Presences in Plaster

They may not be real, but they are certainly presences--insistent as memory, disturbing as a sudden hush in a crowded room. Ghostly white, implacably still, they command a whole ambiance around themselves. Step too close to the motel bed with its sprawled, exhausted girl, and you feel as awkward as an intruder. Even the simplest figure--a naked girl slumped on a chair by a window, a woman emerging from a shower stall--seems not just a piece of sculpture but a centerpiece of some invisible living space. The mind's eye creates walls, curtains, furniture that is not there.

This is the peculiar magic of the strange plaster figures of Sculptor George Segal. In a new show at Manhattan's Sidney Janis Gallery, he demonstrates that at 44, he has survived his early classification as a pop artist to become a major, if idiosyncratic sculptor subject to no label whatever.

Converted Farmer. Son of a Bronx butcher turned New Jersey chicken farmer, Segal began as a figurative painter and bought his own chicken farm to support himself. The farm was on the verge of bankruptcy and his works were not selling when, one day in 1960, a student walked into an art class he was teaching at a New Brunswick community center with a plaster-impregnated bandage marketed by the local pharmaceutical company, Johnson & Johnson. She asked Segal whether he thought it could be used as an art form. Segal took the stuff home, had his wife wrap him up like a mummy, and almost tore out his hair getting it off again. But the experience turned his life around. "I discovered marvelous things going on--elements of bone structure that come through in the plaster."

Today, nobody loses any hair under Segal's hands. In his perfected technique, hairdos are swathed in Saran Wrap before the plaster cloths are applied. In the case of nudes, Vaseline is used wherever the plaster might pull on body hair. But Segal can never cast the whole figure in one piece--a complete cast would cut off the body's pores from the outer air and might prove as lethal to the model as gold paint was to the hapless girl in Goldfinger.

Essential Gesture. Each cast comes off after about 20 minutes. By slopping on water, Segal can rework the cast days or months later. "Originally, I thought casting would be fast and direct, like photography, but I found that I had to rework every square inch. I add or subtract detail, create a flow or break up an area by working with creases and angles. I'm shaping forms."

In shaping his forms, Segal is preoccupied with what he calls "gesture." He does not mean the wave of a hand or the flick of a wrist, but rather the whole attitude of the body. Says he: "You have to know the gesture you want, and then there's always the question of whether the human being can hold that gesture for the 20 minutes it takes the plaster to dry." The result is that artificial postures disappear, and his models slump into poses that are brutally natural. "People have attitudes locked up in their bodies, and you have to catch them."

He placed his new figures in real environments. He grouped diners'around a real table, put a truck driver behind a real steering wheel. For his Subway, he discovered that the Transit Authority was about to scrap a car, and trucked it to his old chicken barn, which he now uses as a studio. Dismembered, refurbished, equipped with programmed flashing lights and one lone girl passenger rapt in some dream of her own, Subway now transforms one wall of the Janis gallery into a vivid simulation of the flickering trauma of underground travel.

Dealer in Mystery. If the results seem inexplicable to most viewers. Segal knows what he is doing. "I deal primarily in mystery, and in the presentation of mystery," he says. "If I cast someone in plaster, it is the mystery of a human being that is presented. If I put this next to a real object, it also raises a question about the nature of the real object."

To Segal, objects are as important as his figures. "Furniture has already been made by man, and everything made by man has its own expressiveness. The chair legs in a sculpture are just as important as the human legs."

Maybe so. But the strange white figures in the real shower stalls or the garage attendant slouched outside a real winking sign that says "Park," by their whiteness and strangeness, take on a kind of eerie archetypal relevance. The girl in Subway is every girl or any girl who has nervously taken a lonely train home late one night. The couple in Motel is all guilty couples who have ever sneaked away for a surreptitious rendezvous.

Whether they recognize themselves as archetypes or not, anyone who comes near Segal is apt to find himself wrapped in plaster. The despondent male of Motel is, beneath the plaster, his fellow artist and friend Lucas Samaras. The withdrawn girl holding a kitten is his daughter Rena. He even uses himself as a model. For a man with his technique, this is hard to do--but he achieves it by putting his wife to work under his detailed direction.

There is one remaining problem in Segal's work. Where to put it? Subway in the corner of a living room would impose the clickety-clack of rails maddeningly on the inner ear. The woman emerging from her shower stall obviously expects privacy. Each of them seems to demand a room of his own.

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