The Brooklyn Rail

Peter McGough has always been anachronistic. Formerly one half of the artistic duo McDermott & McGough, the flamboyant dandy couple whose commitment to a Victorian-era lifestyle was legendary in New York’s glitzy downtown art scene of the 1980s, McGough today still very much presents as a character from a bygone era. So it is with Alphabet, a suite of twenty-seven cobalt-hued cyanotypes populated by lithesome naked male bodies, artfully contorted to depict each letter of the Roman alphabet in capital form. But don’t confuse McGough’s fondness for photography’s more antiquated technologies, or any passing resemblance to Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden’s risqué tableaux vivants, with nostalgia for some lavender-scented Wildean paradise. In our current era of digital socialization, where disappearing photographs and headless torsos traded on hook-up apps define a new code of queer erotics, McGough’s Alphabet is a prescient reflection upon photography’s role in the construction and visibility of gay identity and desire.

Individually, the cyanotypes that make up Alphabet possess a playful sense of titillation. McGough’s nude models—all the subjects are men—who form the letters A, P, and D look to be taking more cues from the Kamasutra than Ancient Greece’s famed sculptor Praxiteles. The Letter N (all works 2008/23) offers a lesson in the lascivious joys of typographical anatomy (the “stroke” of the letter’s connecting bar is particularly libidinous) while the formation of The Letter R’s “juncture” is a masterclass in ribald gymnastics. With other letters in the series, McGough’s models strike a more classical stance. In The Letter T, a strapping young adonis holds a ribbon above his head, the resulting pose evocative of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, while in The Letter I, a toned twink strikes a contrapposto stance, a clutch of willow branches held aloft in one hand, while at his feet rest two skulls. Vanity of vanities, and all that.

Early photography’s relationship with queer imagery is familiar territory for McGough, whose earlier works in partnership with McDermott included: The representation of the male organ, 1915 (1991), a detail shot of a sculpture’s flaccid penis, the print produced using a gum printing process; and “Extraordinaire: bonheur incroyable, Peter, 1st December 1893”, 1893 (1990), a cyanotype portrait depicting McGough in the costumed attire of a Byronic aristocrat. But there is more to Alphabet than the visually pleasing pastiche of Victorian homoeroticism and the aesthetic use of outmoded printing processes. Viewed as a single body of work, McGough’s Alphabet offers a meditation upon the role technology—specifically, photography—has played in shaping queer desire and identification.

McGough achieves this with his transformation of the gallery’s interior into a replica of the pioneering Midtown Manhattan photo salon 291, Alfred Stieglitz’s early twentieth-century photo exhibition space. Displaying his Alphabet cyanotypes within a reproduction of Stieglitz’s famed gallery, McGough quite literally inserts his images into a dialogue with the canonical history of photography itself, gesturing towards a connection that exists between the medium and the portrayal of the queer body. The era of Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionist vanguard marked not only an artistic revolution in photography, but also a technological golden age in which equipment became increasingly more accessible and prints easier to circulate. One result was the ushering in of a new age of pornography and, in particular, the circulation of gay erotic images.

Jennifer V. Evans has noted in her essay “Seeing Subjectivity: Erotic Photography and the Optics of Desire” that the increased distribution of sexually explicit queer photographs, whether via backroom photo albums, beefcake physique pulps, or hardcore magazines, saw a wider queer community admitted into a shared world of sensuality and desire. This union was in turn reenacted in the coital act itself. Such a loop—the pose informing the desire, the desire informing the pose—recalls Jonathan Crary’s assertion that photography possesses a dialectical capacity to dictate how we perceive ourselves and our bodies, and thus in turn, to inform how we show up when we are photographed. McGough’s Alphabet reminds us this image-driven cycle of lust existed long before the digital age. The “ABCs” of queer desire have always been the same. Now they are simply more accessible.