Rooseum-WILLIAM WEGMAN/Doesn't Fit-Fits

William Wegman
Doesn't Fit - Fits

Conceptual art in America of the early 70's brought the return to the narrative, and photography - highly accessible but held in low esteem in conventional art contexts - emerged as the preferred medium of the period. The use of video spread from the art colleges of the universities, as did political rhetoric and politically-conscious position-taking - this in contrast to the serial form of pop art and minimalism and their laid-back disengagement during the preceding decade. Conceptual art tried hard not to confirm that art should be viewed as an object - it not only withdrew from the market but it also established a norm for what might be considered honorable artistic activity: a commercially successful artist is not a (morally) good artist. Conceptual art emerged in a politically and economically bankrupt society in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate.

The authority and prestige of the social institutions had been undermined. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King had opened wounds and revealed abysses in the guileless surface of American post-war society. In 1972 Richard Nixon was re-elected president with the greatest plurality in US history, but the end of his career turned out to be far from glamorous. After the 1970's, both the media and Hollywood began to focus its attention on political miscalculations, abuse of power, corruption, conspiracy theories, and special interests. Higher taxes and federal involvement in social issues came to be viewed by Republican politicians, such as Governor Ronald Reagan, as next to un-American. At Kent State, the National Guard had been called in - and killed - students exercising their democratic rights and freedoms in protesting the war. America was at war with herself over the meaning of America .

If the 60's had brought with them the objectification of art, the art of the 70's thus became an often objectless field , in which the interest, the broadening of context, and the potential associative surroundings the work generated became the most important criterion of quality. Artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark who worked with buildings to be demolished and with abandoned factories, among other things, and Robert Smithson who stayed clear of the institutions with his large-scale projects, returned to galleries and museums with a photographic material which might best be described as documentary. The role of photography was mainly straightforward, representational, and indexical. But photography and video in the 70's also carried with them a hint of instruction and do-it-yourself. Conceptual art and fluxus highlighted art as a potential for change and as social model: by stressing chance and hazard, by shifting proportions, time, and values, art shows us a world which is put together in a way that defies the conventional-way-it-has-always-been.

William Wegman can hardly be described as a political artist - he describes the message of his art with characteristic distance as "pathetic irony." 1. Wegman regards himself and the surrounding world of the 70's with a weltschmerz-afflicted Romantic's certain instinct for loss, lack, and residue, that which does not fit in, that which is left over. 150 years ago, Søren Kierkegaard created the precondition for an existential political position in noting that his contemporaries preferred the role of the distant, aesthetic spectator to taking responsibility for their lives. A mediocre individual hiding his responsibility in the collective and the notion that societal development will take care of it sooner or later, an individual capable of enjoying his own misery.

In the early 70's, Wegman availed himself of the rich possibilities of role play offered by performance art, using it as alibi in embarking on ironic investigations centering on himself. He challenged and undermined his own prestige, mainly in his videos whose absurd naturalness resemble Adrian Piper's Catalysis series, begun in 1970 - although lacking its racial-political overtones. The works stemming from this period are characterized by a paradoxical, double-coded credibility. The young generation of American intellectuals and artists of the 70's put the social shortcomings of society against the militarism of US foreign policy. It seemed impossible to refer to political, economic, and social conditions without ending up in absurdities.

The American dream seemed over and done with. The models had fallen, and with idealism in society on the wane, the position of European modernism, which had fled across the Atlantic from one political collapse to another, was also undermined. To William Wegman the utopia of modernism was dead. Present everywhere in the art of the 70's, however, was the modern avant-garde notion that art, by remaining attuned to society, would provide it with a more accurate picture of itself and thereby open it up to change.

In his video Massage Chair (ca. 1972), Wegman - with irony bordering on devastation - plays the part of the salesman of a "massage chair", with American immigrant architect Mies van der Rohe reputedly acting as consultant to the designer (cf. The Barcelona Chair , 1971). The chair has metal legs and a wooden seat - just an ordinary desk chair. A cartoon drawing reads "Shape of the desk doesn't matter; kids still get bored" (ca.1973). After finishing his studies in painting in 1967, Wegman taught sculpture at various art colleges until 1971: he knew from his own experience that the teacher, inspired by European models such as Hans Hofmann and Joseph Albers, had become nothing but a purveyor of a heavily institutionalized modernism, immersed in its own tragic myth.

