One for the Road

Sculptor George Segal is a onetime New Jersey chicken farmer who flew the coop to make plaster casts of people. Last week he got a mighty nice little nest egg for all his efforts: the $5,000 first prize at the Chicago Art Institute's 68th annual exhibition. The jurors also awarded prizes of $2,500 each to Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Larry Poons, all New Yorkers of the pop-op-geometric persuasion, and a $1,000 prize to Sculptor Robert Morris.

But the runaway hit of the show was easily Segal's creation, The Truck. It consisted of the actual cab of a red panel truck that Segal had found in a junkyard. Inside, the odometer read 85,723, the generator and oil-pressure gauges glowed red in the dashboard. In the driver's seat was an alert, life-size white plaster driver, both hands on the wheel, right foot hovering over the accelerator. As viewers looked over his shoulders at the windshield, they shared a Cineramic ride through city streets, as lights, cars and bright neon signs whizzed by.

To bring off the joy ride, Segal had rigged a small film projector and mirror arrangement to the right of the cab, which beamed the movie onto the truck's frosted windshield. Watching it, one housewife confided: "That's the way my husband drives." Chuckled a young executive: "I go through that every night." Juror Martin Friedman, director of Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, put it another way: "I found it very moving. Actually," he said, "by treating the man almost as a ghost, as a calcified figure, Segal presents you with reality, then questions the existence of reality." The driver? A neighboring chicken farmer, Leon Bibel, who had got plastered -- Segal-style.

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