Such questions are prompted repeatedly in a marvelous 40-year retrospective exhibition of Wegman's extraordinarily inventive art on view at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Organized by Trevor Fairbrother , a former curator at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and now an independent scholar, "William Wegman: Funney /Strange" presents more than 200 works in video, film, drawing, painting, and photography in which fact and fiction and the real and the illusory are mixed up in unpredictably sly and wacky ways.
Wegman is best known for his comical photographs of his beloved Weimaraners Man Ray and Fay Ray, which have made him one of America's most popular artists. He and his dogs have been guests on the "Late Show with David Letterman," and he has created short films for "Sesame Street" and "Saturday Night Live." He has produced calendars, children's books, and Christmas books featuring his dogs, all of which are available on Amazon.com.
Wegman's dog pictures are the heart and soul of "Funney/Strange." It is wonderful to see just how many different approaches there are. Some hark back to the formalism of Edward Weston , as in "Washed Up" (2002), in which the bodies of two dogs lying on a beach reflect the contours of rocks in the background. Many involve fanciful costumes, as in "Midsummer Night's Dream" (1999) , which transforms a dog into a hovering, sumptuously winged fairy. Sequences of shots of dogs' legs pay homage to the stop-action photography of Eadweard Muybridge .
A few of the dog pictures have a powerful emotional resonance. In "Dusted" (1982), a glossy, 20-by -24-inch Polaroid, Man Ray sits motionless under a shower of snowy flour against a background of inky darkness. In his unflappable endurance of this absurd event, the dog exhibits a deadpan, Buster Keatonish patience. It's like a Stupid Pet Trick on "Letterman."
