|
|
|
|
|
Cruelty to Animals
John Haberin New York City
William Wegman and Ulrike Müller
Dumping on William Wegman is like cruelty to animals. So who am I to object to more of the same from his friendly face?
Yet another show of the artist and his pet may amount to pandering, but every so often I, too, get the cutes. By now, Wegman and his dogs had become so beloved that it takes a full retrospective in Brooklyn to disentangle him from calendar art—or gamely to try. The Met, though, wants to recover Wegman not just for dog lovers, but for a California scene he quickly left behind. Still haven't had enough? Murals for Ulrike Muller are raining cats and dogs. They are also just part of her teasing out children's art, the Queens community, Cubist prints, and gender identity. 
A dog's life
Pictures of one's Weimaraner sound even less like art than when William Wegman first made his, more than thirty years ago. When he shoots his dog lying on the sofa and calls the video Snowflake, he is as social as social media. Wegman's combination of heartwarming and utterly self-involved has a great deal to do with his peculiar appeal—and almost nothing to do with the alert dignity of a dog for Guercino centuries before him. Oddly enough, it also makes him worth remembering.
As the bits of torn paper start to fall, Man Ray raises his head—pardon me, her head—to catch and lick each one. As their descent continues, her fascination becomes a Sisyphean labor, only this time the rock wins. The flakes slowly become a blizzard, until the dog limply accepts her impending burial in the snowdrift. Or she does until one last moment, when she raises her head once more to snag the paper, and the video comes to an abrupt end. As Albert Camus ends his telling of the myth, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." I never really believed that bit of Existential wisdom, but perhaps it applies to artists and house pets.
Much of Wegman's charm lies in that arbitrary ending, leaving the outcome forever in doubt while cushioning the blow. He dumps flour over the dog, and she emerges stately and shining. He has the viewer doubting and cheering as the dog retrieves a treat from a jar, including minutes on end after she has given up on the jar's small mouth, broken the glass, and staked her small happiness on avoiding the jagged edges. He pretends to correct her spelling, but she ends the lesson by walking off, leaving in doubt who has humiliated whom. He does not even need the dog in much of his work to subject himself to his mock rituals, as when he presumes to read two books at once, ever so warily, one with each eye. Photographs by Man Ray, and I mean the Surrealist this time, have more beauty and bite but much the same economy.
Like it or not, Wegman has become calendar art. One remembers the canine Man Ray or her successor, Fay Wray, with the Weimaraner's lean, quizzical countenance a natural extension of the creative artist's. One remembers Wegman with his blank delivery and early 1970s' haircut, like everyone's favorite college roommate. However, he owes more than one thinks to the rigor of early video art, performance, and conceptual art. The artist straddles both sides of the camera, even when he hovers just offstage to make it snow, and he uses only the materials at hand. His happy endings allow a concept and chance to determine a video's composition and length.
The Brooklyn Museum calls its enormous retrospective "Funney/Strange," arguing that Wegman treads the line between funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. Actually, he suggests a much larger range of connotations, from funny absurd to, alas, funny cute. His retrospective includes more than ninety videos, along with photographs, drawings, and, most recently, large paintings. The paintings drop conceptual touches and self-images entirely, in favor of sprawling travelogues, as bland as much late Robert Rauschenberg. Some incorporate actual postcards. Again like too many bloggers, Wegman leaves no doubt what he did on his summer vacation.
The retrospective hopes to rescue Wegman from furry calendar art. I left, though, thinking of that old cliché: he has not been the same since his dog died, even if he keeps buying new ones. Like the show's title, plenty on display did not strike me as all that funny, especially now that he can comfortably afford oil paint and postcards. The paintings drop any hint of conflict, challenge, or resolution. If I stayed for so much film, it comes back to the dog and her philosophical dilemmas—a reminder that Minimalism, too, had room for the artist's predicament and the viewer's laughter.
Conceptualism's best friend
Not that Wegman has lacked for attention. Still, if animal rights suffice to keep work out of "China After 1989" at the Guggenheim, they should permit a look back at art in collaboration with a dog. Besides, the Met has an excuse, in the gift of dozens upon dozens of videos. Even a selection, many as short as a few seconds, runs for ninety minutes. The show also places him in context of California conceptualism. Call it "Before/On/After," but the accent here is firmly on the moment.
Wegman had just three years in LA, starting just out of school, but they provoked a torrent. So did his co-star, a Weimaraner named Man Ray, after you know who. It was a match made in heaven, if only because it could not back then have been made on Instagram. Even when the dog does no more than roll its eyes, what is not to love? Yet there is more to love, in the artist's pointed humor. When Man Ray and a seeming twin move their heads in perfect synch, they do not just double but deconstruct the love.