His text Eureka 2. from the early 90's describes a decisive discovery by Wegman, associated with a photograph, Cotto , from 1970. After having struggled to find the right angle for a photographic documentation of "floating Styrofoam commas down the Milwaukee River", and having to "rush up the bank and quickly set up the camera on the bridge to catch them floating by" 3., it struck him that he already had everything he needed: "This new realization allowed me to set up things just for the camera in the comfort of my own studio". 4. It was possible to preserve the somewhat dry documentary character that conceptual art aimed at, even with a picture that was constructed right in front of the camera. The mimetically representational tie to an event in the realworld had been broken, however.

In a comprehensive assessment of Wegman's art, his photographs of dogs will always remain both the decisive issue and a stumbling-block for the art world. Frédéric Paul, curator of the well executed exhibition at F.R.A.C., Limousin, in Limoges in 1991, devoted to Wegman's conceptual photographic works from the early 70's, chose to leave out virtually all of this essential material.

Wegman is very much associated with his photographs of his dogs, pictures which also represent commercial success. What should our position be vis-à-vis the dog pictures? Do pictures of dogs really qualify for a place in the context of high art? After laughing at dogs losing their discipline as chefs before some hot dogs in a cooking scene (the children's film Alphabet Soup< , 1995) we may perceive other pictures of his as lightweight and droll, especially his Polaroids with references to art such as Blue Period< , 1981, and Boxed/Framed , 1988. Their weaknesses are not primarily of an aesthetic nature but rather a matter of principle: the failure to question the conventional character of communication, conventions poked fun at by the motif.

A chastened but amused Wegman says of his collaboration with his dog Man Ray: "It's interesting to note that although I used him in only about 10 percent of the photographs and videotapes, most people think of him as omnipresent in my work. It irked me sometimes to be known only as the guy with the dog... 5.". Man Ray was named "Man of the Year" by The Village Voice in 1982.

Wegman bought his weimaraner Man Ray in 1970 while teaching at Long Beach State College in California. Those who knew him then describe him as "a rather complex and extremely shy" person. 6. The relationship between Man Ray and Wegman is different from his clearly pragmatic attitude toward Fay Ray whom he bought in 1986, four years after the death of his first dog, and from his relationship with her offspring. In an appendix to his interview with Ross, Wegman points out that Man Ray never realized that he was a dog, and that the only way of getting some peace in order to do some work was to put a camera in front of the dog. Man Ray was always willing. He was at the same time friend and alter ego.

The presence of Man Ray freed Wegman from the self-centered discourse that - along with the explicitly political - was part of the avant-garde of the late 60's and early 70's. A preoccupation with the self, readily seen in the videos of the period, and an undisputed part of the romantic and modernist tradition, a tradition which Wegman accuses of - subjectivity 7.. Wegman used Man Ray as a front. In his video Growl , (ca. 1973), he even mimics the dog's growls, imbuing the myth of the artist as primordial force and romantic wild man with tragicomic content faithful to the myth.

A dog, living for the love of his master, also lives to obey: like a child, it remains untroubled by doubts about where authority resides. A dog is obviously also to be seen as a human: dressed, with arms, hands, and legs. But the picture is never unambiguous. In The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold , 1994, the human form is suddenly discarded, and the two boy detectives are running through the forest on all fours. Wegman uses his dogs to approach the social aspect. In fables, animals serve as the mirror of man. Dogs are created to resemble humans both in looks and in behavior, while retaining the eyes of an innocent animal. They also mirror man in its obvious discomfort with culture. The dog, having lost track of its origins and its evolutionary determined function, appears - contrary to what common sense tells us - driven by nostalgia, by homesickness.

The dog is man's best friend. But if man is man's wolf, then the dog is a substitute for human companionship - a statement few dog owners would subscribe to. In Wegman's works from the 70's, the dog is seen as a symbol of social vulnerability, of loneliness. In the works from after 1986 this compensating role has been toned down in favor of the absurd fable: the dog as philosopher, private eye, golfer, actor of Beckett, etc. The entire team is made up of dogs, except for the batter, who is human, as are the spectators, as in his film Dog Baseball , 1986. If man is made in the image of God, the dog is made in the image of man. If human life is the Divine comedy, dogs live in the human comedy.

