![]() Life, in all its droll banality, was Wegman's subject. And he was just there, a fixture in the studio, like the props and food and chairs that pepper Wegman's images and videos at this time. Turning the camera on Man Ray made the dog happy. I had dogs growing up, but I had never had a Weimaraner, and they really require a lot of attention – so that just sort of happened.' ![]() 'I didn't expect to be working with him, but as a young puppy he came to my studio and convinced me that it was something we should be doing together. In hindsight, the move to California in 1970 brought one other major development: Wegman and his then wife Gayle bought a puppy, a Weimaraner they named Man Ray and who was destined to become his most important 'found' object. This was very typical of the time there was a rebellion against traditional ideas about what an art object was.' And then comes a group of artists who've decided that what's important is the idea, and the documentation of a performance. Before this, photographers in California were people like Ansel Adams, who made beautifully crafted, well-composed photographs. 'Wegman started working in California as a conceptual artist,' says Marc Selwyn, Wegman's LA gallerist, 'and was associated with John Baldessari and Allen Ruppersberg, Bruce Nauman and Ed Ruscha, the whole group of them exchanging ideas and doing really radical things. 'But it is filtered through Bill's incredibly intelligent humorous filter.' ![]() 'It's an appropriate rendering of the facts,' says Peter MacGill, a New York gallerist who has worked with Wegman for decades. Both are draped in a series of garden implements, but as the student is bigger than the artist, so all his tools are bigger than the artist's. In Big and Little (1971) Wegman poses with a student bearing a remarkable likeness to him. His diptych Light Off/Light On (1970) are identical images of door and wall, a flipped switch marking one from the other. His first West Coast pictures focus on difference and duality. The following year, Wegman moved to California to take up a teaching post at Long Beach. It was one of these late 1960s works, the 'screen pieces' fabric installations, that was shown at the seminal exhibition 'Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form', at the Bern Kunsthalle in March 1969, alongside works by Richard Serra, Joseph Beuys and Richard Tuttle. In one performance piece he threw radios off a roof in another he floated Styrofoam commas down the Milwaukee River. Furniture also made an appearance, as did inexpensive materials, such as shoes, pots and pans. Wegman's first photographs and films were a way of capturing the ephemeral works – mostly inflatable structures and kinetic sculptures – he was making.Īfter graduation in 1967, Wegman spent three years experimenting with the first in a long line of 'found' objects, particularly mesh and other fabrics. A student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the 1960s, he met the filmmaker Ronald Nameth, with whom he would later show films at Warhol's Electric Circus in New York. There, he focused on abstract painting in what he has described as an 'overbearing, serious way' – 'manifesto' art movements such as Dadaism and constructivism were a major influence. ![]() He was 'Bill the Painter' at high school and completed his undergrad studies at the Massachusetts College of Art. Wegman was born in Massachusetts in 1943. The photograph or the film would now be the work, not a document of the work. ![]() He now had his reason and his clarity, his beginnings and his endings all to be explored in the form of the set-up picture and the found object. He rushed out to buy some salami and set up a picture, creating Cotto (1970). Then later that day, at a party, he noticed the similarity between the circles on his hand and the circles of pepper in a piece of salami. The photographer – who at the time described himself as a minimalist-conceptualist trapped in a 'tough corner' artistically – had drawn circles on his hand to mimic the stones of his ring. A chance encounter with a piece of salami, sometime in 1970, changed the course of William Wegman's career. ![]()
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