Ghost Maker

In A.D. 79, a volcano erupted and covered Pompeii with ash. Eighteen hundred years later, archaeologists found that the Pompeians' bodies, long since dust, had left molds of themselves in the impacted cinders. The scientists poured in liquid plaster, and when it set, the casts were lifted out and put in a local museum.

This may not have been the archaeological coup of the age, but in some mysterious fashion, it suddenly seized the imagination of a group of European sculptors after World War II. All at once, Bond Street and Rue de Seine overflowed with tasteful mock fossils by Marino Marini, Germaine Richier and Cesar. The style spread to America. The parallels were too many and too pat to miss: Pompeianism suited many a Fifties liberal, with his passive sense of impending catastrophe and his culturally induced impotence in the face of Joe McCarthy and Curtis LeMay. (Q. What did you do in the Great War, Daddy? A. I sat down in an orderly manner, baby, ate some larks' tongues and waited for the ash.) The Pompeian mode produced only one noteworthy American variant that survives into the 1970s: George Segal, whose latest plastered figures currently populate the Sidney Janis Gallery with a ghostly white company.

Segal casts his sculptures direct from life in his studio outside New Brunswick, N.J., a converted chicken house whose successive rooms, dimly lit and filled with immobile plaster figures, suggest an archaic burial chamber. The models are the artist's friends. Segal watches them, studying their gestures and movement until, he says, "one moment clicks with me. A person may reveal nothing of himself and then suddenly make a movement that contains a whole autobiography." The pose held, Segal covers the model's hair with Saran Wrap and the exposed flesh with grease; then he wraps him up in gauze bandages soaked in liquid Hydro-Stone. For the model, this mummification can be an itchy, nasty and claustrophobic experience. One of Segal's models, the wife of New York Taxi Mogul Robert Scull, panicked inside the cast and had to be cut out, leaving her Courreges boots behind.

The finished casts are set up in "environments": a store window, before a mirror, or--in The Aerial View, the most elaborate image in Segal's new show--contemplating a diorama of New York at night. The Bowery shows an alcoholic collapsed on the pavement, with a man leaning casually against the rusty iron of a closed shopfront and staring neutrally at him. "I wasn't at all interested in the bum," says Segal. "What interests me is the uninvolved spectator there, and what's going through his head." Precisely. The unvarying subject of Segal's art is loneliness, alienation, and a tremulous, failing effort of trapped people to touch one another.

Authentic though the angst is, Segal's images tend to wear it as a dandy wears his cane--as a badge rather than an expression of individuality. The tension Segal achieves between the intimacy of his situations and the stiff, objective distance of the plaster effigies is often haunting. But even ghosts can turn predictable. And sometimes one feels that, inside the plaster man, there is a plastic one signaling to be let out.

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