Released to coincide with a retrospective of the same title at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, McDermott & McGough: An Experience of Amusing Chemistry is an eccentric catalogue that examines over two decades of the infamous duo's photographic work. The volume presents more than 120 full-page images and includes an interview project by Matthew Higgs consisting of 20 questions posed to the artists by dealers, collectors, artists, and curators.

David McDermott and Peter McGough are specimens of a peculiar breed of artistic wizards who deviously confuse the past and the present through the science of photography. McDermott slyly replies to an interview question from his gallerist Howard Read, saying: "The history of photography is the history of abandoned process." The artists reinvigorate antiquated modes of developing film into a modern medium as they question the nature of science and truth. Their photographs are titled with anachronistic double dates, tricking the viewer into questioning which date is real. "The Last Supper, 1898," for instance, was created in 1998, but the photograph stylistically appears to be from its purported era.

In sync with the historical aura of the photography, the exhibition catalogue is designed in the style of a Victorian manuscript. The text includes the interview project and an essay on the artists' recent film Found, 1928, which was spliced from found film reels. Subsequent chapters are categorized by various types of photographic processing — salt, cyanotype, palladium, and gum bichromate printing. Of particular note is the series of palladium prints devoted to an 1880 French textbook of classic science experiments by Gaston Tissandier, called Les Récréations Scientifiques. McDermott & McGough recreate each experiment based on the illustrations in the book, including the chemical bonding test to which the exhibition owes its playful subtitle.

-Julia Fryett