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After Wegman

Anne McGuire

2003 00:03:30 United StatesEnglishB&WMono
Tags:
Humor, Performance, Remake

Description

An homage to early videoworks by William Wegman, starring Man and Fay Ray's stand-ins.

"Anne McGuire shows that men are dogs."

--Ed Halter, New York Underground Film Festival (2003)

"The droll conceptualism of William Wegman gets the choke chain in Anne McGuire's ode to pedigree, After Wegman. The trim weimaraners of Two Dogs Watching are replaced with equally trim boys, better trained than their canine counterparts. Where Man Ray and pal lavished obedience on man's best artist, McGuire's attentive post-puberty pets track the scent of their own desire. Slyly, we realize that the instincts differ--the ingrained servitude of dogs being perhaps more noble than the libido's leash on guys. As epilogue, McGuire enacts another Wegman piece, the slurping of a glass of milk, grown monumental in the foreground. With the impediment of a less tactile tongue, our young lapping lad struggles toward satiation, the cloudy liquid splashing and slopping often just out of reach. There is sustenance here: at the trough of desire, yes, but also in a lineage of artists that hasn't gone to the dogs."

—Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive (2003)

About Anne McGuire

Anne McGuire was born in the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant, and has lived in San Francisco since 1990. She began making videos in the late 1980s while she was a student. She has taught at various institutions in California including the San Francisco Art Institute, University of California Santa Cruz, and Stanford University, as well as KyungSung University in Busan, South Korea. 

Through her single-channel works, McGuire translates traditions of personal and poetic performances to camera, playing off of conventions of television. She has explored the personal through formal narrative, particularly in Strain Andromeda, The, her 1993 end-to-beginning re-edit of Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain. Strain was her first foray into disaster deconstruction. In 2006 Anne completed Adventure Poseiden, The (The Unsinking of My Ship), which celebrates the 20-year anniversary of her very own real-life shipwreck experience. She also writes poems and sings them as songs, and has performed as Freddy McGuire with San Francisco-based electronic musician Wobbly, live and on radio.