M.: How did you first encounter William Wegman’s work?

K.: In the winter of 1982 I traveled to New York and visited the famous Holly Solomon Gallery, which specialized in painting and photography.

Holly was a collector, and, like most collectors, she owned a great variety of works: some of them by artists who had been established as central figures of the most recognized contemporary movements, like Pop and Minimal Art; but she also collected works by emerging artists whose market position had yet to be established – as opposed to other gallerists, Holly had the courage to show them.

William Wegman was one of these artists. He was already fairly well known for his photos and videos, especially for his  conceptual black and white self-portraits – the most famous among those had images of his family members superimposed on his own face. On the one hand, Wegman worked within an intellectually stringent aesthetic, but on the other hand he also displayed a ready sense of irony and playfulness as well as a great pleasure in the paradoxical. I saw him as a multi-faceted artist with a gift for narration, especially for comic narration – all these qualities aroused my curiosity and made me want to get to know him better.

M.: What was the cultural context, and what was the phase of Wegman’s career at the time you met him?

K.: In the 1980s, New York was experiencing a moment of enormous transformation, not only in the art-world or the art market: changes were also afoot in the everyday lives of artists – developments in the art market and rising rents, for example – and there was a great shift in what they found interesting. Conceptual notions of art had been largely abandoned, at least for the moment. Young artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle and many others were dealing with the world in a very different way than the previous generation: their approach was more narrative and immediate, more open and comprehensible – and yet their work was no less committed to high art, no less serious. Schnabel was working in a restaurant and used its plates in his paintings – in other words: personal experience had re-entered the picture. This was a highly important decade, especially for painting: the painting of this period was deliberately low-brow, without the sweeping grandeur of abstract expressionism, and a large number of its practitioners became quite famous. Of course I had no way of knowing that at the time, but I had a strong sense of having stumbled onto something new and different – and exciting. Wegman was still rooted in the previous generation, one might say, but his work seemed very contemporary in the way it oscillated successfully between two contrasting valences: one more conceptual, and the other more narrative, more down to earth, with a dead pan, very clever humor. The latter aspect appealed to a wider public, and that’s quite unusual for an artist with his sort of background. However, he also found an audience in the most sophisticated echelons of the art world.

Holly Solomon’s Gallery was the ideal place for Wegman, since it allowed and encouraged him to develop his creative work in all the various ways and directions in which it was inclined to move. The works I saw at the gallery spanned the years from the 1960s to the 1980s, and while the focus was largely on more current experimentation, it also showed the links to the past and how it had already contained the seeds of a new form of expression. It was in this particular context that Wegman was producing his new works, which consisted not only of numerous drawings and traditional photographs but also of extremely large-format polaroids. Those required a highly laborious technical process which very few artists even had the guts to attempt.

Wegman was open to collaborations with other artists of his generation, some of whom were also represented by Holly Solomon: for example Wegman entrusted the creation of the dog costumes for one entire photo series to the painter Robert Kushner. The dog was Man Ray, his first canine model and great muse. He had bought that beautiful Weimaraner as a puppy for just 35 dollars.

The time I first met Wegman, I too, found myself in a state of openness and availability. And after watching his videos, it became clear to me that his work was much more multi-layered than I had known, that there was a lot to discover for me as an art historian. His idiom was very different from the languages of those artists with whom I was most familiar, like Sol LeWitt, Joseph Beuys, or the Italian Arte Povera artists whose work I had come to care for very much. Some of my would-be certainties had already begun to waver in the course of curating shows on the new wave of painting from West Berlin and other German New Fauves or Neo-Expressionists. But my encounter with the new work that was produced in the US – the home of conceptualism and minimalism, after all – shook the very foundations of my ideas about art. And it intrigued me to the degree that I wanted to live in direct contact with artists like Wegman and other members of the new American guard. Because I knew that a curator’s only way of truly understanding contemporary art is by collaborating directly with the artists.

Nam ac tristique sem. Nulla vitae faucibus augue. Praesent eu ullamcorper ipsum, quis vehicula sapien. Sed vitae elit in ipsum commodo pharetra ut eget mauris. Cras nec feugiat nulla, in cursus diam. Cras vestibulum lobortis massa vel scelerisque. Maecenas consectetur blandit urna ac sodales. Mauris malesuada nec tellus non auctor. Proin placerat felis tellus, ut finibus ligula condimentum non. Pellentesque nec libero nec justo auctor eleifend ut in quam. Donec fermentum, libero ac sodales aliquam, lectus turpis pulvinar leo, vel interdum ipsum purus quis ligula. Sed euismod lectus nibh, vitae aliquet ipsum venenatis id. Nam eget libero vel lorem euismod pellentesque. Integer ac nunc ac libero rhoncus sodales in vel tellus. Mauris hendrerit rhoncus mattis. Fusce mattis sapien et massa luctus eleifend.

Nam ac tristique sem. Nulla vitae faucibus augue. Praesent eu ullamcorper ipsum, quis vehicula sapien. Sed vitae elit in ipsum commodo pharetra ut eget mauris. Cras nec feugiat nulla, in cursus diam.

Suspendisse tincidunt tempus tortor, pellentesque ultricies enim faucibus placerat. Donec in dolor vitae est mattis gravida a vel libero. Curabitur tincidunt congue massa a sodales.

Cras vestibulum lobortis massa vel scelerisque. Maecenas consectetur blandit urna ac sodales. Mauris malesuada nec tellus non auctor. Proin placerat felis tellus, ut finibus ligula condimentum non. Pellentesque nec libero nec justo auctor eleifend ut in quam. Donec fermentum, libero ac sodales aliquam, lectus turpis pulvinar leo, vel interdum ipsum purus quis ligula. Sed euismod lectus nibh,

Text für Webdesign, Typografie, Layout und Printmedien.

1. Er ersetzt Deutsch um Designelemente gegenüber dem Inhalt hervorzuheben, hat also die Funktion als Platzhalters in
2. Layouts um dem Betrachter eine vorläufige Vorstellung der endgültigen Fassung zu vermitteln. Buchstaben, Worte, Wort- und Satzlängen bilden
3. ungefähr das Schriftbild eines lateinischen Texts wieder. Latein war in früheren Jahrhunderten eine häufig genutzte Sprache verschiedener Textgattungen, z. B. wissenschaftlicher Werke, Ratgeber, oder auch der sogenannten Erbauungsliteratur. Um die Aufmerksamkeit des Lesers ausschließlich auf das Schriftbild zu lenken wird auch ein zufälliger Sinn durch Wort- oder Satzkombinationen vermieden.

Er ersetzt Deutsch um Designelemente gegenüber dem Inhalt hervorzuheben, hat also die Funktion als Platzhalters in

1. Layouts um dem Betrachter eine vorläufige Vorstellung der endgültigen Fassung zu vermitteln. Buchstaben, Worte, Wort- und Satzlängen bilden
2. ungefähr das Schriftbild eines lateinischen Texts wieder. Latein war in früheren Jahrhunderten eine häufig genutzte Sprache verschiedener Textgattungen, z. B. wissenschaftlicher Werke, Ratgeber, oder auch der sogenannten Erbauungsliteratur. Um die Aufmerksamkeit des Lesers ausschließlich auf das Schriftbild zu lenken wird auch ein zufälliger Sinn durch Wort- oder Satzkombinationen vermieden.