Occasionally a work comes along that defies both genre-definition and expectation. Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here was one of these; part time-travel, part artwork, with each frame visually depicting the narrative of place across tens or even hundreds of years. In this conversation McGuire shares his thoughts on the interconnectedness of things, social media, and the long life of Liquid Liquid amid his multifarious career.
FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ I vividly remember being thrilled by your graphic novel Here. As an architecture student, the idea of travelling through centuries whilst being rooted in the space of a single room, really spoke to the power of the drawing and its potential to unleash the imagination; of course it’s been described as seminal and I agree. What are your impressions when looking back on it, ten years later?
RICHARD MCGUIRE First, thank you for the kind words. Having had some distance from it I can see the book now with fresh eyes. I’d forgotten all the struggles it took to bring to life. It took years. I had a lot of doubts along the way. I worried that without a protagonist I wouldn’t be able to hold a reader’s attention. I honestly didn’t know what I was doing. I just gathered material and kept moving ahead instinctually. The living room is based on the house I grew up in and I used family photos for research, so there are moments it feels like I’m looking through a family photo album. It’s nice to see my parents and siblings, but as much as my family is there I never thought of the book as autobiographical. It is such a very long view of time that my parent’s fifty years in this house is just a tiny blip in the bigger picture.
I had a kind of guiding motto when I was working: “make the big things small and the small things big.” I wanted the small mundane moments to be the centre.
I did a lot of research about the area because I felt I needed to go deep for it to feel grounded and real. But I never wanted it to be seen as a ‘history book.’ I purposely avoided showing all the typically significant markers of time, like World Wars, or presidents. I never even mention the name of the place because in the big picture it’s only a name, and any place name is temporary at best. The subject is so much bigger than that. I had a kind of guiding motto when I was working: “make the big things smalland the small things big.” I wanted the small mundane moments to be the centre. The small events are what make up our lives more than anything else. I was a little worried about the parts that show the future. I consulted a climate scientist who pointed me to maps that projected how the area would be affected over time. According to the maps this location will eventually be underwater. That still feels like an accurate prediction.
KOOZ When you were making or drawing Here, social media was just getting started — meaning that it was still possible to live in the here without being constantly exposed to there. How do you relate to these digital tools, the way they enable spatial and temporal associations, and that kind of ‘travel’?
RM Social media may have shortened the distances between here, there and everywhere, but it’s also created fragmentation. People now see the world through their devices. In a few years time when AI is running everything we will wonder how life was before that. The only social media platform that I engage in is Instagram. It can be great, it’s introduced me to many worlds, but it’s best not to allow it to take up too much of your time. I think it’s best to engage in the real world and spend as much time as possible in nature.
The HERE story originated as a six page comic that was first published in 1989. I had just moved into a new apartment and was thinking about the person who lived there before me. It started as a sketch showing two views of time as a split screen. A friend happened to tell me about this new “Windows” program that he had on his computer at work — at this point home computers were still a novel thing! It was that conversation about Windows that inspired me to show multiple windows of “time” simultaneously. It’s funny now to think that it was that application that enabled a story about “time travel.”
KOOZ The book is the starting point for your retrospective at the Cartoonmuseum Basel titled “Then and There, Here and Now.” (How) does this retrospective trace your practice as an illustrator, designer and musician from the avant-garde art scene of the 1980s in downtown New York?
RM The catalogue cover shows a diagram that literally connects every word of the title, to bring the point home that it’s all connected. In the past I thought these practices were very different from one another. Now I can see how they all inform each other. The exhibition is presented in a fairly linear way, starting with my early work. Things are then grouped in a clear way to introduce an audience who may be unfamiliar with my work. The catalogue on the other hand is nonlinear — the connections are made by visual associations and skip around through time. There is a nice essay by Vincent Tuset-Anres, the director of Fotokino Studio in Marseille, where this exhibition originated, in a much smaller version.
It’s all connected. In the past I thought these practices were very different from one another. Now I can see how they all inform each other.
My street art is early work. At the time it was my response to graffiti, which was at a peak in New York. I had been working at a few different galleries, helping with exhibitions and art performances. Graffiti seemed much more vital. I thought of it as “outsider art” because it had nothing to do with the established art world. It was full of life and came from a place of honest self expression. I was simultaneously very interested in playing music, performing, making records, creating graphics for the record sleeves and posters. Eventually, these graphic experiments led to illustration and graphic work for newspapers and magazines, specifically The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine. Eventually I started designing toys and making children’s books and all of that led to designing and directing animation for TV and films.
Alongside my commercial work, I was always experimenting with personal work. In general I like working on things that are sequential, experimental books, prints and sculptures. These are the kind of things I’m most excited about right now.
KOOZ The title somehow instantly alludes to a certain temporality. What’s your own approach to time, and how has that changed? How is this reflected in your work?
