Back in the studio again, on that orange sweep of floor against a flat cornflower wall, we find the no-place where Wegman stages all his best theater. Down through the top of the frame pour the ribbons: red, purple, lavender, buttercup, a whole spilled sewing box streaming from a maypole we never see, and standing dead center under the cascade, foursquare and unbothered, is the Weimaraner, peering out through the tangle with two pale, patient eyes.
It is pure performance, and the pleasure is in the dog’s refusal to sell it. A lesser subject would mug; this one holds a runway stillness while the streamers do all the dancing, ribbon looping over muzzle and ear and dropping the length of the front legs to coil on the floor. There is glamour in the palette, springtime and confetti and cheap parade, but the pose is deadpan Vegas, a showgirl who has decided the costume can carry the number by itself. The comedy lands because nobody involved is laughing.
By this point Wegman had turned the dog portrait into a genre entirely his own, deadpan and conceptual since the 1970s, museum-serious and living-room funny at once. The picture was shot on the large-format Polaroid, whose dye-rich color makes the ribbons sing and the blue backdrop hum, and it survives as a single unique object, not an edition, the one and only print of this exact tangle. Everything conspires toward festivity; the sitter declines the invitation, and that gap between party and poker face is the whole delicious point.
Back in the studio again, on that orange sweep of floor against a flat cornflower wall, we find the no-place where Wegman stages all his best theater. Down through the top of the frame pour the ribbons: red, purple, lavender, buttercup, a whole spilled sewing box streaming from a maypole we never see, and standing dead center under the cascade, foursquare and unbothered, is the Weimaraner, peering out through the tangle with two pale, patient eyes.
It is pure performance, and the pleasure is in the dog’s refusal to sell it. A lesser subject would mug; this one holds a runway stillness while the streamers do all the dancing, ribbon looping over muzzle and ear and dropping the length of the front legs to coil on the floor. There is glamour in the palette, springtime and confetti and cheap parade, but the pose is deadpan Vegas, a showgirl who has decided the costume can carry the number by itself. The comedy lands because nobody involved is laughing.
By this point Wegman had turned the dog portrait into a genre entirely his own, deadpan and conceptual since the 1970s, museum-serious and living-room funny at once. The picture was shot on the large-format Polaroid, whose dye-rich color makes the ribbons sing and the blue backdrop hum, and it survives as a single unique object, not an edition, the one and only print of this exact tangle. Everything conspires toward festivity; the sitter declines the invitation, and that gap between party and poker face is the whole delicious point.