The 59th Minute

ARTISTS

WILLIAM WEGMAN

Creative Time and Panasonic are proud to announce 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. Starting on November 6, 2002 and continuing through January 22, 2003, William Wegman, a pioneer in the fields of moving image, performance, and photography, charms us 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) are deceptively simple videos that manage to captivate public audiences even in the frenetic, theatrical context of Times Square.

In Dog Duet, two of Wegman's dogs sit side by side as they keenly follow an object moving behind the camera that is finally revealed to be a ball. Like good tennis players, Wegman's models never take their eyes off the ball. Meanwhile we, as third-party viewers, become transfixed by this game of pursuit and unwittingly fall for the chase.

Front Porch, which was shot at the artist's residence in Maine, is a more recent video of Wegman's dog Chundo, dressed in flannel and jeans, sitting in a rocking chair, and reading the local paper. Front Porch conveys contemporary life's complexities: as Chundo carefully reads the paper in the heart of Times Square, we are 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 uses a universal vocabulary of animals and role-play to make us laugh.

About Wegman

William Wegman is known for his performance and conceptual art, photography, drawings, paintings, and videos, all of which use irony masterfully and many of which feature his world-renowned Weimaraners. In 1970, as the result of a prophetic coin toss, Wegman bought his first Weimaraner, Man Ray, and the two discovered a shared passion for the camera. This collaboration continued with Wegman's second Weimaraner Fay and her offspring, who remain the models in much of Wegman's wry, unique work in which dogs are stand-ins for -and mirrors of- their human audience.

Wegman was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1943, lives in New York and Maine, and is represented by the Christine Burgin Gallery in New York City. In 1969, two years after he received his MFA in painting from the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana, Wegman participated in 4 group exhibitions whose venues included the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In 1983, a retrospective of his work began at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne and traveled to museums in Europe and the United States including the Pompidou Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition to exhibiting in museums and galleries, Wegman has published an extensive body of work including "Farm Days," "Fay," and "How Do You Get to MoMaQns?" and has created film and video works for Saturday Night Live, Nickelodeon, and Sesame Street. Wegman has received many awards and grants including from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976 and 1985, the New York Foundation for the Arts Honor in 1999, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 and 1986.

For more information on William Wegman check out wegmanworld.com.

Through November 16, 2002, Printed Matter, Inc. presents William Wegman: Indian in the Refrigerator and Other Printed Works, William Wegman: Selected Video Works 1970-78, and Dog Baseball, 1986, as well as Wegman's most recent video works: Reel 8, 1997-98 and Reel 9, 1999. www.printedmatter.org.

William Wegman is also currently included in a group show, Art Inside Out, through September 2003 at the Children's Museum of Manhattan. www.cmom.org.

Front Porch
Dog Duet
November 6, 2002 - January 22, 2003