The Dogged Artistry of William Wegman : A Droll Dog and a Loopy Approach Are Still the Secrets to His Deadpan Style

“Since his death in 1982, Ray’s come back to me in dreams eight or nine times to save me from big problems,” says William Wegman, the multi-faceted artist whose droll photographs of his late pet Weimaraner, Man Ray, helped make Wegman one of the most affectionately regarded members of the New York art world.

“When I used to work on drawings and paintings, Ray would get jealous because he hated being ignored,” Wegman continues, “and when I first started painting again in 1986 Ray came back to me in a dream. He was speaking to me in English and he said: ‘Now wait a minute, Bill, we don’t have to do this. We can do some photographs right now. Or perhaps a video.’ ”

Named Man of the Year by the Village Voice in 1982, Man Ray had become a major art world celebrity by the time he died of cancer six years ago. After initially worming his way into art in 1969 by refusing to stay out of Wegman’s way while he was working in his L.A. studio (Wegman lived in Los Angeles from 1970-73), Ray went on to star in several hilarious videos, a highly acclaimed series of large, color Polaroids and was immortalized in a glossy coffee table book, “Man’s Best Friend.”

The unique chemistry that Wegman achieved by addressing fine art issues with a humble dog, obviously innocent of the portentousness of his task, continues to intrigue the artist, so here he is six years after Ray’s death in a Polaroid studio in lower Manhattan with Ray’s successor, Fay Ray; in a sense, Wegman is honoring the wishes Ray expressed to him in that dream.

Working for seven hours with the help of three assistants, Wegman coos and cajoles Fay into various poses; Fay on an ironing board, Fay in a baby chair, Fay in a dress. As might be expected, Wegman’s “technique” for these photos essentially boils down to endless coaxing and re-positioning of paws. Booking the Polaroid studio at a cost of $900 per day, plus $125 per exposure, Wegman usually works with the massive camera for three days every few months, shooting between 25 and 40 exposures a day. The 20-by-24-inch prints of Fay that he decides are good enough to include in exhibitions scheduled for this fall in Chicago and Baltimore will go for $3,000 each (shots of Man Ray are $10,000).

With motherhood looming in Fay’s future, Wegman is eager to photograph her “while she’s still got her figure,” and Fay seems equally eager to please Wegman. The rumor occasionally flits about the art world that Wegman mistreats his models, but dog and owner clearly adore each other. Wegman respectfully recognizes Fay’s limits and when she stubbornly draws the line and refuses to hold a pose, Wegman gives in. At one point Fay is briskly escorted into an adjoining room and the words “bad dog!” are overheard, after which Fay trots back into the room with a persecuted look on her face. For the most part, however, the mood in the studio is as amiable as the work Wegman produces.

Devoid of Anger

Amiable is a word that often comes up in connection with Wegman, who was recently described by Village Voice art critic Gary Indiana as “the most amiable and seductive personality in contemporary art.” Indiana goes on to say that “Wegman is one of the few strong artists in our time who has nothing hateful or mean-spirited in his work,” and indeed, whereas anger is a central ingredient in most current art, it’s altogether absent from Wegman’s work.

Putting a loopy smile on the cold, clinical face of conceptual art, Wegman is a master at striking the off-key note, and his work is charged with slightly wicked double-entendres and flourishes of gallows humor. Like existential comedians Steven Wright and Woody Allen, Wegman’s delivery is low-key, slightly pained and desperately sincere, and his work greets the viewer with the solemn, trusting gravity of a child.

In the scruffy videos he did in the early ‘70s--which still stand as perhaps his greatest work--he staged short, slightly surreal episodes of deadpan absurdity. We see Wegman teaching Man Ray to smoke (Man Ray wasn’t interested), correcting Man Ray’s spelling, and Wegman portraying a chronic loser who thinks of himself as leading a charmed life. As proof of his good luck he recalls the incredibly fortunate day he found a T-shirt in a dryer at the Laundromat--and it almost fit. A video from 1986 titled “Dog Baseball” shows us exactly that; a game of baseball played by two teams of dogs, with Wegman cast as a combination sportscaster/cheerleader.

Shy, Self-Effacing

The photo shoot concluded, Wegman and Fay return to the spacious loft on the Lower East Side where Wegman lives and works. Now 45, Wegman comes across in conversation as a virtual blueprint of his work. Soft-spoken, perhaps a bit shy, he’s a self-effacing man with a sophisticated sense of humor that’s at odds with his wistful, boyish demeanor.

After spending the ‘70s lurching through two marriages and some heavy partying, Wegman’s calmed down considerably, and these days he amuses himself with coffee, club soda, South American literature, classical music, movies and the Red Sox.

“I used to be a hang-out-at-the-bar-after-work kind of guy and thought self-destructive behavior was part of being an artist,” he recalls, “but I know now that I was deluding myself. Some of the domestic crises I was involved in came out in my drawings, but, on the whole, what I was going through wasn’t reflected in my work--it was more reflected in a lack of work.”