If the alternative character of the 1960's was transnational (e.g. Öyvind Fahlström), the art of the 1970's focused its attention on the immediate existence, and video was the medium above all others. These are two important factors for the young generation of artists who take interest in the art of this period today. Wegman's films from the 70's were typical of their time - in form, if not in format. One person (the artist) and one camera (immobile). Wegman worked in brief sittings - rarely more than 2-3 minutes - using an explicit linear structure. "In video", he says, "you confront and must entertain a captive audience" 8.. In his interview with Ross, he stresses that, unlike the established form of the period with long sittings and a static camera, he "needed an entrance and an exit" 9..

Rage and Depression , (ca. 1972), Deodoran t, (ca. 1973), Baseball over Horseshoes (ca. 1977) - a remarkable number of Wegman's early films touch on feelings of loneliness, deviation and outsiderness albeit propelled by an artistic logic reminiscent of that of Andy Warhol. Whenever pressured to put effectiveness and productivity above all else, Warhol's response was not one of predictable protest, but of meeting it head on and fulfill all expectations. His marriage to his tape recorder and his famous words "I want to be a machine" made him an icon for an adaptability whose optimism is glaringly misplaced.

The video Bad Movies , (ca. 1977) contains an exchange between two expressions and tones of voice that is anything but ingratiating: "Whenever I get lonely, do you know what I want to do?", "No, what?", "I like to turn on the TV and watch a bad movie". The freshness of popular culture and the liberated individual of the 60's was followed on the art scene of the 70's by a dark contrast, where the alienation of the media and the dumbing down of the spectator are obvious. The view of the media at the ranged runs from Marshall McLuhan's techno-optimism and sense of participation to Guy Debord's distant and amoral society of spectacles.

Art is no longer able to hide as an aesthetic onlooker, and if it becomes part of the media it will become an accessory to the crime. To several of the artists central to Wegman the media is not only the message, it is both material and context. Self-assertion and challenging the limitations of the body - Bruce Nauman. The urgent need for an immediate experience - Chris Burden. Genuine American paranoia - Vito Acconci. The demonstrative and objectifying gestures of popular culture - Edward Ruscha. Wegman does not indulge in avant-garde experimentation of form, however. His story technique is borrowed from commercials and later from children's film. The intimate format of his performance videos from the 70's signals For Private Use .

The attraction of Wegman's early videos is based on an instantaneous, precarious balance composed of comical, headlong straightforwardness and consistent double-coding. By overacting, he leaves the viewer in doubt of how the films should be read; you do not know whether he is desperate, trapped, and therefore authentic, or preserving a distance, testing various language possibilities along some underlying hidden aesthetic or formal consideration. The films are poised between direct speech and - clearly signaled - recycled convention. He is anything but unambiguously funny. "...And then when they put this cold metal electrode or whatever it was to my chest I started to giggle. And then when they shocked me it froze my face into this smile. And even though I'm still incredibly depressed, everybody thinks I'm happy. I don't know what I'm going to do". (From his video Rage and Depression , ca. 1972).

The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus contains some eighty synonyms of the word crazy . In perceiving Wegman as a humorist we overlook the fact that his photographs, videos, drawings, and paintings basically lack an edifying quality. His work does not indicate how (or whether) it should be placed in relation to the dialectically persuasive self-image of the European avant-garde with its heavy investment in progressiveness. Should his drawing Weather/Politics (1977) be seen as criticism of politics (changeable, like the weather), of the absence of politics (we discuss the weather instead), as criticism of the media formula that transforms all differences into broadcast material of equal value, or as an expression for Wegman's naively ethnological interest in everyday matters and trivialities, as in another of his drawings, Suburban Exploration (1982)?

Freud views laughter as the failure of our (imagined) sense of self-control.
Acknowledgment of this failure is accompanied by a sense of liberation, and whatever prestige we have lost is returned to us in the form of self-awareness. To receive a response is edifying. We may learn from the response, and in our dialectical blind faith we may imagine that we change for the better. Bonkers , (one of the synonyms) may be described as anti-humor, more of an individual anarchistic (destructive) than symbolic act, since what Wegman pokes fun at with his "bonkers-attitude" is emptied of value and meaning.

In an interview, Wegman expresses his doubts about "having to read Wittgenstein and Lévi-Strauss" during his time as a teacher; It wasted "my time, being a dilettante", and he adds "I thought Robert Smithson was being a dilettante scientist in that way" 10.. Wegman's art possesses an identity and a language, but it is not that of theory. Art is lousy, viewed as science. His art does not predict events, nor does it investigate events in the spirit of human science. His art may rather be described as ... not science.

