The End of the Downtown Scene
By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier
Late in 1978, Peter McGough arrived in New York City, just when it was its most “dirty and dangerous.” He was 20 years old and had grown up in Syracuse. He came to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology but soon dropped out. He spent his tuition going to clubs like the Ninth Circle and Studio 54, drinking, taking drugs, and hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel with Village denizens like Cookie Mueller, the writer and John Waters actress, and fashion designer Michael Kors, a former classmate at FIT. For a while he made money doing odd jobs, sketching for fashion magazines, working at vintage shops, and eventually selling drink tickets at Danceteria. When he first became acquainted with the fledgling artist David McDermott, his friends warned him that McDermott was crazy. But then he saw McDermott perform in a “New Wave Vaudeville” show at Irving Plaza. McDermott was dressed in a full-tail suit with a stiff-starched bright white bib shirtfront with studs, a detachable wing collar, a white bow-tie, and black patent-leather dancing pumps. His hair was lacquered and shiny. McGough was captivated.
McDermott may not have been crazy, but he was definitely an eccentric. He believed that all time periods were simultaneous — that 1928, 1748, and 500 BC coexisted on different planets. He was obsessed with living on those other planets. “I’ve seen the past,” McDermott told McGough, “I’ve smelled it. I’ve broken into abandoned houses where everything was still there, down to the Indian-head pennies on the dresser.” Everything was secondary to his passion for living in his time machine. “You know, Peter,” he explained, “1928 is coming back, and I’m ready. … The future has been canceled. We’re all marching off a cliff to the future and I’m not going! And I’m serious. Very serious. The future is finished!”
Soon after the performance at the “New Wave Vaudeville Show,” McDermott began to court McGough. They began to paint together. Their partnership was sealed when, on a painting they had done together for McDermott’s mother, McDermott signed it “McDermott & McGough, 1947,” declaring as he did so, “Now I have you forever.”
Together McDermott and McGough made paintings, drawings, photographs with vintage cameras; they stripped apartments and houses of electricity, eschewed telephones, ate by candle light and heated their homes with wood burning stoves — all while dressed in top hats and tails and traveling by antique cars or even horse and buggy. After years of bohemian poverty on the punk and arts scene in the East Village, they eventually achieved enormous success, but then lost it all with the collapse of the art market in the late 80s. Pursued by the IRS, in 1994 McDermott boarded the Queen Elizabeth II ocean liner and moved to Ireland, planning to benefit from the tax-free status conferred on Irish artists. Soon after, McGough tested positive for HIV and spent several years on the edge of death battling AIDS, though he eventually stabilized. But while McGough and McDermott have continued to work together up until the present, their lives remain split between the United States and Ireland, between a reconciliation with past successes and a pursuit of new artistic opportunities.
I‘ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in 1980s
By Peter McGough
Pantheon, 2019
304 pages
I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going (2019, Pantheon Books) is Peter McGough’s memoir of their personal and artistic partnership — and their participation with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Julian Schnabel in what we might call the Downtown Scene — the East Village-centered amalgam of artists and eccentrics that played a pivotal role in the 1980s creative areas of music, film, visual art, and performance art. It is deeply personal, with much effort taken to demonstrate to the reader the anguish, jealousy, and sense of betrayal that McGough experienced as his romantic and artistic life unraveled before him. It is also rich in detail, mentioning art world figures, bars, clubs, galleries, and collectors that constituted this scene. And for these reasons, it is also historically significant: shining a light not only the dissolution of an artistic-romantic partnership but also charting the end of the Downtown Scene. The reasons for this ending are many: increases in real estate prices and the cost of living, expansion of previously diminished systems of maintenance and surveillance that existed in the 1970s, the effects of drugs and mental illness, the staggering toll of the AIDS epidemic, and the grief that resulted from such tragedies. All led to a profoundly changed downtown Manhattan and occasioned an artistic diaspora to Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey, and abroad.
Marvin Taylor, in The Downtown Book, holds the year 1984 as a turning point in the ethos of the experimental East Village scene. By this year, the mainstream art market had mostly embraced the once fringe Downtown artists, prompting an “influx of economic capital that would eventually overtake the symbolic capital.”[1] McGough and McDermott too experienced the boon of this economic influx and saw their own economic value and cultural prominence rise during this time. However, the consequences of such a glaring spotlight upon the East Village scene were soon to be felt. Renown and attention exacerbated personal struggles, leading too often to addiction, mental illness, and tragedy — consider the young death of Basquiat. The influence of the wider art world fostered a more market-oriented approach to art-making. Media coverage of the East Village and its denizens led to increased property values, prompting many (like McGough and McDermott) to look for studio space in Brooklyn or upstate.
By 1984 the AIDS epidemic had gained significant momentum and claimed the lives of almost 6,000 people.[2] Particularly hard hit were the Downtown artistic communities. Though McGough survived his battle with AIDS, benefiting from the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy in the mid-1990s, most of those in the previous decade and a half did not.[3] This toll, along with that of rising intravenous drug use, not only thinned the ranks of artists and community members but beckoned in a period of grief, opposing (to an extent) the experimental energy of the Downtown scene.
1984 also saw the re-election of President Reagan, which signaled a further rightward shift in national American politics and occasioned the vehement opposition to governmental support for American artists that eventually led to the profound erosion of the National Endowment for the Arts. McGough speaks passionately of this perceived hostility to artists when detailing his and McDermott’s struggles with the Internal Revenue Service. And the American government’s seeming ambivalence to artists played a significant role in McDermott’s decision to move to Ireland.
In concert, these changes signal an artistic dispersal of sorts from the East Village — and McGough’s account sits right in the middle of these profound changes. This diaspora was not total and vestiges still remain — even McGough and McDermott retain a studio in Williamsburg, and McGough still lives downtown — but the zenith of the East Village’s period of experimentation and market ambivalence (and the unique expressions and figures that such conditions fostered) has long passed. McGough’s memoir offers us a view into an unrecognizable world that over the course of his account of commercialization and exodus — for better or worse — becomes more and more familiar.
Jeffrey Patrick Colgan is one of the founders of the Network for Culture & Arts Policy and a writer on political and social philosophy.
Jeffrey Escoffier is the author of American Homo: Community and Perversity and a research associate at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
[1] Taylor, Marvin J, Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, Fales Library, Andy Warhol Museum, and Austin Museum of Art, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006, 36.
[2] Ibid., 36.
[3] “HIV and AIDS --- United States, 1981--2000.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed May 18, 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm.