William Wegman

Lower Level

Shaping culture like few technologies before it, television played a key role in America’s post war consumer boom, beaming the country's newfound cornucopia of goods and services into millions of living rooms across the country. Initially housed in large, box-like furniture, the television screen took its place among an explosion of novel domestic appliances, stealthily transmitting America’s new mandate of perpetual consumption to its growing audience.

As part of the first generation of artists born into a world of television, William Wegman’s early video works seem charmed by the wonders of creating one’s own “TV shows.” With new technology that allowed anyone with the basic video equipment access, a decidedly low stakes game could be played by artists within a medium that had become dominated by corporate interests almost from its inception. Exploring some of the same themes and subjects found on mainstream television (family, relationships, pets) but within a spare “set” in the studio, Wegman’s videos offered a stark contrast to the orgiastic frenzy of fast paced commerce and seamless messaging characteristic of mainstream TV.

With a boundless appreciation for the unlikely and the absurd found in popular culture, Wegman returned to painting in the 1980s and in the ‘90s he began an ongoing series of paintings which incorporate imagery from his ever-expanding postcard collection. Introduced to the canvas as found, small- format pictures, the orphaned images are anchored by illusionistic painted imagery that significantly expand their standard 4” x 6” size. Like the postcard paintings, which source widely disseminated popular imagery, the paintings of TV’s for Wegman’s Please Stand By depict icons of popular culture. But where the post card images fuse with the surface of the canvas as their illusionistic properties are repurposed on top of and within a flat picture plane, the work in this exhibition at last arrives at the source of popular imagery itself.

If today’s flat screen television sets are the equivalent of Malevich’s black square (or rectangle) when turned off, Wegman’s silent but expressive television sets reemerge from a defining era of America’s somewhat contested past. With their greenish grey screens staring blankly back at the expectant viewer (echoing the spare but captivating 1960s phenomenological experiments of Light and Space artist Robert Irwin) framed by the familiar panels and decor when “television” was synonymous with “family room,” the once highly dimensional objects that funneled endless hours of stories, products, and newsworthy events now appear on a flat canvas. The screen muted, it plays a dual role of expressing a blank “end of painting” narrative while simultaneously acknowledging the once ubiquitous era of broadcast television and the modern era from which it emerged.

As digital culture dispenses with the unifying nature of broadcast TV in favor a two-way technology that tracks our cultural and commercial interests, where “offers” appear before we’ve asked for them, and programs merge billions of data points into mono narratives that channel our consciousness like Brave New World ’s soma, an analog resurgence seems to be afoot. What began as an updating of modernist efficiency culture which lulled the user into a sense of mastery over newer, smaller devices providing faster delivery of all our wants and needs, today’s hyper-individualistic algorithms funnel us into ever tighter, isolating feedback loops.

With a growing awareness of the darker side of digital culture’s nebulous, self-reinforcing shadow world, where the fabricated and the real have become indistinguishable, the contours of the glass, wood, and fabric box that once graced living rooms across the country has a newfound appeal. Standing in this room filled with pictures of TVs without pictures, the shadows of the image world gone silent, the "blanks" are profoundly liberating, offering possibilities we can only imagine, in place of the endless flickering of images that often divert our attention from the depth of experience possible in the world right in front of us.

—Excerpted from William Wegman’s Television by Peter Scott, included in the exhibition catalog William Wegman, Please Stand By.

William Wegman received a B.F.A. in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in 1965 and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana in 1967. From 1968 to 1970 he taught at the University of Wisconsin. In the fall of 1970 he moved to Southern California where he taught for one year at California State College, Long Beach. In 1971 He moved to Santa Monica. By the early 70s, Wegman’s work was being exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. In addition to solo shows with Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and New York, Situation Gallery in London and Konrad Fisher Gallery in Dusseldorf, his work was included in such seminal exhibitions as “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 and “Documenta V” in Kassel in 1972. His work was regularly featured in Interfunktionen, Artforum and Avalanche magazines.

It was while he was in Long Beach that Wegman got his dog, a Weimaraner who he named Man Ray, and began a long and fruitful collaboration. Man Ray, known in the art world and beyond for his endearing deadpan presence, became a central figure in Wegman’s photographs and videotapes. When Man Ray died in 1982 he was named “Man of the Year” by the Village Voice. It was not until 1986 that Wegman got a new dog, Fay Ray, and another collaboration began marked by Wegman’s extensive use of the Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. With the birth of Fay’s litter in 1989, Wegman’s cast of grew to include Fay’s offspring — Battina, Crooky and Chundo — and later, their offspring: Battina’s son Chip in 1995, Chip’s son Bobbin in 1999 and Candy and Bobbin’s daughter Penny in 2004. Out of Wegman’s involvement with this cast of characters grew a series of childrens’ books inspired by the dogs’ various acting abilities: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, ABC, Mother Goose, Farm Days, My Town, Surprise Party and Chip Wants a Dog. Wegman has also published a number of books for adults including Man’s Best Friend, Fashion Photographs, William Wegman 20 x 24, The New York Times Bestseller Puppies, Fay, William Wegman: Paintings, Being Human, and William Wegman: Writing by Artist edited by Andrew Lampert.

Wegman has created film and video works for Saturday Night Live and Nickelodeon and his video segments for Sesame Street have appeared regularly since 1989. In 1995, Wegman’s film The Hardly Boys was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Wegman has been commissioned to create images for a wide range of projects including a fashion campaign for Acne, banners for the Metropolitan Opera and covers for numerous publications including The New Yorker, Wallpaper and, most recently, French Vogue. Wegman has appeared on The Tonight Show both with Johnny Carson and with Jay Leno, The David Letterman Show and The Colbert Report.

Numerous retrospectives of Wegman’s work have toured Europe, Asia and the United States including: “Wegman’s World,” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1981; “William Wegman: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Videotapes,” which opened at the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne in 1990 and traveled to venues across Europe and the United States including the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; “Funney/Strange” which opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2006 and made its final stop at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus in the fall of 2007 and “Hello Nature” which opened at the Bowdoin Museum of Art in 2012 and travelled to Artipelag in Stockholm, Sweden. Recent museum exhibitions have included “Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and “Being Human,” a large scale survey of over thirty years of Wegman’s photographic work which began a four year international tour after opening at the Rencontres d’Arles in the summer of 2018.