MacDermott and McGough: A History of Photography.

Santa Fe: Arena Editions. 143 pp. 73 illustrations. $65.

Brooks Adams

Ostend and Santa Fe may seem like far-flung points of the globe for such recalcitrant travelers as McDermott & McGough, the artist-collaborators (currently residing in and around Dublin, Ireland) who are known to eschew airplanes in favor of conveying themselves, whenever possible, by ocean liner, train, or Model T. But Ostend now sports a rather marvelous museum of modern art in a renovated '30s department store, which last winter was the site of the expatriate artists' first-ever retrospective (the occasion for the first publication reviewed here). And Santa Fe has become the venue of choice for lavish photographic and homoerotic art publishing ventures.

Ever since they left America in the mid-'90s, McDermott & McGough have practiced the politics of exile. A sense of distance and disenfranchisement has always suffused their work, but never more so than recently. This is immediately apparent when flipping through the Belgian book, with its myriad color plates of new paintings. Of course, the duo's deliberately awkward, antiquated-seeming canvases, photographs, films, and decors are meditations on history, but the Ostend-inspired selections make clear how much these artists are also concerned with the present tense. The unregenerate horniness of their art, visceral in both books, in the photographs as well as the paintings, is reserved mostly for the young and usually male nude model posed in any number of art-historically resonant tableaux. When gazing at M&M's hazy, softly tinted photographs (especially well reproduced in the Santa Fe book), we are meant to think of Von Gloeden, Ingres, and most of all, F. Holland Day.

The Santa Fe volume appears blanketed in pastness, with bits of real-life vividness (gadfly Ricky Clifton as a nineteenth-century gent posing with two skulls) occasionally peeking out. Through an informative essay by Mark Alice Durant, an assistant professor of media studies at Syracuse University, we learn that McDermott & McGough first undertook photography in 1987. They went on to make beautifully tinted gum-bichromate prints of Roman emperors' busts, head shots of living goddesses (Jacqueline Schnabel as Sappho) and crotch shots of ancient statuary. Durant invokes the curious nineteenth-century tradition of spiritualism and freemasonry, and underlines photography's early association with the scientific and the occult to account for what he calls "the odd feeling of depopulation" in the duo's photographs. On the whole, his case is successfully argued, and it's a beautiful book, though a tad vacant, suggesting the toniest kind of soft porn. All M&M lovers will want to have it on their shelves.

As Robert Rosenblum points out in his excellent essay in Paintings, Photographs & Time Experiments, 1950, "The fantasized history of a gay subculture in America is a constant inspiration to McDermott & McGough's reconstructions of same-sex desire repressed by the convoluted rituals of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decorum." Thus in a single painting, Types of Homosexual 1942 (1997), we see what appears to be a detail of antique wallpaper overlaid with a list of '40s sociological classifications for gay men, including "The Demoralized Married Man" and "The Ship's Queer," as well as diagrams of men's underwear. The result is a rich layering of meanings and allusions, not least of which is a wry conjuring of the very terms and fetishes that might well have constituted queer identity and desire at a given moment, say, "Jan. 6, 1942."

Yet McDermott & McGough's art, it seems to me, may well be even more seminal than they or we ever imagined. Even a glance at the Belgian edition reveals the collaborative duo to be vitally involved in several early '90s zeitgeists of style and motif: Frank Moore, Lari Pittman, John Dugdale, Elizabeth Peyton, Jane Hammond, Jane Kaplowitz, Kara Walker, T.J. Wilcox, and Ilya Kabakov are only a few of the contemporary art names that come to mind. Finally, McDermott & McGough's work is not as isolated as they might wish. Still, one is consistently seduced by their humor (some might call it "camp"), which is exceptional in its depiction of a pre-Stonewall gay world. "They knew little about him," reads the legend in one painting of a St. Moritz skier, dated 1932, "other than that he was deeply religious and wanted to be a hairdresser."

Brooks Adams is New York-based writer and critic.