Evidence of various projects--drawing tools, carrousels of slides, video equipment--is scattered about the loft, while several large paintings in various stages of completion lean here and there. A massive attic is given over to storage of props--wigs, racks of thrift store clothing, baby furniture--many of which have turned up in one dog photo or another. On seeing Wegman’s studio it’s immediately apparent that his activities as an artist involve a great deal more than photographing dogs, yet that’s the work he’s known for.

“The most widely held misconception about my work is that it’s mostly about dogs,” says Wegman as he fiddles with an espresso machine. “My overall body of work has been upstaged by the dog photos and for a while I really hated that. I felt like screaming, ‘Hey! I don’t do dogs!’ But then after I lost Man Ray I was so profoundly affected by his death that I stopped saying anything bad about the photos. I felt I should show more gratitude towards the work.

“After Man Ray died, all the reviews of the work I did from 1982 through 1986 would include some comment along the lines of: ‘Frankly, I miss the dog.’ Well, obviously, I missed the dog too, but I’d decided never to work with another dog again, and I didn’t get Fay to photograph her. Then one day I took her with me to Polaroid and I realized I’d be denying myself a basic pleasure to not take pictures of her. I try to discipline myself not to work with the dog all the time because it’s something I know how to do and I don’t want it to become too automatic. That’s one of the things I like about switching mediums--it turns you upside down. I don’t trust it when it goes to smooth, and I don’t like to repeat myself.”

Though the casual observer might assume that Wegman’s been plowing the same lucrative field since he bought Man Ray (at the insistence of his first wife) in 1969, he has, in fact, been through numerous incarnations as an artist. Born in Holyoke, Mass., into what he describes as “an Ozzie & Harriet family with young and encouraging parents,” Wegman was interested in art from the time he was a child.

“I can remember the illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post making a big impression on me, and I used to draw all the time when I was a kid. The first 17 years of my life I felt very estranged and outside of society--even though I wasn’t the most miserable child, I felt like I had no ego or any real connection. Then I discovered all those wonderful, heavy things--art, music, religion, philosophy--and I had quite a fantasy about the life of an artist at that point. I became a very serious aesthete type of person compared to how I was in high school, which was sort of like a confused hockey player.

“Through my first year of grad school I did paintings--hard-edge, glow-in-the-dark things on shaped canvases--then I got involved in the art and technology movement and started doing performances and working with fiberglass screen material. At that point I thought of myself as a conceptual/earth/performance artist--I was always floating things down the river and photographing them. I really admired the conceptual artists from that period--people like Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Robert Smithson--and I was thrilled when I met them and they liked me. I figured they’d hate me, but I guess I was like recess for conceptual art.

“I sort of stumbled into photography by accident,” he continues. “I was documenting an installation piece and I started to cheat a bit in order to make the installation fit the camera better. I suddenly realized I was actually making pictures. At about the same time I started working with video making pieces that were short, simple and clear, and I liked the fact that people either got it or they didn’t.

“It seems hard to imagine this now, but at the time it seemed almost illegal to do things that were so easy to get--there was this feeling that art had to be obscure and difficult. But I suddenly got the feeling that I was finally on the right track. This was in 1969 and by the time I got to California and got Man Ray things were really moving.”

Quantum Leaps in L.A.

Wegman moved to Los Angeles in 1970, where he lived until 1973, working in studios in San Pedro and Venice. Though his work progressed in quantum leaps during his L.A. years and he received the first glowing reviews of his career here, his pieces weren’t selling, so in 1973 he pulled up stakes and relocated to New York.

It was during his years in Los Angeles that Wegman finally found his own voice--a development largely attributable to the fact that he granted himself the freedom to wander away from the cutting edge of the avant-garde and tuned in to with his own instincts. This allowed his work to blossom but it also shifted his position in the art world’s critical community.

“While most artists are constantly struggling to establish new turf and new territory, Bill makes work about things that speak to him on an intuitive level,” says Peter MacGill, Wegman’s photo dealer in New York. “He’s always had the strength to follow his instincts regardless of the currents around him, and if some people take him less seriously because he ignores trends, that’s their problem.”

“Bill is very sophisticated about daily life but he doesn’t play politics,” adds Wegman’s longtime dealer Holly Solomon. “He’s not a social artist, and he doesn’t care about the role or being seen at the right restaurant.”

While Wegman’s work has always been favorably reviewed, it’s never been the subject of the kind of deeply theoretical writing the other major artists of his generation have elicited. Does he feel that the art world takes him less seriously because his work is accessible to a non-art audience?

“I don’t think the art world ascribes less weight to my work because it’s funny and easy to like. Do you think that’s true?” he asks, slightly alarmed. “People don’t tell me things like that--although people have told me they wanted to write serious things about my work but felt foolish doing it.”

