I've Seen the Future and I'm Not Going

July 15, 2019
Artist McGough travels back to the heady 1980s New York art scene in his engrossing debut. Growing up gay in Upstate New York in the 1960s, McGough found art to be “a safe haven in which I could live and dream.” In 1978, he moved to New York City to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology; he later met a young man who would become his artistic partner, David McDermott—about whom he writes with awe and real fascination. The two appropriated objects and images from the 19th century and fashioned themselves into Victorian dandies while creating period performance art. Finding an artistic community in the 1980s East Village, the two socialized with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, and Andy Warhol. As their friends began dying of AIDS, McGough and McDermott focused on gay themes in their art, with their abstract word painting A Friend of Dorothy becoming a hit in the 1987 Whitney Biennial. The two went into debt in 1992, when the art market slowed and galleries dropped them, but they made a comeback with their Oscar Wilde Temple, a chapel in London for the LGBTQ community. This provocative account offers an idiosyncratic examination of gay pride and the 1980s art scene.

July 15, 2019
A frank memoir reveals life, art, and death in 1980s New York. Growing up in suburban Syracuse, McGough was shy, gay, and frequently bullied. In high school, he found refuge in the art room, peopled by "artists and outcasts" like himself, and he became recognized for his talent. After graduating in 1978, he headed eagerly to New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, hoping to find sexual freedom at last. In his candid debut memoir, the author vividly conveys the turbulence and seediness of the "dirty and dangerous" West Village and of Times Square, "a mess of dirty old theaters" showing horror movies and pornography. "It was everything I dreamed of and more," he admits, and he spent his tuition money in nightclubs, including the infamous Studio 54, and on rent for squalid rooms. When his money ran out, he took odd jobs illustrating, sketching, and, at one point, painting Danceteria, a new nightclub, where he also worked as a busboy. McGough's life changed when he met David McDermott, an eccentric, charismatic artist who rejected the modern world as "cheap and vulgar," claimed he was a genius (and, sometimes, Jesus), and carefully curated environments for himself filled with Victoriana. McDermott's world, McGough writes, "became immediately alluring, and I felt safe and cut off from a world I thought harsh and cruel." Soon he, too, was wearing shirts with highly starched detachable collars, frock coats, and homburg hats: "We felt we were making a statement by our very existence." The two became lovers and artistic collaborators, signing their works with both surnames and eventually gaining a reputation among dealers, collectors, curators (they showed twice at Whitney Biennales), and fellow artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Julian Schnabel. In a world filled with narcissists, grifters, and assorted lost souls, Schnabel and his wife, cleareyed and compassionate, stand out. Bitterness and anger sometimes surface as the author recounts betrayal, severe financial hardship brought about by McDermott's wanton spending, and years of suffering from AIDS. An intimate portrait of personal struggles and artistic triumphs.

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September 15, 2019
If one ever wanted to eavesdrop on the meetings, parties, and art openings of the 1980s, McGough's memoir accomplishes that feeling in a frenetic style that leaves the reader dizzy after every outrageous story. Self-described as an introvert, McGough met his long-term partner and art collaborator, David McDermott, referred to as McD, in the late 1970s within the emerging New York punk scene. The duo's eccentric lifestyle and art, inspired by McDermott's insistence that the whole of modernity is tacky and lacks taste, caught the attention of many famous figures in the art world, including Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Keith Haring. The couple's art careers careened the highs and lows of the 1980s, scuttling topsy-turvy from barely making enough money to eat to owning several properties and traveling the world whilst living the lives of Victorian gentlemen with only the amenities of their chosen era. McGough offers a personal view of New York's prominence in the art world in tales that are gritty, frustrating, and filled with laughter, some tears, lots of yelling, and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)