Word: wegman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Whether or not the dog is man's best friend, it's been good to William Wegman. For many years Wegman's best friend was Man Ray, a soulful blue-gray Weimaraner that is by now the most famous artist's model since Alfred Stieglitz picked up the scent of Georgia O'Keeffe. In the oversize Polaroids that Wegman started making in the late 1970s, Man Ray can be found patiently enduring whatever new conceit his master would visit on him. Dusted in flour, tricked up as an elephant, wrapped head to toe in Christmas-tree garlands...
...Wegman retrospective, which continues through April 19 at the Whitney Museum in New York City, then moves to Houston on May 16, puts his famous dog pictures in the context of his career as an artist whose specialty has been mildly cerebral jokes. For the Conceptualists, whose outlook was just taking hold among younger artists when Wegman was at the University of Illinois in the mid-'60s, anything could be art so long as it wasn't a painting or sculpture, those luxury items that the galleries peddled to the bourgeoisie. Works were conceived as ideas to be preserved...
...West Coast branch of Conceptualism, which Wegman joined during the two years he spent in the Los Angeles area starting in 1970, had the best comedians. In his early days Ed Ruscha photographed parking-lot patterns from the air: a satirist's geometric abstraction. Bruce Nauman photographed himself performing visual puns, like shooting water from his mouth and calling the picture Self-Portrait as a Fountain. And Wegman started making deadpan videos of himself spraying an entire can of deodorant into his armpit. When his new Weimaraner got into the act, Wegman recognized that it was enough to tape...