COMMENTARY : Wegman: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks : Art: Unheralded artist mixes creature comforts with cultural values. A spate of worldwide exhibitions show his appeal.

For a 47-year-old artist of unheroic pretensions, William Wegman’s career can hardly be said to be languishing. Two concurrent exhibitions of his recent work opened recently in Los Angeles (paintings at James Corcoran and large Polaroids at Linda Cathcart). These will be followed this month by two similar exhibitions in New York. And those will be followed in May by a retrospective exhibition that opens at the Kunst Museum in Lucerene and will travel from there.

But even this Swiss exhibition, entitled “William Wegman: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Videotapes,” fails to encompass the encyclopedic scope of Wegman’s recent endeavors. A little over a year ago, for instance, he accomplished the well-nigh impossible task of completing a genuinely funny, aesthetically serious, politically relevant work of public sculpture for the Stuart Collection in San Diego.

On a beautiful promontory adjacent to the UCSD campus, Wegman constructed a “scenic overlook,” complete with telescope, water fountain and a large bronze drawing of the view. This “overlook,” however, faces away from the Pacific and presents us with a tripartite vision of what we would gladly overlook: the dread “valley of the condos,” spreading east, which we may contemplate as a landscape vista, a drawing in institutional bronze, or in a “video” close-up through the telescope.

Still, even from this exalted and ironic promontory, at this enviable moment in his career, there has to be something bittersweet for William Wegman about the schizophrenic nature of his impact on our culture. He could claim, for instance, with some justification, to be spiritual father to some of America’s “most serious new art.” And he could claim, as well, with equal justification, to be the spiritual father of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

But I doubt that he would claim either. It would be less a testament to his influence than an emblem of his isolation, since both the “Funniest Home Videos” and the “most serious new art” are, for the most part, creatures of a cultural mind-set that is antithetical to Wegman’s.

This mind-set first came to prominence in the late ‘50s, then blossomed again in the late ‘80s. It regards image-making as an essentially polarized activity. In the ‘50s you either made “serious” abstraction or you “sold out” to Madison Avenue. These days you either make hermetic Euro-crit for the galleries or gaga lumpen -pop for the tube. Between these polar extremes, Wegman continues to cultivate an equatorial territory he has less staked out for himself than inherited by default.

The perimeters of this domain are deftly delineated in a 1984 drawing that portrays two vaguely Matissean heads, a woman and a man, frowning earnestly at one another. The heads are labeled “Wife” and “Husband,” and beneath them is the caption: “2 philosophers worrying about everyday problems.” These people live in “the Wegman zone”--where art, philosophy, and everyday relationships interpenetrate and impinge upon one another, tantalizing us with the possibility of communication, guaranteeing its improbability.

“There is something more obvious here than has otherwise been supposed,” Wegman seems to say, gazing at this impure world. And his comedy arises from its improbable revelation. In Wegman’s first video with the late Weimaraner, Man Ray, we are introduced to the noble pooch as he noisily chews on what he assumes to be bone, and we know to be a condenser microphone. The scene is at once funny and sad because that symbolic “bone of contention” does, in fact, establish a skewed, improbable community between man and beast. The distance between “medium and message” is collapsed as Man Ray “eats the mike.” The tragedy of technological distance is miraculously transformed into the divine comedy of its violation.

Wegman loves these tiny victories, those moments when the manipulative wickedness of what technology and history teach us is redeemed by the benign stupidity of things we actually learn. For his new paintings, he has gleaned hundreds of historical, scientific, technological and architectural images from the encyclopedias he pored over as a child. But he has “detoxified” them, defused all of their virulent modernist subtexts about “progress,” “evolution” and “style” and reconstituted them into a series of extravagant capriccios.

Like those imaginary tableaux of antique architecture that 18th-Century Englishmen used to send home like post cards from Italy, these new paintings tease the iconography of history and technology from amid veils of falling color. They hilariously translate the rhetoric of “prograss” into haunting, subaqueous visions of Oriental timelessness. And in their innocent drollery they are indeed like post cards, not from Italy, but from Wegman’s “prehistoric childhood.”

But for all the high comedy Wegman derives from such subversions and lapses of communication--his work does, nearly always, communicate. It is about communication, however imperfect, and the laughter it calls forth is the mark of its accessibility. It’s not surprising then that Wegman responds like a tuning fork to point where it all goes phony. Usually, this point is marked by a particularly infelicitous effort at “double-encoding” (putting a message into a code that communicates it; then, putting that code into a code that obscures it, or restricts its recipients.)

The kind of double encoding that concerns Wegman most urgently involves re-encoding images of the phenomenal world with human cultural values.

Wegman’s most hilarious send-ups of this proclivity are his color Polaroids of Man and Fay Ray. Each of these pictures fails pitifully in an attempt to “signify” the already “significant” image of the dog and, in its failure, allows both codes to be read--thus making a third message available.

It would be unfair, of course, (not to mention stupid) to credit the Weimaraners with having “influenced” Wegman’s art. But the fact remains that the dogs have played a more active role in Wegman’s production than Picasso’s mistresses did in his. And, certainly, by choosing to collaborate with a creature from another genetic universe. Wegman created one of the great comedy teams of the late 20th Century.

In the tradition of Abbott and Costello, and the Smothers Brothers, Wegman and Ray exploit the relationship between a manipulative sadist and a passive masochist. The humor arises from the fact that the passive partner, no matter what indignities the manipulator inflicts upon him, remains benign (if often confused) and incapable of being manipulated in a satisfying manner. The relationship is continually redeemed by his absolute refusal to acknowledge darker aspects of his sidekick’s personality.

Abbott and Costello, of course, fight the never-ending battle between endomorph and ectomorph; Tom and Dick Smothers exploit their already extant sibling rivalry. But that between Wegman and Ray is the more profound one between species. Ultimately, it pits the society and intimacy that Wegman and Ray share against the culture that they do not. The running joke has to do with Wegman’s relentless, futile attempts to anthropomorphize the dog by re-encoding his image.

He tricks the dog up with all manner of cultural iconography and disguise, detains him in any number of “formal contexts” and, in every case, fails miserably to possess him. Man Ray remains firm in his adamantine, loving dogginess through it all. To err is human, the subtext goes, to forgive canine.

My favorite of all these hilariously unsuccessful efforts is “Bad Dog,” a large Polaroid in which Man Ray, decked out in devil drag, is placed theatrically behind a roaring fire. Unfortunately, Man Ray gazes through the fire with a look of such benign doggy distress as to render the accouterments of metaphysical evil in which he has been disguised profoundly ludicrous. Nature and culture don’t mix in these works, and, however fortunate or tragic one might take this to be, one’s final memory of “Bad Dog” is not that funny at all. It is a vision of two creatures gazing longingly at one another, through a maze of technological and linguistic barricades, across a stormy, genetic Bosphorus.

Finally, then, you have to admire the tenacity with which Wegman has held his position at the unstable intersection of culture and society. On the one hand, he has exploited their discontinuity to give us a comic vision of their reconciliation. On the other, he has provided us with a chilling demonstration of the ways that culture endeavors, in the absence of social values, devolve into manipulative pet tricks. It is not a particularly fashionable task, nor a very funny one, but it is one worth doing.

Hickey is an art historian and writer who teaches art history at the University of Nevada at Los Vegas.