals. Moby was
a big champion, playing it often on his MTV show,” ibid.
[13] Claes Oldenburg, as cited by
Richard McGuire in ed. Alden, op. cit.,
p. 10.
[14] McGuire, as cited in ed. Alden, op. cit., pp. 10-11.