ART-PRESENTATION: Richard McGuire-TimeSpace, After Here
Richard’s McGuire short story “Here” is likely the most lauded comic book story from recent decades. The six-page comic, which appeared in 1989 in Raw Magazine the comics journal edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, it was immediately recognized as a transformative work that would expand the possibilities of the comics medium. Its influence continues to be felt 27 years after its publication.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum Angewandte Kunst Archive
“Here” originated as a 36-panel story. No one who saw that story ever forgot it. A chronicle of a life, running from 1957 to 2027, as situated in one room, with kaleidoscopic intrusions from various pasts and a wisp of a future, the house burns in 2029 and is torn down in 2030, a time capsule is interred on the site in 2033. In the exhibition TimeSpace: After “Here” at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Richard McGuire, explores questions concerning our relationship to time and space, exploring his graphic novel “Here” (Pantheon Publications, 2014), the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic work. Like the original comic, the 300-page graphic novel, is based on brilliant pictorial architecture that expands the narrative possibilities of pictorial storytelling by way of the comic. In the same ordinary living room corner, McGuire introduces temporal insertions into a constantly changing Now. The exhibition TimeSpace: After “Here”, brings McGuire’s room to life as a walk-in, act-in stage space. Visitors are invited to move through the life-size setting and thus to become protagonists of the story themselves, to change the scenery and become characters in the stor, but also become its storyteller. In both versions of “Here”, the course of time is mirrored in the coming and going of generations of occupants and in changing landscapes and atmospheres, but also in the emergence and disappearance of the room itself. In the exhibition, it is historical furniture, objects and accessories from the museum collections, complete with the passing of time they represent, that enhance the McGuirean room with a series of domestic settings dating from many different eras. Likewise in the exhibition, two further artistic approaches each endeavour in their own way to reveal the relationship between time, space and image: Carl Burton with his dream-image-like animated film “Shelter”, and Leanne Shapton with her watercolour series “A9 paintings.”
Info: Curator: David Beikirch, Museum Angewandte Kunst, Schaumainkai 17, Frankfurt am Main, Duration: 30/1-11/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, www.museumangewandtekunst.de
