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MacDermott & MacGough at American Fine Arts at P.H.A.G - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, July, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney
David MacDermott and Peter MacGough made their names in the art world by airily discarding the weight of history for a fabricated version that celebrated their fantasies of homoerotic utopia. In the '80s, they donned Edwardian apparel and moved into an apartment stripped of modern conveniences. They jointly created paintings of idealized homosexual love that were backdated to the year into which they had imagined themselves. The message was one of mind over matter or, to be more accurate, mind over history.
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In their first New York show in a decade, they finally were willing to acknowledge that some things cannot be wished away. This exhibition focused on the Nazi program to eradicate homosexuals. The pair marshaled their skills at mimicry to re-create an entire wall's worth of heroic Hitler portraits. Most of these depict the Fuhrer in his military uniform from a low, power-enhancing angle. Several others were based on the same historical source, a portrait of Hitler as Parsifal in shining medieval armor. The artists overlaid the portraits with scrawled names, places and dates of death of actual homosexual victims of the Nazi regime. On the opposite wall, a grid of small paintings of variously colored triangles set inside Jewish stars commemorated the varieties of state enemies (Jews, homosexuals, intellectuals, gypsies and others) incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps.
There were as well a number of other references to the Nazi extermination plan. The Eternal Jew (dated 1937 in the manner of the pair's previous forays into history) is dominated by a recreation of an anti-Semitic poster in which a Shylock-evoking Jew holds out a hand full of gold coins. Underlining the alleged link between Jews and Communism, the painting's backdrop includes a map of Russia overlaid with a hammer and sickle. In Europa: The Lust That Comes from Nothing (dated 1933), a three-dimensional snake with Hitler's face frames a giant, painted, swastika-emblazoned Valentine heart. There was also a set of workmanlike landscapes dated 1908, which were purported to be Hitler's submissions to art school. And in the back, swastikas had been superimposed on paintings of ornate period furniture.
As with Komar and Melamid's Socialist Realist parodies, a whiff of nostalgia throws the critical intentions of this series into question. Even when they are not dressed for the part, MacDermott and MacGough remain immersed in playacting. Hitler emerges here more as a titillating bogeyman invoked to send a thrill through the comfortable present than as the horrific historical figure that he really was.
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