Joseph Kosuth sets out to solve the question of what art is "as idea as idea". His answer, in the form of a work of art, puts an end to the discussion (that is how he viewed it). The work, as One and Three Chairs , (1965), consists of three parts: an object (a chair), a photographic documentation of the object in its place in the exhibition, and its lexical definition. Wegman's Two or Three Chairs , (1972), which may be read as a commentary to Kosuth, is a photograph of three chairs in which exposure has been interrupted and the right hand chair removed, after which the exposure process has been allowed to continue. As a consequence, the right hand chair appears to be dissolving into nothingness. Wegman's not very edifying answer to this pretended scientific question directed to art is to pull the rug out from under the explanation.

In another work, Building a Box (1971), Wegman comments on Robert Morris' Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) by executing a number of operations without any visible effect, except in the very last of the nine photographs where some messy and sticky black paint from the broad brush adheres to the box. Richard Serra's demonstratively heavy sculptures of steel plates are commented on in the title chosen by Wegman: To Hide His Deformity He Wore Special Clothing (1971). Of his works from the early 70's, Wegman says that he fought to liberate himself from minimalist, formalist, and conceptual models with which he felt uncomfortable. Apart from this, there are few direct references to other artists of his time in Wegman's work.

In his text for the catalogue to the Limoges exhibition 1991, Frédéric Paul interprets Wegman's early photographic works in terms of two themes: perception and identity. 11. Based on the selection of pictures, Paul's reading is significant and quite useful. However, there is one problem: Wegman is not the intellectual artist Paul would like for him to be. He does not engage in explorations beyond his own immediate sphere of experience, and both the work itself and the words of the artist indicate that he is acutely aware of this deficiency . Paul's analysis of Wegman's works refers to and is interpreted through leading artists from around 1970, such as Dan Graham, for whom perception is central, and Bruce Nauman, where identity is being tested. The role of the dogs, however, appears neither integrated in the work or deemed worthy of further exploration.

If you include Wegman's dog pictures, his drawings and his painting from the late 80's in a consideration of his artistry, you are forced to re-evaluate the emphasis of his conceptual position, thereby giving rise to new themes and patterns. The recurring question throughout his entire oeuvre is what does and does not fit (is a misfit). Two related issues are briefly hinted at, especially in his works from the 70's: those of failure (failed explanations) and lost orientation. The question of what does or does not fit does not primarily concern the relationship between the individual and society, but rather the roles assumed, more or less successfully, by Wegman himself or his dogs. Under the two pictures that make up As a Joke (1971) he has written "As a Joke, he put his T-shirt on Backwards" and "No one got it." The first photo shows Wegman walking past a sitting person who, in picture number two, looks up at him as he passes. That is all.

Lucy Lippard, the curator of several early exhibitions of conceptual art, who has written extensively on the subject, provides a telling example of the formal sense of experimentation of the era where conceptual art "... offered a bridge between the verbal and the visual". Experimentation which often became divorced from the comprehensible: "...at one point I tried alternating pictoral and verbal 'paragraphs' in a narrative; no one got it" 12..

Art is routinely regarded as identical to the finished product that we encounter installed and prepared in galleries and institutions. Art is thus idealized and objectified at one and the same time. Viewed in this way, we ignore and forget that most works have a track record of failure, misunderstandings, and incomprehensibility. Wegman is different in this respect, for he incorporates failure in his works already at an early stage, and makes of this experience a central - if paradoxical - theme. In his four pictures Advice/Lemonade/Toy Hats/Closed (1972) he is seated in his studio at a rickety table resembling those of the lemonade vendors that pop up in "soft" comics, like Peanuts, which attempt to extol the advantages of the American way of life to their young readers. There are seemingly no takers, business is a failure but since the picture sequence must be described as a success - where does failure enter in?

Allow me to backtrack for a moment and view As A Joke through Freudian lenses as a visual slip of the tongue. Let us replace "T-shirt" with "Self." Now assuming the explanation to be incorrect, Wegman now appears to represent himself as a man dressed in the wrong person, one who does not fit himself, who is wearing himself inside out. Two photographs, Untitled (Woman Sweeping out Door) (1976) and Reduce/Increase (1977) show Wegman dressed or contextualized as a woman. With the aid of ink touch-ups, the artist stresses the gender-specific parts of the body: hip. waist, breast, unshaved legs. Once again, nothing fits. As drag queen, Wegman is a disaster, but it is that which does not fit, the failure, that makes the gender-code obvious. 13.

