McDermott & McGough
Cheim & Read
McDermott & McGough Suspicious of rooms without music or atmosphere
Cheim & Read
Between a Gaze Returned If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be. — Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
The title of McDermott & McGough’s new exhibition, Suspicious of rooms without music or atmosphere, is taken from a Rod McKuen poem. This is appropriate, intimating the noir quality of the artwork with a line from a poet whose peculiar celebrity (as both a fashionable luminary and master of schmaltz) emerged in the heady if doom-tinged period these paintings reference: the post World War II era, or “Nuclear Age.” Accordingly, a combination of the maudlin and cliché, the naively touching, and the sinister charges this work with a sense of enchantment and dark humor, where wonder, aspiration and glamour are fraught with subterranean passions, menace, and dread.
The paintings in the exhibit depict stills from classic-era Hollywood movies titled with such brusquely suggestive phrases as Raw Deal, Terminal Station, Lost Weekend, and Madame X. The large rectangular canvases (all made in 2012) function as diptychs, presenting the viewer with distinct scenes that, while drawn from different films, nevertheless suggest elementary narratives familiar to any of us. As hyper accurate representations of cinematic moments, these works exploit various dichotomies, including the one between color, generally suggestive of the fullness or exuberance of being, and black-andwhite, which connotes, alternately, life’s starker aspects. Another opposition is that between artifice (both painting and film) and the intensity of the actual emotions these mediums are capable of signifying. Made up of renderings of photographic images from a former era, the exhibition, in line with the artists’ overall oeuvre, reifies time (or re-reifies it), the universality of the well-crafted cinematic impression shining through all the more relentlessly for being frozen in pigment before us. While this referentiality between visual art forms is part of the intellectual pleasure these paintings afford, it doesn’t obscure their earnestness, their not being so much about film or time finally as the portentousness of those lived moments that draw us to movies, and art more generally, in the first place. However idealized, this work evokes an insistent confrontation with the telltale and the irrevocable, that gravid instance between thought and deed when the fates of real people are at stake.
On some canvases the idyllic is contrasted with the forlorn, the elation of a budding romance abutting the anguish of loss, for example. This is the theme of In between the dark and the light, 1967 whose left half features a kiss—haloed by lurid aquamarine—between a young and impeccably coiffed couple (the only image in the exhibit not taken from a motion picture, it comes from a 1957 record album cover). Rendered with the gelled-light splendor that accompanies one’s stock impressions of a first kiss, it is bluntly juxtaposed on the right to a black-and-while still of an empty booze glass on a bar, the upside-down top of an open bottle poised uselessly over it, having already dripped its last drop.
Pairing iconic representations of both amore and dejection in a single work, the artists strike a pitched balance between bathos and pathos that is typical of the exhibition overall. Here the wit that helped to make the duo famous early in their
career feels notched back toward the affective, the humor never quite letting us escape the wound that remains its source. While we share in the yuks, the violin is still drawing out that solitary swansong of a note threatening to strand us in bitterer crooks of our own experience.
As though a friendly riposte to the current school of technical realism, these works are painted in a representational style that feels more lyrical than clinical. Consider the background of the upper portion of Looking over my yesterdays, 1967 where from a balcony the eerily lissome frond of a fern appears to stretch over the crashing surf of a distant moonlit sea. Framed by the open French doors leading out of a Technicolor-saturated room, this painting-within-the-painting element feels especially poetic for being a probable depiction of a backdrop (intriguingly, a copy of a copy of a copy). If what it portrays is the more striking nonetheless, this is due to the sensibility of the artists who appear to have subtly accentuated this element (drawing us toward the inconspicuous, the unexpected) and who selected the evocative still it inhabits. In the foreground a woman (Lauren Bacall) wearing a traveling suit stands between bouquets of flowers, her back mostly turned to us, her left arm bent as though reaching toward her abdomen in a gesture intimating sudden bewilderment or distress (a feeling underscored by the weeping woman—played by Alida Valli—in the larger image below). With the painting depicted on the wall to Bacall’s right complimenting the quaintly bracketed night she peers out on, the composition is a marvel of studied casualness, as pregnant with chromatic lushness and formal complexity as with apparent poignancy. Not to mention again—given the melodramatic context of these canvases as well as movies generally—potential farcicality, at least when the predicaments these scenes imply are viewed from the anonymity of theatrical darkness, where our common compulsions are played out cathartically, in a manner that just might rescue us from some of them.
