Best Friend Turned Backdrop
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Man and dog are a partnership made in heaven. Who doubts that seraphim keep spaniels or cherubim guard Eden with hounds and retrievers? William Wegman’s genius in exploiting canine responsiveness to social cues is one of the sweetest pleasures of contemporary photography. The artist once complained that he was “nailed to the dog cross.” That is just where we want him.
“Wegman Outdoors,” a survey of photographs taken between 1981 and 2007, combines classic Wegman images with new work that emphasizes the artist’s outdoor color photography. The show coincides with the opening of Mr. Wegman’s new video work “Around the Park,” a film shot in Madison Square Park and staged there on outdoor monitors.
His kennel of canine performance artists has carried off a long-running series of Dogs-R-Us tableaux. The troupe summers in Maine, making landscape a natural backdrop. Landscape themes threaded through Mr. Wegman’s conceptual work in the 1970s. Posed studio shots of Man Ray, his first Weimeraner muse, moved easily into outdoor mode a decade later.
In several of the most recent images the animals appear more as geological forms than dogs. A reclining couple or the outline of a haunch, viewed at very close range, seem part of the landscape, like rocks and hills. But it is Mr. Wegman’s playful anthropomorphism that makes the most of his gift for double effect, both droll and elemental.
The dog in “Waterwork” (1998), poised against the vistas of the Rangeley Lakes region, appears to be standing on water. The stance is hieratic, the gaze intense. Christ on the Sea of Galilee? Or Washington crossing the Delaware? A 2007 image finds a Weimeraner draped, with surprising feline languor, on an ambiguous outcropping. The scene mimics the repertoire of wildlife photography — the cougar lounging on a tree limb.
At quick glance, an untitled 1981 photo seems a straightforward shot of a “No Hunting” sign posted on a tree. But look again at the telltale contour of that pile of autumn leaves at the base of the trunk. It is Man Ray, hunched under a thick suit of fallen leaves. A hunting dog loose in a game preserve needs camouflage.
“They always ask me what my art stands for, and I tell them it doesn’t stand, it sits,” Mr. Wegman is fond of saying. His one-liner encapsulates the whimsy that makes his photography so engaging. Something of the shalom of Eden lingers in the rapport between the artist and his Weimeraners. And there is a cherub in his Hasselbad.
Until November 3 (21 E. 26th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-213-6767).