Serious or Not, His Art Is Intriguing and Fun

It’s hard to know just how seriously to take William Wegman.

He photographs his dogs, draped in boas and chiffons, wearing swim fins or tucked into bed. He pours a “muzak ground” of paint onto canvases, then scatters images on top that he’s gleaned from the encyclopedia. He draws maps, rearranging the countries so Ireland floats in the Mediterranean, Egypt in the North Sea. And he makes videotapes for “Sesame Street” of his dog, Fay Ray, demonstrating addition and subtraction.

One critic has hailed Wegman, whose second retrospective exhibition is now wrapping up a three-year tour of Europe and the United States, as “the art world’s most amusing heavyweight lightweight.” Others dismiss him as a clown milking a few good gimmicks.

For Wegman, whose work is on view at the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla, being two things and yet neither is what matters, what gives his work its distinctive “edgy, strange tone.” Wearing a serious navy blue sport coat over an absurdly bright, casual shirt, Wegman discussed his “polyphonic art” in a lecture and private reception Sunday at the Athenaeum.

Pages from his first limited-edition artist’s book, “Field Guide to North America (and other regions),” hang in frames there. When the 15 copies of the book are bound and published by Lapis Press later this summer, “transparent pages will fall over counterpoint pages of image and text,” he said. Maple leaves from Maine and plastic ones from Taiwan will mingle in the book, among drawings, hand-painted photographs and watercolors.

Notes and coy comments meander through the book’s 40-odd pages, blending the earnestness of a 19th-Century naturalist (“Animals go into hiding in winter”) and the urbane sarcasm of a New Yorker of the ‘90s (“How many animals can you find hidden in this picture?--None”). Wegman, who divides his time between Manhattan and the Maine woods, borrowed from how-to nature craft books, primers and encyclopedias for his quirky field guide, with its pictographic title page painted on a slice of birch bark.

“It’s fun to stretch old texts, texts that are defunct and no longer useful, to warp them into a new perspective,” he said.

Wegman’s brand of parody is also stamped upon another of his works in town, the Stuart Collection’s “La Jolla Vista View,” permanently installed in 1988 on the campus of UC San Diego. Situated on a bluff overlooking “all of what’s wrong with Southern California,” the pseudo-historic marker maps a panorama of shopping malls and cookie-cutter condominiums.

“The tone is similar” to the field guide, Wegman said. “It’s not satirical; it’s making fun but not really. It’s tongue-in-cheek but not really. Your tongue’s in a different part of your mouth than your cheek.”

Wegman, 48, was “a crafty, busy little boy,” a bullied Cub Scout who grew up to become a conceptual artist in the 1970s.

“In the early ‘70s, I had a beautiful, minimal trio of things I did”--black and white drawings, photographs and videos. Then Polaroid called and invited him to work with their new 20-by-24-inch instant color print camera.

At first, Wegman photographed only black and white things, including his sleek gray Weimaraner, Man Ray.

“One day I snuck in a bottle of Revlon and painted his toenails red. That corrupted me,” he confessed, and his colorful canine antics continued. The Man Ray photographs, which he thought he would do “for about a week,” continued until the dog’s death in 1982. His photography became “museless” after that, so he resumed painting, a sport he had abandoned in the late 1960s.

His paintings of buildings, boats, animals and most everything else obey the same “lazy” logic that governs much of Wegman’s work. He might start by consulting an encyclopedia, such as the “Book of Knowledge” that bowed his family’s shelves when he was a boy.

“I like painting Indians, and then other things starting with the letter I.”

Since adopting another Weimaraner, Fay Ray, Wegman has also begun photographing again. Next year, Disney’s Hyperion Press will publish the first of “Fay’s Fairy Tales,” a series of photographically illustrated books in which the dog plays all of the female leads. They start with Cinderella.

The pages of Wegman’s “Field Guide” now on view at the Athenaeum are still works in progress, he said. As the book’s character becomes more defined, drawings that “were not the right tone, too snotty or off-the-wall,” are being omitted. Those with sweet-and-sour personality, Wegman’s polyglot mix of the quaint, banal, astute and entertaining will stay.

Each of the 15 copies to be published will be different, but all will be bound in a wood veneer. Crafty as ever, Wegman plans to inset a compass in each cover so that the books will open only when pointing north.

* William Wegman’s “Field Guide to North America (and other regions)” continues at the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, 1008 Wall St., La Jolla, through June 6. Public hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.