Wegman's Wild Life

William Wegman, famed for the Polaroid portraits of his pet Weimaraners, summers at a ramshackle Boy's Life lodge in the Maine woods. MARTIN FILLER visits Wegman at his vintage Americana retreat as he gears up for a season of fun, art, and dog baseball

'I photographed fay a lot because thought it might be her last great year."

It's going to be a wild summer up at the lake this year," promises William Wegman, even though the wildness will be a bit different from the kind he was used to in the seventies, when he was a coked-up Downtown New York artist making weird drawings and witty videos. Wegman, who is best known for wacky Polaroid portraits of his pet Weimaraners, particularly the late Man Ray, no longer suffers from the tortured-artist syndrome. He lives a life of exemplary sobriety and calm and has just had an amazingly busy and successful year. There were well-received gallery shows on both coasts, and a big retrospective that opened in Switzerland in May and will travel for over a year in Europe and the U.S. This fall Abrams is bringing out an exhaustive survey of his paintings, drawings, photographs, and videotapes. The forty-six-year-old Wegman also has a new girlfriend, a new summer house, and a new family of dogs.

The dogs are hard to miss. Up at the lake in Maine, he hangs out with four of them: his five-and-a-half-year-old bitch, Fay Ray, and three of the nine puppies she delivered last spring. Weimaraners have been a central part of Wegman's life since that fateful day twenty years ago when he answered an L.A. newspaper ad for pups and plunked down thirty-five dollars for the single male of the litter. He named him Man Ray, and the rest, as they say, is art history.

During the next dozen years, Wegman transformed the blue-gray shorthaired hound into an international artworld celebrity, one of the most famous contemporary portrait subjects since Alex Katz's Ada and David Hockney's Celia. Ray submitted uncomplainingly to being wrapped in yards of tinsel garland for the photo Airedale, and being sprayed green and made to wear flippers and fake pop eyes for Frog. He was doused with a bag of flour for the memorable shot Dusted and donned a tasseled pantaloon getup for Louis XIV.

The dog became the shy artist's veritable alter ego, his constant companion and artistic collaborator as well as tireless playmate in games of dog baseball. Dog Baseball was the title and subject of Wegman's best-known video (commissioned by Saturday Night Live in 1986, four years after Man Ray's death), and it is one of the wholesome activities that will make up the "wild" summer Wegman is planning at the old resort in western Maine where he has been staying since the late seventies.

Wegman's rough-and-ready summer setup could not be more different from the luxurious and pretentious settings created by some of his artist contemporaries. Julian Schnabel has wrapped himself in a mantle of bourgeois ostentation, making houses as overblown and overbearing as his art. Jennifer Bartlett's interiors on two continents are as cool and calculated as her carefully plotted career moves.

But Wegman has none of their false graces. "I'm going to do as little here as possible," he says while wandering through the warren of odd rooms that honeycomb the ramshackle lodge.

"I like having big, raw spaces to do stuff in—I'll have both* painting and photography studios here—but it's not like a loft in New York. The lodge has fiftyeight windows and eleven doors to the outside. That's eleven locks, but in New York I have eleven locks on my one door. This place is to Maine what the North Fork is to the Hamptons— much less posh."

Wegman has been drawn to western Maine ever since the unforgettable summer of '58, when he was fourteen and one of his older highschool buddies had just gotten his driver's license. Six of them drove up from their hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, and discovered York's Log Village, a down-at-the-heels but nifty little hotel camp on the shore of a lake with the fishing they'd been looking for. Nineteen years later, Wegman and a newer friend, the painter David Deutsch, began a search around New England for a place where they could escape from both the city and the vacation art scene in the Hamptons. "We looked in northern New Hampshire and Vermont, but secretly I gravitated here because I had such a great time in the fifties," Wegman says. York's Log Village had gone out of business and was in a remarkable state of suspended animation—a little worse for wear, but still very much the regular guy's hideaway they had in mind.

