ART CITIES:N.York-The Oscar Wilde Temple
McDermott & McGough consists of visual artists David McDermott and Peter McGough. McDermott & McGough challenge the chronological boundaries of art history and cultural identity. They question the nature of nostalgia and narrative, and the ways in which the past is conceptually and contextually reoriented for the future. The subsequent evolution of their work has found them more recently inspired by Hollywood cinema, advertising tropes, and comic books of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the duo again searching for identity within an artificial world.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The Oscar Wilde Temple Archive
David McDermott & Peter McGough rose to art-world fame in the ‘80s as boyfriends. They made subversive queer-themed paintings. In the ‘90s they split up as a couple. McGough nearly died of complications from AIDS. Mr. McDermott renounced his United States citizenship and exiled himself to Ireland, where he remains, facing health issues of his own. “The Oscar Wilde Temple”, an ambitious public installation work two decades in the making is conceived as a welcoming secular space to honor one of the earliest and most courageous forebears in the centuries-long struggle for gay liberation and to celebrate the fight for equality. The refusal of famed Irish author, novelist, poet, and playwright Oscar Wilde to hide his sexuality even when faced with imprisonment and hard labor, has resonated with McDermott & McGough since the outset of their collaborative practice in the midst of the bohemian East Village art scene of the ‘80s. Wilde’s example as an enemy of homophobia remains a bellwether of modern activism and is the basis for McDermott & McGough’s installation, which combines painting, sculpture, and site specific elements in a functioning environment that recalls the beautiful and provocative sensuousness of the Aesthetic Movement Wilde championed. The Temple project has been realized through a collaboration between The Church of the Village and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of New York City (The Center), a joint effort conceived to foster deeper ties between the two institutions and to expand the community services they offer. The installation has been conceived to transport visitors back to the precise moment of Wilde’s visit to America in 1882-83, with an Aesthetic Movement interior suggesting the world in which Wilde lived, worked, and loved. Specially made fabric wall coverings, architectural and decorative details, furnishings and lighting exemplify the longstanding art-life practice that the duo has described as a “time experiment”, in which the boundaries of chronology, art history, and cultural identity are strategically upended in order to open the minds of viewers to universal themes, aesthetic discoveries, and spiritual byways. The centerpiece of the Temple is a central altar built around a figure of Oscar Wilde, carved in linden wood in a devotional style and based upon the iconic portrait of the author made by the American photographer Napoleon Sarony in his Union Square studio in 1882. On the pedestal below, Wilde’s prison number at Reading Gaol (C.33) appears. Framing each side of the statue are eight “stations”, paintings tracing Wilde’s journey from arrest through imprisonment, and his sentence of two years’ hard labor. Inspired by the Stations of the Cross paintings at Notre-Dame-des-Champs cathedral in Avranches, France, and based upon engravings from English newspapers (The Star, The Illustrated Police Budget, The Illustrated Police News) that chronicled Wilde’s dramatic trial and the spectacle of his public humiliation, each canvas has been rendered by McDermott & McGough in a color palette of deep Limoges blue. In this pictorial retelling of Wilde’s sensational downfall, the artists have depicted Wilde as a divine soul, adding gilded flourishes to each work to communicate his suffering and martyrdom. To one side of this central Wilde altar is a secondary altar, conceived by the artists as a designated place for honoring those who have died from AIDS and those still suffering worldwide. Here, McDermott & McGough’s painting “Advent Infinite Divine Spirit” (1987) is accompanied by a votive candle stand, a book for visitors wishing to inscribe tributes to loved ones, and space for leaving mementos for those who have been lost to AIDS. The Temple also features McDermott & McGough’s portraits of key contemporary martyrs of homophobia and the AIDS epidemic whose sacrifices have contributed to awareness and change. Among these are: Alan Turing, Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, Brandon Teena, Xulhaz Mannan and Sakia Gunn. Additionally, the Temple includes plaques that commemorate two ministers from The Church of the Village’s own history: Rev. Paul M. Abels and Rev. C. Edward Egan, who were forced out of pastoral ministry in 1977 and 1984 for being gay.
Info: Curator: Alison Gingeras, United Methodist Church of the Village, 201 West 13th Street, New York, Duration: 11/9-2/12/17, www.oscarwildetemple.org
