Bowwowing The Art World

By Richard Lacayo

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, he had the comic gravity of Buster Keaton and the acrobatic ambiguities of a four-legged pun. The pictures made Wegman, until then a lesser-known Conceptualist, the kind of artist who gets invited on Carson and Letterman. Four years after Man Ray died in 1982, Wegman acquired Fay Ray, a chocolaty female of the same breed who has been his muse and model ever since.

The 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 in whatever medium suggested itself -- video, snapshots, the artist's own body -- the more offhand the better.

The 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 the puppy doing something as simple as trying to extract a biscuit from a glass bottle. As a comic deflation of the doggedness of human endeavor, Man Ray's tireless noodling with his bottle ranks as a bit of theater that Samuel Beckett might have enjoyed.

Wegman's blackout skits on video were followed in the '70s by cartoonish drawings and whimsies staged for the camera. Like the big, vaporous paintings he started showing in 1987, they have their moments of Thurberesque charm, but it's only the loopy dog pictures that click. Situated somewhere between Marcel Duchamp's cunning art pranks and David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks, they rib Conceptualism even as they lay out its possibilities. But in the end their effectiveness rests upon powers of portrait psychology that owe little to Conceptualist mind games.

In Wegman's best pictures, his implacable dogs are a surrogate for the part of ourselves that we hold back from the world, above all in our moments of abject obedience. In one picture after another, the secret of Fay Ray's charm is the way she gets the last laugh, even when wrapped in aluminum foil, by facing down the camera with her own impenetrable self-enclosure.

As a premium, Wegman's dogs can double as Surrealist found objects. In the 1990 Lolita, Fay Ray's puppy Battina is draped, sex-kitten-style, along a Le Corbusier chair. With her spindly legs and nipple-studded underside offered as cheesecake, Battina is a jolt, a dream of mutant sexuality as well as a reminder that the bulges we make such a fuss about on people are just their standard equipment as mammals.

Does Wegman's work qualify as art if he can't keep a straight face? Why not? Dada was a punch line to the sick joke of World War I, Surrealism a field of comic non sequiturs, Pop art a pie in the face of solemn Abstract Expressionism. Given their devotion to whatever was ephemeral and disreputable, the Conceptualists were bound to go in for jokes, the second- class citizens of mental life. But the philosophical pitfall of Conceptualism is piffle, the temptation to be content with art lite. Or as Wegman once said, "As soon as I got funny, I killed any majestic intentions in my work."

Sometimes even more modest intentions don't get satisfied. Quite a few of / these big-eyed dog shots feel like visual one-liners that merely extend a Wegman product line that has bowwowed the art market. The pictures of Fay Ray dressed up in gowns and colonial housedresses are one step removed from those wallpaper murals of poker-playing bulldogs. Put her on roller skates, as Wegman has done, and she's just the thinking man's J. Fred Muggs.

Maybe it was Wegman's own sense of dwindling returns from the dog pictures that led him to take up painting. His large canvases are covered in a thin, mottled wash of acrylic. It gives them the look of oversize watercolors, bringing to mind anything from the mists of J.M.W. Turner to Raoul Dufy's sunny mats of pigment. Bobbing to the surface of this broth are simple images -- planes, ships, cowboys, Greek temples, water sprinklers -- that Wegman adapts from such feeders to the collective unconscious as grade-school readers and illustrated encyclopedias. The aim may be to bring these generic memories into a suggestive mix or to poke at the juvenile sources of our mature assumptions, but Wegman's room-temperature musings don't clinch yet. You smile and wait for his ideas to coalesce, but . . . nothing.

Maybe it doesn't matter. If painting doesn't work out for him, he can always go to the dogs again. It's probably just a matter of time before Battina too has puppies.