Obsessed with the revelatory moment when the camera pans in for a close-up, the paintings also pay tribute to the formal virtuosity and elegiac allusiveness the stills they replicate display. When not emphasizing the gazes of their subjects, the exhibition provokes our curiosity about the perceptions and feelings of those characters whose faces are turned away from us. The eyes of a young Elizabeth Taylor in the upper section of unwillingly mine, 1967 are closed for a kiss, while those of Lana Turner below are buried in the Tijuana hotel room bedspread she sobs against. The top portion of My echo, my shadow, 1967 zooms in on a woman’s (Taylor again) adoring gaze, which we imagine engages that of her sweetheart; here looking up into eyes that themselves peer upward, we appear to be strategically positioned by the artists beneath a representation of the vulnerability of any trusting lover. Meanwhile, below, and more squarely before the viewer, a distant, lone woman (Jennifer Jones) on the train platform stands with her back to the camera, peering with us down the cold, empty tracks into the foggy depths of evening. In the bottom portion of Deep in my heart, I lied, 1967, we see the head of a woman (Bacall again) both in profile and from the front, the vanity mirror before which she sits symbolically revealing her stare, its slight, quasi-demure aversion insinuating the treachery her comeliness belies. Above, the prototypical expression on Sandra Dee’s face is that of astonishment dawning, when comprehension vies cruelly with disbelief. In I know lonely nights, 1967 2012, a shadow bisects a character’s (played by Bacall once more) right pupil as, in order to keep a man, she decides to betray another woman. Adjacent to her is an ashtray, colossal in close-up, strewn with the butts of coffin nails sucked down during so much scheming, pining, and vacillation.
The deliberation is on the appalling, the scandalous, that moment of desperation marking turning points in most any life, in spite of the cool front we must nonetheless affect. The mystery compelling this exhibition is suggested by mimetic theory, which examines the central role of imitation in human behavior and desire. Theorists see “the self” as residing not in the individual mind or body, so much as within our mutual regard of one another, in that broader social/symbolic construct charged with the various tensions between its members, which stem in turn from our derivative striving for the same object(s), whether material or pertaining to social status. Hence the concentration in this work on the pivotal moment when a person is torn between the moral norms necessary for social order, and that remorseless competitiveness which can compel our breaking them, a risk upon which anyone’s triumph or downfall might hinge. Hence the convergence on that trembling hush when the weight of communal attention rushes in on the visage of the person suffering the instance of ethical conflict or duplicity, its sensational finality stripping her of volition, illusion and grace all at once. And all before—from every imaginable camera angle—our avid leer, which dares not flinch for fear of missing the least inflection conveying her humiliation, that catastrophe against which we define our own normalcy and sense of belonging, even as the hazard she courts beckons each of us.
If the allure of her gaze feels both terrible and irresistible, that is because it threatens us with the knowledge of our phantom-like natures as the needy reflections of the culture we prefer to imagine that we influence. Thus her excoriation burns in our imagination, as though signifying the outrage of our vanity, that flame toward which our aspirations hurl us nevertheless, her downfall, like our own, the vortex about which the rest of life wheels. The words in their titles—“memory,” “dream,” “echo,” and “shadow”—inferring the fragility of our invented world, conjured in these paintings are those moments impossible to forget yet too painful to recall, around which the memory circles, swimming for psychological survival against an inevitable denouement. If we are suspicious of the room without music or atmosphere, it is because these mask its emptiness, and shelter us from our own.
In serving as an allegory for our confrontation with the impersonal artificiality of our social structures and the transience of the self thereby implied, the sculpture Just a memory, 1967 2012 acts as the cornerstone of the exhibit. It is comprised of nine cubes of equal volume stacked into a square the side of which depicts the visage of Anne Francis from, aptly enough, an episode of The Twilight Zone entitled “The Mannequin.” This is the moment when the protagonist (re)discovers that, for all but this one day each year, she is actually a department store dummy. Goggle-eyed, girlish, hands to her face in a classic brink-of-scream pose, she is a symmetrically fractured emblem of trauma, the white blocks comprising her portending an absence of significance beyond the indifferent permanence of the ideal realm.
