Exhibition review for Camera Austria 95
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Washington DC
Until September 24, 2006
Norton Museum of Art
West Palm Beach, Florida
November 4, 2006 – January 28, 2007
Addison Gallery of American Art
Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
April 7 – July 31, 2007
For an artist who jokingly claims to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, the retrospective of William Wegman’s artistic output, currently on show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, demonstrates a remarkably sustained and consistent exploration of ideas over a period of almost four decades. Over 300 works embrace many artistic styles and movements across a diverse range of media. The show includes drawings, paintings, black & white photographs, large-format colour and black & white Polaroids, kitsch postcard paintings, altered works (featuring everything from Wegman’s early cast off photographs and found vintage photographs to old knitting magazines, all altered by cutting, painting, re-configuring or re-contextualising), c-type prints, works for mobile phones, artist’s books and almost 100 short videos.
On first impressions, this exhibition is a veritable clamouring pack; a teeming mass of individual framed works, each vying for attention. But Trevor Fairbrother’s thoughtful curation, which groups together works with little concern for chronology or consistency of media, ensures that the viewer can enter into the world of Wegman with comparative ease. The hanging effectively opens up a dialogue between the many facets of his art, and makes explicit Wegman’s (often denied) engagement with ideas. A predominant theme - apparent in the earliest photographs, such as Learn to Dance with Modern Electronic Equipment, 1973, (where we see Wegman literally waltzing with stacks of equipment) as well as in more recent Polaroids such as Prototype II, 2001 - is his engagement with experiments in art and technology which, due to Wegman’s quirky sensibilities, often highlights human foibles and fallibility. Despite its ability to make you laugh out loud, his work has a certain aesthetic of detachment, which extends to the content of the works. As the exhibition title, lifted from one of Wegman’s dashed-off sketches, suggests, Wegman’s trademark humour provides a foil for the disturbing undercurrents that are rarely absent from his work. His bodies, for example, may sometimes appear somewhat incomplete. Limbs, in particular hands, are often absent: strange, but understandable, in a Polaroid of a dog in a dress; more inexplicable in paintings, re-worked magazine covers and photographic self-portraits. Another thread throughout the show is Wegman’s visual engagement with similarity and difference, language and process, which manifests itself, for example, in the classic video Spelling Lesson, where dog and master act out a ridiculous charade, Gulls/Waves, 1973, a drawing which plays on the inversion of similarly-shaped pencil marks, and photographs such as the palindrome-inspired Madam I’m Adam, 1970, a double portrait using a flipped negative, which is not all that it seems... The general DIY aesthetic, ranging from scribbled line drawings, to stuck on greetings cards and postcards of famous artworks, extended by the hand (and imagination) of Wegman, belies a sophistication, a mastery of the visual as well as intellectual content, which is most apparent in the colour Polaroids.
Which brings me, of course, to the dogs. It would be impossible to review a Wegman retrospective without mentioning his enduring relationship with the Weimaraner. His original collaborator and muse, Man Ray, who effectively announced to the art world Wegman’s fascination with transformation (and to the rest of the world, Wegman’s consuming love of dogs), is now long gone, but a central presence in the show. Classic images such as Ray Bat, 1980, an inverted Polaroid, and Silver and Gold, 1982, heavenly close-ups of the ageing dog, stand out, as do the more anthropomorphic images of Fay Ray, the chameleon-like dog who followed. Fay appears in a multitude of postures and guises, including the disturbingly human Lolita, 1990, and the somewhat grotesque Bikini, 1999. Surely these works must be a send up of Cindy Sherman’s early work on identity? Wegman deals head on with anyone who has ever felt even slightly uneasy about the idea of dressing up dogs. It is difficult not to laugh at yourself when confronted with the altered work, 2 Dogs Dressed Up to Look Like Children, 1997, which features a vintage print of two small children dressed identically, with text added by Wegman, alluding to them as dogs. Finally, the more recent and most striking Polaroids - which range from the subtle merging of dog and architecture in the 2003-2004 multi-part works, Surround Sound and Room, to the almost monochromatic output of 2005 - echo some of the formal concerns of his early conceptual works.
Jo Longhurst, 2006