Along with video and photography, Wegman has always worked with drawings 14., constructed along a conceptual pattern of "always one idea per page" 15.. Drawing - and painting - is described in a note from 1990 as an escape from a "claustrophobic" lens-seeing and technical considerations: "I needed to be free for a time from Technological problems" 16.. Towards the end of the 70's, when Wegman leaves performance-oriented video behind and turns instead to large-scale Polaroids, the drawings return but then as "not so much a perfect conceptual complement, but a deeply important routine mode of expression for me, its range extending to my own dark corners". 17.

Wegman's art is thus filled with wrong explanations, slips of the tongue, and confused attempts at clarification. His drawings are always full of questions as to what does or does not fit as an explanation: Adult and Baby Tongues (1974) - the fact that children like sweet and adults sour things is due to the shape of the tongue! Missed Shot (1972) - that's why the ball did not go in! Irish/Italian (1975) - that's why Irishmen shine the shoes of Italians! and in a central work, his drawing Own Your Own (1975).

In one of the drawings, Wegman greets the viewer with Don't Forget your Childhood (1988), but the context of the picture is not easily interpreted: are these the words of the child, dressed as a Revolutionary soldier? If so, are the other crawling, falling, or fallen figures to be seen as victims to be saved by the child (the pure idealism of the child/the young nation)? Or, is the child (or the comic strip figure) playing a practical joke or worse on the grownups? Other interests are making themselves heard beyond Wegman's disregard for the true context: the homespun American delight in child or animal stars - Lassie, Flipper, Rin Tin Tin, Pluto, and Babe.

From the vantage point of tradition, there is a clear connection between Wegman's work and surrealism. To the surrealists, nature and animals were potential allies in the fight against a joyless society. René Magritte's semiotically inspired surrealism, the linguistic play with image and the visual play with words as well as his propounding of unsuitable explanations appear to be another important context for Wegman's art. His Tree (1973), Bow and Arrow (1974) and Wood (1976) share with Magritte's L'espoir rapide (1927) the surrealist condemnation of the routine description given reality by both the written and visual language. It may be the wrong characterization, but this problemizing may appear somewhat infantile. It is e.g. fully conceivable that heads could be substituted for lampshades, and that a lamp - as happens in the video Randy's Sick (ca. 1970) begins to call for its mother...

Interest in children's culture may actually may be seen as an established form of social criticism in generall and art institutions in particular, especially during the 70's. After the attempts to radically change society had failed, the possibility of changing the thinking of children still remained, with art as a messenger. The criticism by conceptual art of the institutional stuffiness of art proved powerful as a contributing factor in the renaissance of children's TV, with programs such as Sesame Street (to which Wegman became a contributor in the late 1980's) and Alexandersson-De Geer's Tårtan (The Cake ), which included direct quotations from Swedish art critics!

Surrealist art grew out of notions that have become part of the avant-garde ever since: the lack of self-control and transparency of the subject, the fact that we never quite know why we choose to act in one way or the other (psychoanalysis, to be precise), but also that the meaning of signs - both pictures and words - is conventional. 18. There is a fundamental lack of correlation between what we see and what we are aware of seeing. Through his texts and titles, Wegman consistently highlights the contradiction in the image of the world presented by the descriptions. Every assertion contains a shadow of other, potential realities for which Wegman constantly opens the door and to which he keeps returning. There is in every act of communication a residue, something that does not fit.

In terms of art history, the artistry of Wegman and many other central contemporary figures are poised on the borderline between conceptual art's naturalist documentary position toward the image and the presuppositions of surrealism. It is only proper to name the artists who have been influenced by the subject of an exhibition, but is it not more interesting to note that the force of this post-surrealist setting is still increasing?

Some of Wegman's themes are shared by artists such as Cindy Sherman (his malicious "ads" Eau II from 1983 and Handy , 1984, were produced between the works devoted to the female stereotypes of the media and their grotesque and diabolical sequel); Jeff Wall (conspicuously constructed tableaux, but devoid of political punch as in Greek Restaurant , 1982); Sigmar Polke (a tragicomical, graying liberal and, socially progressive rationality confronted with emotional overkill) and Rosemarie Trockel (the fable-like relationship between humans and animals).

