We are often suspicious of artists who make their actual lives into their work. The London duo Gilbert and George are an example, as are Mcdermott and Mcgough. Are they charlatans, we wonder, or attention-seekers, or eccentrics? Gemma Tiptonmeets them to find out.
There's something very attractive about nostalgia, a lovely yearning for things that, because they are long gone, you cannot have. That leaves you free to romanticise, and not trouble to consider the hardships of reality. Those hankering for the glories of bygone days when ladies wore long dresses, when men were gentlemen, and when horses drew elegant carriages along gracious streets, tend not to dwell on privations such as a lack of central heating, refrigerators, dishwashers and motor cars.
Artists David McDermott and Peter McGough live in the past, but in a manner too real to be considered nostalgic. Their celebrations of the past, or "time capsules", as they like to call the spaces they create, are pretty thorough. You step into another era, warts and all. This is nowhere more true than in McDermott's house in Dublin, which is frozen in time somewhere at the start of the last century.
The main mood of the place is Victorian, there are lots of dark wooden pieces of furniture, elaborate shell ornaments, pieces of lace, painted china, and more taxidermy than is really that comfortable to be around. Unlike the careful stage sets of the museum experience, this is a little chilly, somewhat chaotic, quite grimy in places, but decidedly atmospheric.
The house is heated by turf fires, and most of the electric light fittings have been removed, too, one weak bulb remaining in one of the bedrooms. There are details everywhere. A cabinet contains an egg collection, there is a little silver match holder by the fireplace, and chamber pots and teapots.
It's a fascinating place, and McDermott, who lives full-time in Ireland, also dresses the part. He has been recognisable around Dublin for a number of years, walking or on a bicycle, and clothed in a style that was indeed Victorian a while ago, but has now edged forward, more Great Gatsby than knickerbockers.
Over in New York, Peter McGough tells me he is more immersed in the 1930s, but confesses to being somewhat less exacting than his creative partner, the kitchen in his apartment being new, but screened behind a curtain.
Successful artists in the US, where they were born, the pair came to Ireland in the early 1990s when the Manhattan Soho art scene collapsed. McDermott is now an Irish citizen, while McGough makes regular trips here. The distance helps the creative partnership, McGough tells me. "It has been 27 years, and we've never argued about the art, we've argued about everything else . . . 3,000 miles is a dream of a lasting relationship."
In this relationship McDermott creates the theories, and McGough creates the work. So what exactly is it that they do? Sean Kissane, who is the curator of their exhibition, opening next Wednesday at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, gives me a hint. If you have a room full of objects from 1920, he suggests, decorated in the style of 1920, with an artist dressed in 1920s clothes, using a photographic process from 1920, is the resulting photograph actually from 1920? A question which, basically, translates as a inquiry about the nature of time.
At Imma, they are showing photographs, in some of the oldest rooms at the museum, which they have decorated as "environments, they're domestic, so you're not looking at them in a white cube," says McDermott. The photographs, of objects and of people, are taken using archaic processes such as salt prints and cyanotypes. And they are images that seem caught between the past and the present in an odd sort of frozen, suspended-between-times type of a way.
One of the reasons for this is that while McDermott and McGough immerse themselves in the past, you still arrive at their work through the present. Even in the house McDermott has created, you are aware of the double-decker buses passing by the windows.
And that goes some way toward answering Kissane's question: no, the photograph isn't from the 1920s, because while you might change how you live, and the things you wear, you can't get rid of your knowledge of technology, of wars, of human history.
McGough points out that all this tells you is how nothing really changes, at the end of the day. "Think of kids with their lingo, and their clothes, those young people become old, and then it's all over for them. It doesn't mean anything, there's still desire in the world, still human nature."
As McDermott describes it, it's more about denying a particular approach to time, which he calls corporate time. "Corporations are interested in corporate time being observed everywhere, even if it's in the deepest part of the Amazon jungle. And they say if you're not in corporate time, you're disadvantaged. And they're right, in a way," he says.
We are taught to admire artists, like Tracey Emin, who use the substance of their lives as inspiration for their work, but nonetheless, we are often more suspicious of artists who make their actual lives into their work. The London duo Gilbert and George are an example, as are McDermott and McGough. Are they charlatans, we wonder, or attention-seekers, or eccentrics?
"We are artists, and we do crave attention," says McGough, although that doesn't fully explain the clothes, the lifestyle, or the lengths McDermott may go to - he doesn't fly, and used to go back and forth to New York (he hasn't been for six years now) on the Queen Elizabeth. "It's just like Irish Ferries," he tells me.
The pair first met in New York's East Village. "David was a performer," remembers McGough. "He was singing at this vaudeville venue, and someone said 'you should go see this person, he reminds me of you,' so I went and said 'you're out of your mind, he's nothing like me!' But I had moved into an apartment that he had moved out of two weeks prior, and there was a picture of him. And his roommate, who he had fallen out with, told me all these horrible stories about him that I thought were fascinating. And we just kind of took up together."
The pair are rejecting the "package" that passes for contemporary life - "the music, the clothes, the interiors, the manner of speaking, the way of making love, the way of getting angry," says McDermott. "It's all provided by the media as an instruction book on how to live in the present moment, and the shops provide the means, the accessories."
Unlike many with theories of how the world could be different, they are living their experiment. And in their celebration of that, and their intriguing photographs and antidotes to progress, perhaps there is a little nostalgia after all.
McDermott & McGough - An Experience of Amusing Chemistry: Photographs 1990-1890 (sic) is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, February 6th-April 27th. www.modernart.ie