Wegman first rented and then bought a cottage called Sunset, a stone's throw from the rambling, three-story main lodge on the edge of the lake. Scattered around the wooded campsite were other summer cottages with picturesque names—Fly Rod, Sleepy Hollow, Tarrya-While, Easy Come Easy Go—but the abandoned hotel building remained an irresistible magnet. Think of a shabbier version of the Great Northern Hotel in Twin Peaks and you've got the picture: acres of wood paneling, a bestiary of stuffed animal heads, and yellowing wall calendars that haven't been changed since the year President Kennedy was shot. "I used to break into it and explore," Wegman admits. "It was scary and interesting, and I want to keep it that way."

Wegman bought this strange set piece of blue-collar country Americana last year for $155,000, a vast sum by depressed local standards, and has established deep roots here. His sister, Pam, had begun visiting him during his summers at the lake in the late seventies and eventually married his next-door neighbor, a Maine-born forester named Stan Bartash. Pam and Stan now live in Nervous Wreck, the one winterized house on the property, and keep an eye on things during the nine months when Wegman divides his time between his lower-Manhattan loft and his thirty-two-acre spread in upstate New York. But July, August, and September belong to Maine.

Wegman's artworld guests will be startled by the extreme simplicity , even primitiveness, of the lodge, although it's unlikely they'll have much time to dwell on it amid the hum of activity that fills up days on the lake. The calm heart of Wegman's life there is the presence of the striking, selfpossessed Alexandra Edwards, a twenty-eight-yearold aspiring photographer Wegman has been seeing since they met two years ago. She is the daughter of Chilean publisher Roberto Edwards, and her inborn but thoroughly charming sense of command is already legendary. At the center of attention, however, are the dogs, who roam around in a small herd like a nomadic tribe in perpetual search of new olfactory sensations. Feeding time sets off a virtual stampede. (Their diet: Eukanuba mixed with a tablespoon of Colombo unflavored yogurt, twice a day.)

Last summer, it was easy enough to keep the newborns together. The artist built a chicken-wire enclosure for the litter and festooned it with brightly colored plastic strips to scare off predatory birds. "It looked like a used-car lot," Wegman laughs. "But puppies are a huge event, and sometimes they just totally took over. One day I couldn't take it anymore, and started shouting 'Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!' and turned the hose on them." But they are now almost fully grown, and other forms of letting off steam are called for.

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Aperpetual boyishness gives Wegman's work a particular and peculiar Americanness.

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Weimaraners are highly adapted hunting dogs with a keen instinct for retrieving, and they like nothing better than to have an object thrown for them to fetch. This can soon become tiresome when there are several persistent and competitive dogs to satisfy. Dog baseball is the ideal solution. The only position reserved perforce for a human is that of batter; all Fielding positions are taken by the dogs, who fan out over a clearing in an uncanny approximation of a team around a diamond. The preternaturally boyish Wegman pops flies into center field, bunts, fouls, and makes long line drives, while the eager dogs chase and snag the ball with all the alacrity of money-hungry rookies up from the minors.

In years past Wegman played dog baseball with Man Ray or Fay, Liebe (a Weimaraner, now an ancient fifteen, that he gave to his sister), and any number of neighbor dogs. This summer he'll be able to field his first all-Weimaraner team, captained by Fay, three of whose pups are already learning the rules: Batty (born Battina), whom Wegman kept; Chundo, a large male named after the burly foreman on the Edwards estancia in Chile and owned by Pam and Stan; and Crookie, a sleek female owned by the family's best friend and Pam's boss, Dr. Dave Macmillan, the local dentist. (Such are the bonds of their friendship that Dr. Macmillan recently cleaned Fay Ray's tartar-stained teeth, which were beginning to mar Wegman's photos.)