I don't know whether Wegman ever refers to the work of Polke, but they have a surprising amount in common. Both juggle shifting value scales, both poke fun at and advertise their last names - as in Polke's Weltbild (1966) in which the world is spinning with Polke at the center of numbered "cycles"; in Wegman's Zone System and Directions in W (both from 1985) as well as in the two versions of Wegman Bros (both 1983). A more concrete influence is obviously Bruce Nauman's blow-ups of his own name in neon. W is also found in the stellar constellation of Cassiopeia, but the letter is to be read as Wittgenstein . 19.

Text and image are part of a mutually blocking, snarled entity, Polke's Lösungen I-IV (1967) in which he demolishes the four fundamental rules of arithmetic, and Wegman's Own Your Own in which the very heart of capitalism - reification and the resulting equating of all values with goods and money - is presented as a linguistic and semantic trick. The point is not that P precedes W in the alphabet of art, but that the two share a common source in anti-art and the anarchistic rather than analyzing critique of the conventions of viewing, without the comfort of goal orientation.

Romanticism changed the way art was viewed, fundamentally altering the expectations with which both audience and artists approached it. Over the centuries rhetorical tables had developed showing that artistic value (in the eyes of the male artists and buyers) resided in the suitability or unsuitability of the motif. Topping the list were historical painting, battles, and portraits (royalty - not self-portraits). Animal pictures were found somewhere in the middle (the favorite horse, the favorite dog), and at the end of the descending scale were landscapes and still-lifes. Romanticism turned this scale upside down. From the Romantic point of view, animal pictures fell outside truly important artistic motifs - but were not entirely lost to art. Those who criticize the pictures of Wegman's dogs thus do so on good art historical grounds.

Every photograph, every video of him, his models, or his dogs, end up as a bit of everything, poised between hilarious comedy and resolute intent (which often strikes exactly the right note, but which also misses the mark). In films and Polaroids 20. from 1979 onwards, Wegman sends his dogs out into a world which has more in common with a boy's room than with the avant-garde: safe as the nursery, American, self-evident, David Crockett-like, but with a dangerously high concentration of niceness. It is only with the aid of the dogs that childhood can be recaptured.

In Wegman's America , the toys compete with your imagination, and the imaginary world has been invaded by cheesecake, toasted marshmallows, station wagons and other ultra-American phenomena. The price paid by Wegman's (canine) Americans is that they, like Peter Pan, never grow up (Arm Envy , 1989). The Kennebago (1981), Vacationland (1994) and the children's film The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold (1995) take Wegman close to Disney's and Hollywood's unbeatable success formula composed of equal parts of popular national romanticism and popular animal stars.

Beginning in the 80's, Wegman draws closer to a mythical national romanticism, where the depiction of nature has its roots in the classics known to many American students: James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans , Thoreau's Walden and the paintings of Albert Bierstadt and George Bingham. The emblematic character of his late paintings and photographs is not so much ironic exploration as a deliberate step into that which does not fit, seen from the critical perspective of avant-garde art, but is confirming and life-affirming to the artist.

In his paintings we see a little Godfearing, thriving WASP-village. The pioneer community is gathered around the white church and just beyond its limits the world opens itself to modernist architecture, semis, airplanes, Greyhound buses, and train sets as in House and Village (1989) and to American history in the shape of wooden forts, rolling wagon trains and deserted Indian civilizations. Everything small-scale, crowded together, as if the point of departure for the paintings had been an HO train set.

Traditional America, the promised land of the imagination, also represents in itself a distancing from modernity and the avant-garde (look at the chair in Parental Chair , (1971) - a piece of furniture taken from magazines like Country Living USA or Log Homes ). The ideal case of "The Great Outdoors" is realized in a log cabin with the game peering in through the screen door, as in Ray & Mrs Lubner in Bed Watching TV (1981). "Civilized man is a wild man only with more experience and judgment", says Thoreau. 21. Walden is a place to withdraw from the world and meditate on God, nature, and the human condition. What is given, as opposed to what is culturally wrought. A difference which Wegman - and his dogs as his stand-ins - elegantly spans.

