Backwards

At just 23 seconds long, 'Backwards' is one of William Wegman's earliest video works, made in 1970 when the Sony Portapak had recently put portable video equipment into the hands of artists for the first time. Wegman was among the first artists to treat this raw, domestic-looking medium as a space for dry conceptual humor, and the title alone signals his approach: something is reversed, flipped, undone. Like many of his short early tapes, the piece toys with the basic properties of the medium itself, using video's capacity for playback manipulation as both the subject and the punchline. The black-and-white picture and ambient sound give it a distinctly lo-fi, almost home-movie quality that feels very much of its moment.

This work sits at the beginning of the same run of conceptual video experiments that would define Wegman's reputation before his famous Weimaraners entered the picture. Pieces like 'Tammy and Can of Plums' and 'Average Guy' from a few years later share the same compact, absurdist structure. Wegman had come from a painting background, trained at Massachusetts College of Art and the University of Illinois, but by the early 1970s he was fully committed to video as a medium for quick, witty ideas. 'Backwards' captures that transition at its most raw and unguarded.