When Fay and her offspring get together they take over, even in repose. They commandeer every seat in the living room, making it look like one of those corny postcards of dogs engaged in human pastimes, or like a Wegman photo waiting to be shot. But when it comes time to get serious, Fay Ray—and more recently Batty—is no less tractable than Man Ray was, a trait deriving from the breed's docile nature, encouraged through generations of training to take orders for hunting. Wegman's work with Fay accelerated in the period just before he decided to have her bred. "I photographed Fay a lot then," he explains, ''because I thought it might be her last great year, remembering from Ray that you only have a short timespan and then it's gone. I wasn't really finished with Ray when he left. It seemed like I was just beginning to do something." It took Wegman more than two years after Ray's death in 1982 to acknowledge that he wanted to work with a dog again, and implicit in his decision for Fay Ray to become a mother was his desire to carry on the dynasty of Wegman Weimaraners beyond her.

Five of Fay's pups were put up for adoption, but the bizarre disappearance of one of them continues to prey on Wegman's mind a year later. "We're really worried about Blaze,'' he says. "We don't know where she is. We sold her to a Reverend Gumby. But his check bounced, and he skipped, and we haven't heard from him, or about Blaze, ever since. Maybe if you put it in your piece, he'll come forward, like America's Most Wanted. ' '

For better or worse, Wegman is widely perceived as "the guy with the dog,'' although in fact the canine work makes up only a small percentage of his oeuvre. Lately he's been concentrating on his painting, which he calls "my neglected child." (One reason for his photos' great popularity, aside from their beguiling subject matter, is their rarity factor. Every twenty-by-twenty-four-inch Wegman Polacolor print is one-of-a-kind and unreproducible, making them desirable to collectors for whom uniqueness counts.)

A strong selection of Wegman's drawings from 1972 to the present was shown at the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York last spring, providing a convincing display of his conceptual virtuosity, even though his draftsmanship is far from skillful. ("I hated technique in art school," Wegman protests. "You had to study drawing technique, and photography was all about the darkroom. I was flat against that.")

If few of Wegman's intriguing sketches have the "wall power" demanded by many collectors, the same cannot be said about his massive canvases, also shown at Sperone Westwater and at New York's Holly Solomon Gallery, his primary dealer. Representative of the artist's more ambitious painterly approach of late, those large and high-priced pictures ($100,000 each) possess the dense but elusive quality of prehistoric cave paintings, alive with tiny animal and human figures cavorting amid cloudlike veils of thin, earth-colored pigment. Unlike many contemporary works on that large scale, these can sustain more than instantaneous attention. Prolonged scrutiny reveals more and more going on in them, and Wegman's jaunty hieroglyphs and antic ideograms are easier to figure out than David Salle's enigmatic juxtapositions of disjunctive images. The loosely structured Wegman murals draw on iconographic sources as simple and all-American as Wegman himself, in whose atelier can be found such reference works as The Golden Book guides, The World Book Encyclopedia, and Birds of America.

By and large, Wegman confines his art-making to the studio. He is not visibly bursting with ideas his hands cannot keep up with, like Picasso, who could barely get through a meal without making a work of art from his napkin, utensils, or the food itself. Yet Wegman's eye and conceptual intelligence are always at the ready for the unexpected, and his quick takes on the world around him often find acute verbal expression. Driving home after dark, the headlights of his pickup truck suddenly catch the low, sinuous darting of a fox. "Look at that!" Wegman exclaims. "It's like a feather with muscles!"

Wegman's three months in Maine are built around simple pleasures for which he found no better substitute during the two decades between his first summer at the lake as a schoolboy and his ultimate return as an established artist. It's that sense of perpetual boyishness that permeates all of Wegman's work, no matter what the medium, and gives his art a particular and peculiar Americanness quite different from that of his major American contemporaries. While Salle and Schnabel go for the high drama of European history painting in the grand manner, Wegman remains fixated on the kind of twice-told tales that were part of local legend in those secure years just after World War II. The opening of the Red Sox' season at Fenway Park is much more real to him than the opening of the Biennale in Venice. Bo Jackson is a bigger hero than Baudrillard.

If there is something slightly arrested about the persistence of the Boys' Life philosophy into the early reaches of middle age, then that is typically American, too. This is a country that in many ways, both good and bad, resolutely refuses to grow old—or, at times, even to grow up. And it is that land that William Wegman is keeping alive on the shores of his lake up in Maine.