Had it been two human beings lying in bed, the picture would have fallen totally flat. As testers of society's reaction, however, the dogs awaken associations to happiness in the form of subconscious obedience and fulfillment of duty and thereby become a critique of traditional patterns and of Wegman's own generation. What is it to obey? The knowledge that the child from the heart of New England had, did not fit - he had to distrust his background and always remain a rebellious individualist at whatever cost. All exemplified by the paradoxical submission of the modernist artist to the appeal of perpetual revolt. Wegman's work contains a critical - or factual - statement by the post-flower-power generation, post-1968. The party is over. History has returned: "a great party last night" / "back, going back in all directions". 22.

Staffan Schmidt

1. Willam Wegman in a 1989 interview with David Ross, published in the exhibition catalogue William Wegman, ed. Kunz, New York, 1990.
2. Reproduced in William Wegman. Photographic Works, 1969-76. F.R.A.C. Limousin, Limoges, 1991.
3. Interview with David Ross, op. cit.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Fr�d�ric Paul in "Bill, William & Prof. Wegman, Fundamental Works: 1969-1976" in cat. William Wegman, Photographic Works: 1969-1976, F.R.A.C. Limousin, Limoges, 1991.
7. Joshua Kind attributes the views on modernism to Wegman in Contemporary Artists, St, James' Press, 1996, but without identifying his source.
8. From an interview with Fr�d�ric Paul in William Wegman. Drawings 1973-1997, F.R.A.C. Limousin, Limoges,1997.
9. Interview with David Ross, op.cit.
10. D. A. Robbins, "William Wegman's Pop Gun", Arts, March 1984.
11. Fr�d�ric Paul, "Bill, William & Prof. Wegman", 1991, op. cit. The subtitle: "Fundamental Works: 1969-1976" reflects in conjunction with the lack of emphasis on his dogs a view of Wegman's conceptual works as his "fundamental" art. A "fundament" which tellingly appears to coincide with a selection of motifs (virtually) free from animals. Paul thus seems to attempt to save Wegman from being ranked as a lesser artist by removing that which may be viewed as problematic. That the art world finds Wegman's art difficult to handle may also be seen by how little has been written about his artistry. Wegman's dogs have graced the cover of Artforum and other art journals, but there is precious little material inside � at most an anonymous review.
12. Lucy Lippard, "Escape Attempts", from the exhibition catalogue Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965-1975, MOCA, Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
13. One of the texts in "Little Tales" (1972-74) reprinted in the catalogue of the F.R.A.C. exhibition, Limousin, Limoges, 1991, touches on the issue of gender-coding: "My little sister likes to wear t-shirts and jeans just like a boy. My older brother likes to wear frilly dresses and nylon stockings like a girl. Sometimes I wear dresses and other times I wear jeans". Wegman is testing to what extent he fits outside the order he knows best and identifies with. He is exploring the gender-codes more than he challenges them.
14. "If I could, I would just make drawings. It is what I am most comfortable doing. Sitting at a table, peering down at a piece of paper". Wegman in his interview with Fr�d�ric Paul, 1997, op. cit.
15. A handwritten text "Why Draw?" (from February 24, 1990), in cat. William Wegman Drawings, Sperone Westwater Gallery, N.Y., 1990.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. "Everyone called my father Bill until I came along. Then he became George, but not with everybody. I became Billy Boy at home. Willy in art school. As an adolescent I had lots of names. Nicknames. They are often hopeful and a little sad. Especially when you move and introduce yourself to a new group. 'Hi, my name is Billy Boy. You can call me Fubby'. In my photography I am often concerned with renaming things.", Wegman in an interview with Fr�d�ric Paul, 1997, op. cit.
19. Wittgenstein during a nocturnal walk in Jesus Green, Cambridge, according to Norman Malcolm, on page 32, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir, London1958. Malcolm asserted that he saw the stars as an upside down "M", whereupon Wittgenstein "gravely assured me that I was wrong".
20. "I attribute the Polaroid process with the undermining of my manifesto. I stopped making video when I began to use this camera in 1979." Wegman in William Wegman. Drawings 1973-1997, 1997, op. cit. The manifest � Photo + video + drawing = Wegman � is included in his text "Why draw?", New York, 1990.
21. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854. Retranslated from Frans G. Bengtsson's Swedish translation, Stockholm, 1964. by Kjersti Board.
22. Jim Morrison, from A World on Fire, An American Prayer, 1978.

TO THE WEGMAN INDEX PAGE