The 59th Minute: William Wegman

November 6, 2002 - January 22, 2003
Times Square Astrovision
Photo ©1995 William Wegman

Creative Time and Panasonic proudly announced two seminal video works by William Wegman, Dog Duet and Front Porch, as part of The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Times Square Astrovision by Panasonic. From November 6, 2002 through January 22, 2003, William Wegman, a pioneer in the fields of moving image, performance, and photography, approached the public with his signature Weimaraners and his deadpan humor in the world’s media capital.

Since the 1970s, William Wegman has used irony and wit in his work to comment on American culture, reflecting on our society’s contemporary routines and the cultures from which they stem. Dog Duet (excerpt, 1974) and Front Porch (1999) were deceptively simple videos that managed to captivate public audiences within the frenetic, theatrical context of Times Square.

In Dog Duet, two of Wegman’s dogs sat side by side as they keenly followed an object moving behind the camera that was finally revealed to be a ball. Like good tennis players, Wegman’s models never took their eyes off the ball. Meanwhile passersby, as third-party viewers, became transfixed by this game of pursuit and unwittingly fell for the chase themselves.

Front Porch, which was shot at the artist’s residence in Maine, was a more recent video of Wegman’s dog Chundo, dressed in flannel and jeans, sitting in a rocking chair, and reading the local paper. As Chundo carefully read the paper in the heart of Times Square, the audience was reminded of the constant evolution of media and its pervasive presence in our daily lives.

In Times Square, where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world visit weekly, Wegman used a universal vocabulary of animals and role-play to make people laugh.