Mr. Winkle Does It Again
James Scarborough
Mr. Winkle Hotel-Motel Nudes: Photographic Works by Lara Jo Regan at Icon Gallery shows what happens when you separate glitz from celebrity, aesthetic readings from literal readings ("It’s not journalism, stupid, it’s art!"), bacon from the sizzle.
The result surprises. You’re left with the work itself, with form and content, elements intrinsic to the work. Unholistic viewers who see style as transparent separate form and content. One type sees Mapplethorpe, Serrano as pornographic, as iconoclastic. Another thinks art illustrates premises and idée fixes. In both cases, the art object becomes irrelevant, prey to extrinsic impositions.
Regan doesn’t privilege form or content. She takes an icon, an icon of her own making, not one she cannibalized from popular culture, and situates it in un-glamorous settings that brim with low-brow patinas.
Mr. Winkle’s iconic status cannot be denied. He has achieved worldwide popularity through a series of calendars and note cards that bear his likeness. He’s become a global cultural phenomenon because so many people have identified with his plight–abandoned on the side of a highway, rescued, nursed back to health by Regan.
Time and again people attribute their desire to continue to live, to stop abusing themselves and others, to make something of lives, all to the example of this dog. His Q-tip body, his infectious, Cheshire Cat smile, his poses staged a la Cindy Sherman all confer upon him the status of secular icon. An icon by definition implies transcendence (read celebrity), induces veneration (read adoration), and confers hope and salvation.
Before she began what exploded into "Winklemania"–a phenomenon that includes packed book signings, appearances on national televisions shows, a biblical deluge of e-mail–Regan was an award-winning documentary photographer; she won "Pictures of the Year" awards and "The World Press Photos of the Year 2000 Awards" for the social acumen of her work.
And it’s that sociological incision that Regan imparts to these current photos. Regan the journalist/icon shepherd/artist doesn’t play upon Winkle’s iconic status. In fact, she demotes it. She places him, not in luxury suites as would befit canine royalty and expense accounts, but in budget hotels and motels, the kind of place in which you would stay were you to plan to get your kicks on Route 66. Hotels like Howard Johnson and Best Chalet Inn serve a function of utility; their artistic representations either wax ironic or else document a specific genus of middle-class culture.
You would think the juxtaposition of Mr. Winkle and these white bread roadside rest spots would clash. They don’t. Mr. Winkle doesn’t look out of place here. Nor does he look like he’s slumming. Nor does it appear as if he’s placed there for purposes of irony.
Why don’t these images jar us? It’s not because the banality of these places can dim the luster of even the brightest star.
No, it’s because the formal qualities of these images, their composition, hold the intellectual clashes at bay in an unlikely grid of beauty.
At some point you have to account for the chromatic richness of these pieces, their lush texture, and, most of all, their exquisite compositions. It’s too easy to zero in on the meta-esthetic qualities of the image–their cultural and economic implications–without considering the effect their composition has on their reading.
Each piece abounds with a formal vigor that complements their iconography. In Corner Curve the semi-circle of Mr. Winkle’s body completes the circle begun by the balcony railing. In DC Donut, the rectangular lampshade above the circular lamp whose center frames the dog glows around the edges like something out of a Rothko painting. Stay ‘N Play Motel is filled with the whimsy of a Miro painting. Ho Jo Hedge presents Winkle as an appendage to a series of rectangular hedges whose verticality resembles Easter Island monuments. In Sliding Door the pattern of the carpet echoes the design of his two front paws.
Regan anticipates and then undercuts ironic poses with a rigorous pictorial architecture that something not-quite-beauty is localized and site-specific, that you find it, as here, in the most unlikely of places.
Forget the art historical associations of Raft of the Medusa and focus on a gradation of color that runs the spectrum from red to blue, punctuated with a strident yellow raft upon which rests a white cipher of a dog. A scene sequestered in formally, literally, by both the vertical bars of a gate as well as the vertical white lines against the green rim of the pool.
Then consider the scene itself. Forlorn dog in a spiraling cultural vortex. Vivid like the colors in the remake of The Stepford Wives. Though its circumstances belie it, this image, all these images, offer a drama built up, first, from formal elements. When you consider the art of these images, distinct from and then reintegrated back into the content, you realize everything is not as it seems, that first impressions are not always the best, that beauty is here, there and everywhere.
