“They keep bumping into me,” says Wegman, 71, from New York City, about his current rambunctious sitters, Flo and her half brother Topper. “With a dog, that’s the way it was. They’re always looking at me, and I’m always looking back.”
This time around, in “Artists Including Me: William Wegman” at San Jose Museum of Art, the pooches can be found lounging on decidedly more high-class perches: Eames chairs. Or they’re posing in a faux Eadweard Muybridge freeze frame or mock Hans Hofmann abstraction — putting the, er, bowwow in the Bauhaus. Stoic, streamlined and ever enigmatic, they provide the visual language — and punch lines — for Wegman’s thoughts on high and low culture in this overview of photos, paintings, videos and drawings from the ’70s through the present.
The exhibition was assembled by the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where the artist received his master of fine arts degree in painting in 1967. Yet however long ago, the academy is never very far away for an artist coming up in the postmodern era. “I thought it was an interesting title,” Wegman says of the show, “because I’ve been doing a lot of work that had art references, something I was allergic to in the ’60s and ’70s, and it just so happened there’s this group of work that cuts across all the media I had been using.”
Those paintings of imaginary spaces incorporate art postcards he’d been gathering from museums like the Guggenheim. “Postcards are an endangered species these days,” he says. “Matisse, Picasso, anything like that seemed worth playing with. It isn’t a battleground anymore. It’s just common material.”
Ph. courtesy William Wegman