The art world has always had a somewhat strained relationship with humor, which is a singularly hard thing to pull off in painting. Demanding an extremely light touch, humor is ever in danger of collapsing into triviality or cruelty, moreover, humor frequently tends to be topical and, hence, doesn’t wear well over the years. Wegman, however, is gifted with a crack sense of timing, and his humor rings with a resonance of pathos that should continue to speak to audiences far into the future.

“I don’t think of myself as a funny person,” he says, in offering his thoughts on humor in art. “I can remember being shown Paul Klee’s ‘The Twittering Machine’ in art school and being told ‘this is an example of humor in art’ and ‘it provokes a wry smile’ but I didn’t find it funny at all. I don’t know if it’s possible to be funny in painting. There’s art that’s funny-peculiar--people like Richard Artschwager, Ed Ruscha or Gilbert & George--and Jeff Koons is funny in a weird, corporate, scary way, but generally painting doesn’t lend itself to humor. I don’t know what it’s best suited for but it does have it’s limitations. I was unable to paint for many years because I was overwhelmed by the grandiosity of it. I thought you had to be tall and have an aquiline nose to be a good painter.”

An Original Vision

Wegman caught a number of people off guard last spring with a show of paintings at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York that suggested him to be a painter with a surprisingly mature and original vision. Hailed in Art in America as “unerringly skillful work that brings the full force of Wegman’s ideas into play,” his recent paintings were described in New York Magazine as “endearing free fancies that are epic in a quite unexpected and utterly humble way,” while the New York Times observed that “the work weaves together this artist’s well-known expertise as a storyteller with a new-found talent as a painter.”

Described by Wegman as “a sort of collective boy’s life,” his paintings combine the kind of cliched imagery associated with a child’s notion of adventure--dinosaurs, pirates, airplanes, circus animals--with a luminous style of mystical landscape painting.

It’s neither night nor day in this dreamy netherworld that seems to be lit from within by incandescent light and where the air is perfumed with mystery and danger. Lush foliage and atmospheric murk intermingle and envelope figures, buildings and machines that lurk in the mist, in these sensual images built around a veiled interplay of innocence and eroticism.

“The paintings have a real dreamlike quality,” says Wegman of his new work, “but they aren’t taken from dreams--I describe them as some kind of Boy Scout Britannica. At the moment I’m referring quite a bit to the Wonderbook, which is a set of encyclopedias for children from the ‘50s, and for a while I was looking at Webelos, which is the Cub Scout handbook. I remember many of the things in these books from my own childhood. Childhood is a real mine field, and the more distance you get on your childhood memories, the stranger they become. They finally come to seem like distant, familiar shapes and colors that you can sort of wheel around at will.

“I have this strong memory from when I was small of spending endless hours digging tunnels and holes. As an adult I interpret that as a very sexual pursuit, but I also see it as a way of hiding out and immersing myself in the beautiful textures and colors of dirt . . . reds, browns, the whole sensuality of it. And that’s what I’m doing as an adult. It’s a kind of digging.”

In light of the solid reputation he’s built with the help of his Weimaraners, Wegman’s move to painting posed something of a risk, however, he comments that “if I had to single out an area where I feel confident it would be my ability to switch gears and see what’s really happening in the medium rather than what you hope is happening, and to surrender to it. I seem to be able to do that. For instance, there would’ve been no point in trying to do ‘War and Peace’ with the kind of crude video I was using in the early ‘70s. But I developed ideas that allowed it to live up to its potential--and I still like that work a lot. Those videos from the early ‘70s have a berserk originality, and they still seem really fresh to me. There’s a solid 30 minutes of stuff from those 7 years.

“But, as far as feeling confidence and a sense of achievement, it’s stunning how quickly it evaporates once you’ve achieved a goal. It seems like it’s never quite enough, and I’ve never done anything that made me sit back and gloat for 10 days or anything. I’m a driven person, and when I was in art school I was very ambitious. I might be lying if I said I wasn’t ambitious now, but I can truthfully say I’m not competitive. I don’t worry much about my shows, despite the fact that even though I’ve been showing since 1970, my show of photographs of Fay last December was the first one that ever sold out. This one sold well because everyone who regretted not having bought a Man Ray piece didn’t pass up the chance to buy a Fay piece very cheaply. So this show was like the ‘Helga’ series--long awaited.”

Like his work, Wegman seems an understated man, the sort who keeps his wittiest bons mots to himself and is apt to edge into a corner at a party where he can unobtrusively observe things. He seems to court attention in a circuitous, somewhat ambivalent fashion, and one wonders how comfortable he feels leading the life of a famous artist.

“I’ve always been the kind of person who’ll do something to get attention, then duck for cover--and that’s one of the reasons video was so ideal for me,” Wegman confesses. “I could safely accomplish a funny thing and then vanish. Having a dog worked in a similar way; people would see me and their response would be: ‘Oh, there’s Man Ray.’ Ray enabled me to sort of space out and dream.”

‘I’ve always been the kind of person who’ll do something to get attention, then duck for cover.’