The eureka moment came like this: He was talking on the phone, drawing little circles on his hand. This was 1970, in Madison, Wis., where he'd gone to teach conceptual art and photography, after he'd realized that painting was dead. (He wasn't the only one to do so in the '60s.) After the phone call, he went to a party; here was food, he reached for a slice of cotto salami -- Bingo! The cut peppercorns matched the doodles, which matched the gemstones in a ring he wore. He remembers how pretty it was. The coincidence of circles made his hand look like meat, and the whole setup looked somehow like outer space. "It had that kind of strange beauty," he says. "And so I set it up and the photo came out amazing. And I never took a photograph like that, that was so graphically strong. It cleared my mind."

It was the heyday of conceptual art, when it seemed that every article by or about Robert Smithson began with a quote from Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty or the Third Law of Thermodynamics. Wegman felt a little worn out, he says, from studying set theory, logic, mathematics, philosophy, all the heavy lifting that went with the pose. "I wanted to be smart and superior and know everything," he says, "but I just wasn't cut out for it." "Cotto" made him forget about the conceptual strategies he'd been experimenting with -- documenting performances or creating such Smithson-like environmental events as floating a line of Styrofoam cups down the Milwaukee River.

A year later he moved out to Los Angeles, the headquarters of the droller branch of conceptual art. Wegman remembers being compelled by funny, strange work like Bruce Nauman's -- the holograms of the inside of his own mouth or the videos where he played a violin very badly while standing in the corner of a room. As he describes such influences -- Nauman, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha -- his tone is measured, respectful, sort of Wall Street Journal meets Artforum. He really lets go when I ask about his favorite comedians. "My heroes were always Bob and Ray," he says, recalling the Boston radio team of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, who did dry, Down East bits, describing summer vacation photos on air or running spelling bees where one contestant gets "interfenestration" and the other gets "who." Wegman gushed about them -- their minimalist approach, how they could be so funny with so little. "They were kind of lazy, too. They didn't try very hard, it seemed," he says. "But you can't if you're going to be funny."

Wegman's videos -- his contribution to the conceptual canon -- combine these approaches. He's a combiner by nature (Can't walk along a river without a fishing rod, he explains, because "just to take a walk in the woods isn't interesting, but to pursue trout!?"), so when Man Ray, the Weimaraner he got in his first months in L.A., kept barging into the videos he was making, he decided to go with it. Wegman compares this offhand video work to drawing -- sketch comedy, as it were -- and Man Ray fits perfectly into the mood of straight-faced ludicrousness. In one, Wegman, on his hands and knees, backs across the floor, and the dog follows, licking off the line of milk that Wegman spits out onto the tiles.

Although he lived on food stamps for a year before people started to pay attention to his photographs and videos, by the mid-'70s Wegman's work began receiving both critical and popular acclaim -- he was picked up by the Sonnabend Gallery, which gave him one-man shows in both its Paris and New York branches, and his videos appeared frequently as short spots on "Saturday Night Live." But the fame that elevated him also tended to reduce his body of work to its most obvious element: the dog. By the late '70s, he observed, he felt "nailed to the dog cross," a bit of hyperbole that hid other problems endemic to many postmodern art stars -- drink, drugs and grumpiness. For a year, he swore off work with Man Ray. "I became sort of a strange, sad, lonely, hibernating sort of person who was antisocial and just wanted to make my own drawings and little crazy pictures. And everyone excused me for that because, of course, I was an artist and I was supposed to be crazy and reclusive," he said. "But I wasn't happy."

About the time that Wegman lost everything in the loft fire, in 1978, Man Ray contracted prostate cancer and fell into a coma; the vet recommended putting him down. But Wegman chose to keep him on strong antibiotics and the dog survived. And despite an initial reluctance to make more Man Ray photographs, Wegman recognized the power of the 20-by-24 Polaroid poses he was invited to take that summer. "My approach to color and beauty and elegance and all those things that were formerly dirty words, that weren't allowed in my manifesto, that I didn't want anything to do with -- suddenly they were blasted right back at me in a stunning way." Again the dog pointed the way to greater fame. By the time Man Ray died, four years later in 1982, the Polaroids had made them both so widely beloved that the Village Voice named the dog "Man of the Year."

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