BACK TO THE PAST

“I’ve seen the future, and I’m not going,” declared David McDermott, the visual artist who forged a well-known partnership with his former lover Peter McGough. McDermott & McGough were self-professed Victorian dandies renowned for eschewing modern luxuries something which McDermott still does sans smartphone, computer and reputedly electricity in his Dublin base. New York-based McGough, meanwhile, has decided to reflect on their lives, loves and fallouts in his memoir, I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s. “I like to think I’m a bohemian living here during the Depression,” says McGough who describes McDermott as “the Mad Hatter of art.” Sadly, the two are currently having a transatlantic quarrel.

Pantheon Books, $29.95