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73 Kenny Scharf — interwove the tropes of the 19th century by recreating the Victorian and Edwardian eras, down to detachable collars, dogcarts and Model T Fords, lavish wallpapers, top hats, and cutaways. Their four-decades-in-the-making life work, on view now at the Dallas Contemporary, incorporates prowess in virtually all media: painting, photography, sculpture, and filmmaking. No longer romantically linked, they remain artistic collaborators despite living a continent apart, painstakingly rebuilding their work and lives after losing everything to the IRS in the 1990s, because they simply failed to pay any income taxes. Today, McGough lives in New York and works in Bushwick, Brooklyn; since the 1990s, McDermott has been in Dublin, where he's creating an ode to decorative arts from previous centuries in a 30- room Irish country house. Life for both is lived in amber, with time suspended and the clock stopped in the 1880s. But to think of their work merely as elaborate performance art or time immersion misses the point of its incisive political and social message. Dallas Contemporary adjunct curator Alison Gingeras, based in New York, Genoa, and Warsaw, recasts the collaborators in their first American retrospective, one with a radical twist. The Contemporary survey is timed to align with another McDermott & McGough project, also curated by Gingeras: the Oliver Wilde Temple in New York, with its stations of the cross to the persecuted Wilde and elegiac chapel devoted to victims of the AIDS epidemic. The temple, like the Dallas Contemporary exhibition, seeks a broader understanding of the pair's brave stance towards human rights. PETER McGOUGH, IN AN EXCLUSIVE PHONE Q&A FOR PAPERCITY How your retrospective came about for Dallas. McGough: I met Alison Gingeras at an art dinner April 30, 2015, in New York. It was a dinner for Vito Schnabel's gallery. I thought she was a very interesting person. I had no idea who she was, and we started talking about 19th-century photography, art, etc. Then she said, "Have you ever had a retrospective in the United States? And I said, "No, I've had them in Europe." That's how it began, through Alison. On your current dwelling. It was a friend's apartment, and I went to dinner there and said, "This is so charming. If you ever move, tell me." And he moved. And I took it. Well, it was circa 1905. It's a railroad flat and has sliding glass doors. It's intact: a big 1920s sink, 1930s bathroom. It's very "THROUGH THE ENTWINEMENT OF THEIR ART AND LIFE, McDERMOTT & McGOUGH HAVE 'WRITTEN' THEIR OWN QUEER HISTORY THROUGH THEIR PRACTICE OF TIME TRAVEL." old-fashioned, and that's what I like about it. My friend who had it was a decorator, and he did a beautiful job. I love it. Your attire, as we speak. I'm wearing a white summer suit, with a blue-striped shirt and a polka-dot bow-tie. I wear my summer clothes when I can. I'm wearing white-buck spectators with little holes in them. When it's cool, I've really been dressing up. On home life and your memoir. I'm not a big entertainer. David was more of an entertainer. After working at the studio all day, I'm pretty tired. My favorite evening is being home alone. I have a Chihuahua named Queenie. I never learned to drive, since I moved to New York when I was a teenager. Our Model Ts all got lost in the crash of the late '80s … But I sold my memoirs to Random House, so that's what I'm also working on now. McDermott & McGough's Peep Hole, 1888 (detail), 1988, at Dallas Contemporary ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTISTS INSTALLATION PHOTO ELISABETH BERNSTEIN. © MCDERMOTT & MCGOUGH. McDermott & McGough's The Stations of Reading Gaol (IV. Oscar Wilde taking his constitutional.), 1917 (detail), MMXVII, at the Russell Chapel, The Church of the Village, New York McDermott & McGough's Oscar Wilde Temple, 1917, MMXVII (installation view), at the Russell Chapel, The Church of the Village, New York — Alison Gingeras, Dallas Contemporary adjunct curator Oscar Wilde as touchstone for today. Look at this man at the height of his career, who wouldn't deny his sexuality, and they took him down, and destroyed his art, and his life. Put him in prison, for two years, hard labor, and he gets out of prison, and he's snubbed by everyone. And he dies in poverty. If that message doesn't speak to somebody in the LGBT community ... This is a person who had everything and lost it because he said, "This is who I am." What's left is Wilde's writing and his quotes — they're hysterical. He's so brilliant and still under-recognized today. I have one text piece that says, "We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." The conversation continues, with Alison Gingeras, at papercitymag.com. "McDermott & McGough: I've Seen the Future and I'm Not Going," through December 17, at the Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass St., dallascontemporary.org.