RM The HERE book is certainly an example of temporality. I think my interest in Eastern philosophy may have something to do with it. Another theme is interconnectedness, which is also coming from a similar place. My children’s books are good examples. Night Becomes Day reads like a poem of connections: “…river becomes ocean, ocean becomes wave, wave becomes beach…” It’s one long series of connections. Some are funny or strange, to keep the reader amused, but the underlying thought is there, that everything is connected. What Goes Around Comes Around shows another chain: this time it’s a chain reaction of events. It’s essentially about karma.
There is that great William Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Things have a circular nature.
There is that great William Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Things have a circular nature. The music I made with my band Liquid Liquid in the early eighties has had a life of its own that keeps circling back around. Every few years, the catalogue has been reissued, and each time it opens up new opportunities. In 1997 it was released on Grand Royal Records, which was The Beastie Boys label. It brought fresh attention to the music and a few tracks were licensed for film. In 2003 it was released on Domino Records in the UK, which led to the band being asked to play shows that were on an entirely different scale — huge festivals around the world for tens of thousands of people. More tracks were licensed for TV commercials and films. We played on The Jimmy Fallon show along with The Roots; we played at Madison Square Garden with LCD Sound system. I could never have imagined that the band would have such a long afterlife. There are plans for a new reissue and more remixes later this year but I think our touring days are behind us this time around.
I’ve been busy working on a new book that is kind of the inverse of the HERE book. Instead of one place, it takes place everywhere and instead of thousands of years, it takes place in one minute. Again, the idea of things happening simultaneously shows an interconnectedness.
KOOZ From your time in the pioneering post-punk band Liquid Liquid, to the sound drawings produced in recent years, how does sound guide your perception of space?
RM The recent Sound Drawings are diagrams that map the spatial relationships of the sound events. They look a bit like architectural plans. In fact, they have already inspired me to create sculptures that I’m welding out of steel. Earlier, I was saying how each thing informs the next. I made a small book a few years ago called LISTEN, which was an exercise in codifying sounds into abstract shapes. It was inspired by moving out of the city and into a small town. The new place has eleven windows and I was surrounded by sounds that were all heightened, because it was a new environment. I gave the book to a musician friend who immediately thought it should be used as a score for a performance. It’s not a bad idea. I have to think about the best way to do that.
I think it was the musicality and not a traditional narrative that made it work.
Having a musical background actually helped with the HERE book. There was a moment when I was feeling frustrated because it wasn't coming together. Because it isn’t a character-driven plot I was having trouble finding my way forward, until I thought of it as less of a narrative and more like a musical score. I put all the pages up on my wall and started cutting and moving parts around, so I could build up crescendos and wind down to quiet moments. I think it was the musicality and not a traditional narrative that made it work.
Richard McGuire, Sound Drawings, 2023. ©Richard McGuire
KOOZ From a short black and white strip format in 1989 to a graphic novel in 2014, Here is soon to become a film by director Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. What do you think about that translation — from static to moving image, and from drawn evocation to specific actors?
RM I only just saw the trailer of the film the other day and I was completely overwhelmed! It’s still hard to believe that this is happening! Robert Zemeckis contacted me a few years ago about the possibility of adapting the book. It was during Covid and we had a Zoom call. He said he wanted to make the film “exactly like my book,” which sounded very nice, but it also felt like an impossible project to get financed. The idea of a locked camera point of view for an entire Hollywood film just sounded insane. But I said “sounds great!” and I agreed that they could develop a script. A few years later it was announced that it was indeed happening. I visited the film set last February, which was completely surreal. A huge soundstage where the sets were built. It was exciting to meet Tom Hanks, who was as nice as you would expect him to be. I met the screenwriter, Eric Roth, and Zemeckis, and we discussed some of the technical ways they planned to make it work. From what I have seen so far it still has the feeling of the book, which I’m very happy about. The spirit is there.
Bio
Richard McGuire is an American artist. He has produced an enormously diverse body of work in multiple media, characterised throughout by intelligence, wit, conceptual integrity, and the use of elegant, minimal design to communicate complicated ideas about the human experience. Throughout his career, McGuire’s artistic practice has remained multidisciplinary. He is an illustrator and longtime contributor to The New Yorker, for which he has produced numerous covers and interior illustrations. He has also written and illustrated several children’s books, designed toys and other products, created interactive media, and directed and designed animation. All of McGuire’s work shares a simplified aesthetic, built out of minimal forms, often combined in dizzying ways. His approach to diagrammatic abstraction remains mindful of the relationship between line, shape, and form, and permits seamless shifts in scale and perspective even as it moves from medium to medium. McGuire’s work reorganises perception to suggest larger connections between time, people, and places. His work is included 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.
Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.
