ALDEN PROJECTS™ 34 Orchard Street New York, NY 10002 212 229 2453 [email protected] www.aldenprojects.com Richard McGuire: Art for the Street – New York 1978-82 September 27 – November 18, 2018 Richard McGuire: Art for the Street – New York 1978-82 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 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 1978-82 (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 downtown New York contexts the Ixnae Nix works occupied, including St. Marks Place, Houston Street, and White Street. Richard McGuire arrived in New York in 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 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 silksilkscreen.2 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.”3 One highlight in Alden Projects’ show is a 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.”4 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.”5 The example at Alden Projects is one of three extant examples. Another highlight with another surprising back story is McGuire’s boxing style poster 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!”6 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 unmissible. 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”;7 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. 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 that these perfect secrets have been kept for so long? © Todd Alden 2018 *** The fully illustrated book, Richard McGuire: Art for the Street – New York 1978-82, 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 ($40). 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. 1 Sante, Luc. Richard McGuire: Art for the Street – New York 1978-82. Ed. Todd Alden. New York: Alden Projects, 2018, p. 4. 2 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. 3 Sante, op. cit., p. 4. 4 McGuire as cited in Alden, op. cit., p. 17. 5 Sante, op. cit., p. 4. 6 McGuire as cited in ed. Alden, op. cit., p. 21. 7 Claes Oldenburg, as cited by Richard McGuire in ed. Alden, op. cit., p. 10. .