Dog show

Photo

Photo © William Wegman

“I didn’t want to become the dog guy. Which, of course, I did become.” Smiling wryly, Bill Wegman is recalling the first time, in 1971, that he worked with his lovable Weimaraner family’s ur-canine, Man Ray, star of Sesame Street and museum collections alike. Wegman’s fear of being typecast added a “sense of danger” to the intriguing process of photographing the creature, he says, sitting in the family room of the spacious East Village building he shares with his wife, two children and four dogs. Kids and parents will be glad that the artist forged ahead in spite of his trepidation, especially after visiting “Funny/Strange,” Wegman’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. The show covers the entire 35-year span of Wegman’s career in photography, video and painting, and includes his work for children, along with more conceptual dog-based pieces that might interest kids who consider themselves too grown-up for Weimaraner fairy tales.

Do you ever worry that seeing your work all together in a retrospective might make you think, Enough with the dogs, already?

Well, it probably will, and I have to be wary of that. But I also have to be wary of repeating myself. Every once in a while I get stumped, and then I feel like I find something fresh to do with the dogs. Like the first time I made a dog tall, and dressed it like a person, it was kind of jarring and fantastic. That in turn led me do something in opposition—making the dogs into rocks and mountains. So I find a breakthrough within my own cliché.

Did you have dogs as a kid?

I grew up in the ’40s and ’50s in western Massachusetts, and we always had pets. I watched my first dog get hit by a car when I was five—it was very traumatic. The dog was a cocker spaniel, and it was really my mother’s. My mother told me, “Billy, that dog hated you! That was always my dog!” [Laughs.] But then I did get my own dog, Wags, in my Christmas stocking. The mutt lived to be about 20, so he was our family dog. We also had cats.

What do you think of cats?

Oh, I love cats, but they really don’t like me. Same with girls. I like girls but they don’t like me. Because a dog you can pick up and put on your lap and squeeze whenever you want to—they are there for you. Girls and cats, you can’t really grab them like that. But I did use cats once in my work. I photographed Abyssinians for a magazine called Connoisseur, and those were wonderful, interesting cats. But I only got one or two shots out of them. After the flash went off, they were gone. They didn’t love being photographed, like the dogs. The dogs have an almost Pavlovian response to the camera.

In the beginning, it was just you and Man Ray. But for the last ten years or more, you’ve used whole groups of Weimaraners. How did that change your work?

Each dog brings its own personality. So when I had a family of them, that led to all the narratives—the books, the stories, the little films and so forth. When I did my first book, Cinderella, I cast Fay as the evil stepmother and the fairy godmother, her daughter, Batty, as Cinderella, and Batty’s brother, Chundo, as the prince, because that pretty much summed up their characters.

What’s always been great about your work is that everyone gets it, kids as well as adults. How does that make you feel?

I always wanted to reach an audience other than the art audience. I always wanted any hopefully smart person—but, you know, anybody—to be able to get my work, like you wouldn’t have to know Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt in order to get it.

“Funny/Strange” is on view Mar 10–May 28 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Wegman-related programming for kids is planned.