William Wegman

Born in 1943 in Holyoke, Massachussetts (US)
Lives and works in New York City, New York (US)

  

Metallized Fay

1988
Colour photographs, cibachromes Triptych
123 x 210 cm
Purchased in: 1990

Suddenly appearing from beneath a silver coat, a ‘futuristic’ fairy rises up on its four legs, a comic and trivial expression of dressing up and disguise. The protagonist of this wonderful game, an escapee from a tale and attired in absurd theatrical props, is non other than Fay Ray, a dog in his own right who, after Man Ray his deceased peer and colleague, served the renown of its master with the well-known loyalty of the species, and plunged body and soul into its calling as an actor and model. The look on its face reproduces the interplay of revelation between one panel and the next, recognizing the endless light trail as the imaginary prosthesis of a desire to be granted. The spectator’s identification is caught up in this silvery circulation which, by reverting to the artistic sphere, talks about the ‘magical’ process of the works appearance.
By letting the imagination float on the wings of memory and its stereotypes, this piece, which belongs to a series of illustrated tales (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood), is part of a set of absurd and commonplace anthropomorphic transformations which express, in the manner of a diary, the insignificance of existence. By means of analogy, identity, and otherness, with or without dog, Wegman has been developing, since 1969, a destructive way of looking at American society, and a conceptual discourse revolving around artist and studio, just like Bruce Nauman, but with a pitch of anecdotal absurdity.
In his photos and videos, where dogs, actors, performers, and mythical stars are taught lessons, the seriousness of the grotesque and ridiculous popular snapshot is used to trigger the visual familiarity of the public thus led to identify with that other canine spectator, subject and symbol of action. Wegman parodies just as much the larksome and kitsch stereotypes of a world with an excess of media, as the ways of art institutions, the major references of art history, and the potential of technologies (demonstration photograph of ‘average art’ [Haussman], documentary, special effects of recording…). By going beyond a directly perceptible burlesque naivety, Wegman surveys the wings of art, appropriates and hijacks formalist ideologies and attitudes, in order to lay bare the alienation of artistic and social behavioural patterns by contrasting them.

^{Maïté Vissault}

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