All this speaks to what is both compelling and disturbing about these elegant women on the brink of love, malice or devastation. Behavioral studies demonstrate the cross-cultural phenomenon of men being erotically drawn to female distress, a fact with an apparent basis in biology, the same structures in the male brain being responsible for both sex and aggression. While the allure of McDermott & McGough’s startled starlets are at least as ludic as sensual, the discomfort remains, such amusement being a flipside of attraction. Our fascination seems mitigated only to the extent one identifies with these subjects, however incongruous their poise on the one hand, and their turbulent inner lives on the other…variously
stricken and baleful, their emotional states running absurdly counter to the glowing complexions, prim apparel, and perfect hair that are our culture’s equivalent of war paint. Statuesque in desolation, they are the vatic foci of our voyeuristic thrall in a way that men can seldom be, since serving as the traditional object of desire the female is also more uniquely its victim. Here, it is as if their gazes cross ours with a kind of recriminating innocence, catching us in our amusement at their misfortune’s pedestrian inevitability, its mawkish clash with their best intentions and eveningwear. They remind us of mockery’s double edge, how it rings most piercingly in our own laughter’s wake.
In focusing on the female in the heyday of the contemporary cult of celebrity, Suspicious of rooms… feels rooted in deep historical experience. A similar idealization of the concomitant vulnerability and strength of women pertains to the prominence of the goddess in many cultures, including those of the ancient West, which personified themselves in the figure of the divine feminine, whom they credited with stewardship over their destiny, and whom they identified with celestial bodies—with stars. In rendering the pangs of our cinematic idols, the artists make a subtle aesthetic point, remaining true to their aesthetic roots. The allure of their images from a cultural epoch still well within living memory does not stem primarily from the age or nostalgia of the duo, whose subject has always been the past in any case, something they have tended to approach conceptually, by way of turning a critical eye on the present. It pertains to the feminine as archetype, and to these works referencing the apex of American society, in whose popular art “the common man” was uniquely front and center in a manner that emphasized not his vulgarity and mediocrity (as today), but his, or more accurately here her, humanity. Much as these paintings depict turning points in the lives of individual characters, they are in a broader sense about a crossroads in the life of a culture, wherein all its potentialities, both utopian and tragic, are present simultaneously. Among the other themes it reflects, this exhibition recalls the brief and incomplete ascendancy of the American Everyman and Woman, whose garish decline heralds our own dystopia or new Gilded Age, whose apocalyptic aptitude has diversified exponentially. In this sense—violin faded—the joke remains on us.
—Thomas Breidenbach
My echo, my shadow, 1967 2012 oil on canvas 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
no tomorrows, 1967 2012 oil on canvas 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
In between the dark and the light, 1967 2012 oil on canvas 36 x 72 in 91.4 x 182.9 cm
A half forgotten dream, 1967 2012 oil on canvas 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
Deep in my heart, I lied, 1967 2012 oil on canvas 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
I know lonely nights, 1967 2012 oil on canvas 31 x 60 in 78.7 x 152.4 cm
Looking over my yesterdays, 1967 2012 oil on canvas 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
unwillingly mine, 1967 2012 oil on canvas 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm
Just a memory, 1967 2012 9 wooden cubes 36 x 36 x 12 in 91.4 x 91.4 x 30.5 cm
I need you, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 30 x 22 in 76.2 x 55.9 cm
All I have is gone, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 30 x 22 in 76.2 x 55.9 cm
On the night he left me, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 30 x 22 in 76.2 x 55.9 cm
answer my prayer, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 30 x 22 in 76.2 x 55.9 cm
not prepared for eternity, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 22 x 30 in 55.9 x 76.2 cm
To every man that put me here, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 22 x 30 in 55.9 x 76.2 cm
When dreams are through, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 22 x 30 in 55.9 x 76.2 cm
It may not always be so, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 22 x 30 in 55.9 x 76.2 cm
All I have is my love of love, 1967 2012 acrylic wash and archival ink jet on paper 30 x 22 in 76.2 x 55.9 cm
McDermott & McGough Suspicious of rooms without music or atmosphere
Born 1952 and 1958 respectively, David McDermott and Peter McGough both attended the University of Syracuse, New York, in the 1970s. They live and work in New York City and Dublin, Ireland. McDermott & McGough have exhibited in several national and international exhibitions, including at Sperone Westwater, New York; Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Manezh Moscow and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. They were included in the Whitney Biennial in 1987, 1991 and 1995. McDermott & McGough are represented by Cheim & Read, New York.
Design John Cheim Text Thomas Breidenbach Editor Ellen Robinson Photography Brian Buckley Printed in the United States by GHP Media in an edition of 1,500 on the occasion of the 2013 exhibition ISBN 978-0-9851410-6-6 Cover image: A love I could not obey 2012 ink jet and gouache 30 x 22 in 76.2 x 55.9 cm
CHEIM & READ NEW YORK 2013
McDermott & McGough
Cheim & Read