I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s

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. (Sept.)