I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980’s, Peter McGough
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A candid, darkly funny memoir of love, art, and survival in downtown New York’s 1980s art scene. Peter McGough recounts his intense partnership with David McDermott, meteoric success, and the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis on a generation of queer artists.
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I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s
by Peter McGough
Hardcover (Deckle Edge) | September 17, 2019
I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going is a brilliant, brutally honest, and darkly funny memoir chronicling Peter McGough’s life, love, and artistic coming-of-age alongside his partner and collaborator David McDermott in downtown New York during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Fleeing a childhood marked by homophobia and violence in Syracuse, McGough arrives in New York searching for freedom and reinvention. He finds both in the raw, chaotic world of the Lower East Side art scene and in McDermott himself, whose cultivated Victorian persona and immersive “time experiment” lifestyle quickly become inseparable from their artistic practice and personal lives. Together, McDermott & McGough rise meteoricly, exhibiting internationally, appearing in multiple Whitney Biennials, and becoming fixtures of an art world that thrived on excess, provocation, and brilliance.
McGough vividly evokes a vanished New York, thick with cigarette smoke and ambition, populated by figures such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Rene Ricard, Kenny Scharf, and the Schnabels. Nights unfold at Danceteria, the Ninth Circle, Studio 54, the FUN Gallery, and the Chelsea Hotel, even as addiction, control, and emotional imbalance quietly corrode the partnership behind the scenes.
When success collapses almost overnight and the AIDS crisis devastates their community, the memoir shifts from glitter to reckoning. With devastating clarity and unexpected tenderness, McGough confronts illness, survival, and the long aftermath of love entangled with art, power, and dependency.
Both a personal reckoning and a cultural document, I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going is a piercing portrait of queer creativity, ambition, and endurance, capturing what it meant to live, love, and make art in a moment that burned brightly and vanished just as fast.
This title is a remainder, offered at half the original cover price. Remainder copies are new and unread, but may show minor shelf wear.
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