At his best, Wegman turns that deconstruction on late modern art. If painting is dead, why not abandon art in favor of dog tricks? If your three-year-old child could do that, why not a four-legged friend? In the photos that lend the show its title, the dog steps on and off a narrow podium while training its eye on geometry. It treats Minimalism as not the promised end of art, but a circus act. So do the doodles that label similar shapes meat and vegetable.
Yet Wegman was also making light of conceptualism. He could adopt the stunts of John Baldessari and the text art of Lawrence Weiner without their solemnity, for here man's best friend is art's best student. It made him the footnote to the 1970s that almost nobody mentions but everybody enjoys. It also makes California art from the Met's collection look imponderable. The inclusion of David Salle is illuminating, before that artist's painted allegories and eclectic essays. Too much else here is not.
The curator, Doug Eklund, makes little effort to tease out conceptual art and its variations. Ed Ruscha turns up as closed books in glass cases that one can barely view. Nor does he convincingly pair others with Wegman. Bruce Nauman draws Normal Desires in fiery or melting letters. Allen Ruppersberg and Robert Cumming riff on the region's most famous industry, with reverse film credits (sometimes to famous artists) and photographs of sound stages. Yet their pop culture seems a world away.
The show also cuts Wegman down to size. The sheer number of videos sounds impressive, but they seem less a burst of creativity then signs of a short attention span. Too often they boil down to a drugged-looking guy in his twenties cuddling his dog. (Salle claims that Matt Mullican made performance art under hypnosis, so maybe for once the Met has uncovered a connection.) A more daring show might have placed the entire lot online, like photos by Stephen Shore or the selfies that they almost are, so that one could dip in and out. Speaking of cruelty, a boring presentation could be the most unkindest cut of all.
Family-friendly Cubism
Can LBGT art be family friendly? Ulrike Müller has the most public face of the most community friendly of museums, and she brings the kids. Her mural covers the most prominent wall of the Queens Museum, visible from both entrances and the central gallery for temporary exhibitions. It is the exterior wall of a tribute to the greater New York community at that—a scale model of the city, left over and updated from the 1964 World's Fair. She initially shared the wall, too, with children's drawings from Queens, curated by Amy Zion, and three prints of her own. For her, too, what is not to like?
Müller, born in Austria, identifies as a queer feminist and she appeared among the gender challenges of "Trigger" at the New Museum and in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Previous work, Herstory Inventory, responded to its place outside a well-known feminist project—
Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum. While I should hope that you welcome gays in your family, here her mural could hardly be friendlier. It sticks to soft colors and rounded profiles for the wide eyes and silhouettes of two large animals, probably puppies. It takes its title, The Conference of the Animals, from a children's book by Erich Kästner—itself surely a riff on The Conference of Birds by a Persian poet of the thirteenth century. I appreciated the gesture on the way into other exhibitions, on Asif Mian and affordable housing, and moved on.
Now the puppies have a companion, and so do cat-friendly families on the Lower East Side. A mural in the galleries has two more pets, cuter than ever. Admirers, though, may have some growing up to do. One kitten lies awkwardly or helplessly on its side. So had I looked again does a still larger animals disrupting the space of the mural back in Queens, plus a fourth face down. If that sounds more akin to the space of modern and contemporary art, Müller adds a selection of collage prints, as "Moving Parts."
She would hardly be alone in subordinating her politics to her integrity as an artist, like black abstraction or women finding their due. Still, she runs to the same hard edges and somber colors as in her murals. She also lets slip in a bit of flesh here and there, like Cecily Brown, Medrie MacPhee and David Humphrey, and other artists between abstraction and representation. The intricacy becomes very much adult and the silhouettes downright haunting. It might even hold some lessons for collage in Cubism.
I could forgive you if you took a long time to respond to early modern art. Not just that it flew in the face of realism and Impression. Collage also adapted ever so well to art class. Little kids might not be able to draw all that much, and their drawings in Queens did not compete halfway with Müller. But they could always have a great time with found scissors and paste. Pablo Picasso began with gaunt circus actors and sad cafés at night, while Juan Gris brought the raking light of morning, but they had an exhilarating time, too.
Well they should have, for unsettling feelings ride on the exhilaration. (Müller also cites as a point of reference George Orwell in Animal Farm, not a happy story.) Nor does she rely on cut and paste. What looks like knit fabric or wicker is Chine-collée, prints on delicate paper affixed by the press to the paper ground. Paint spatters and fabric textures appear often in the process, and warm greys and browns in Cubism go back to Georges Braque as well. Pets will just have to find somewhere else to play.
"William Wegman: Funney/Strange" ran at The Brooklyn Museum through May 28, 2006, Wegman and California conceptualism at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 15, 2018. Ulrike Müller ran at the Queens Museum through August 22, 2021, and at Callicoon through May 29.