Invasion of the Plaster People

By ROBERT HUGHES

At New York's Whitney Museum, a Segal introspective

Silent, muffled in form, tinged with the pathos of the discarded chrysalis, George Segal's plaster figures have kept their place on the edge of modernism for the better part of 20 years. They have also shown how art changes one's reading of other art. In the early 1960s, when Segal --the son of a New Jersey chicken farmer --first emerged as a sculptor, he was identified with Pop art. This happened because some of his tableaux had an aggressive, urban character and used real props: stacks of oil cans, winking beer neons, even the inside of a scrapped subway car, with seats, hanging straps, lights and all. Some 15 years later, after a revival of realism in American art that Segal, among others, helped to set off (his plaster molds, for instance, are the direct ancestors of Duane Hanson's ultrarealist wax people), his connections to Pop look tenuous indeed. In this changed context, it is the figures and their mood, rather than their surrounding artifacts, that one notices first; and they connect to an older realist tradition, far from the self-consciousness and media-play of Pop. They resemble, as the late Mark Rothko once said, "walk-in Hoppers," sculptural equivalents to the world of that American master, with its nocturnal bars and waiting figures. Segal's tableaux have a flavor of the '30s--overlaid, now and then, with a sharp erotic curiosity. Instead of the irony of a '60s Warhol or Lichtenstein, one is treated to an unremitting earnestness, a moral concern with the voids between people and the circumspectness of their gestures. It is a somber sight, this "populist art," as one of Segal's admirers dubbed it; and it gives a special density to the retrospective of 100 works by Segal that is on display at Manhattan's Whitney Museum.

One reason for the popularity of Segal's work is its material: plaster casts from live bodies. Because there was once a person inside each of the shells, they have the slightly eerie factuality of a petrified tree, a fossil or (as has often been said) that great tourist attraction of Southern Italy, the plaster molds of dead Pompeians. Now and again, Segal made an identifiable portrait; the show includes the effigies of those New York Pompeians of the '60s, the collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, she complete with sunglasses and Courreges boots. But as a rule, Segal's figures are not identifiable. They are generalized, spectral presences, muffled in the folds of calcified gauze, their skin roughened with residual abstract-expressionist drips and clots. It hardly matters that the stooped Gerontion in Segal's Hot Dog Stand, 1978, is a cast of the sprightly museum director Martin Friedman; what does count is the peculiar tension between his dark shape and the bright white figure of the waitress, under the glare of the lit mock-Mondrian ceiling.

There is always something ominous about Segal's images; no American sculptor today runs his work closer to theater. The theatricality becomes particularly intense in his painted sculptures, where the coating of figures with primary red, yellow or blue gives them a ferocious visual punch while rendering them, in Segal's words, "more like abstract shafts of color." To take the colors associated with the most rigorous abstractionists of 20th century art -- Mondrian and Barnett Newman -- and use them in a piece like The Costume Party, begun in 1965, has a perverse aspect.

The narrative of the sculpture remains opaque (what is a figure of Ian Fleming's Pussy Galore in a bike helmet doing in the same place as the donkey-headed Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream?), but its intention is plain -- to provoke a sense, as Segal puts it, of "terror, hallucination, nightmare."

Strong feeling does not necessarily make strong art, and Segal's tableaux might remain in the category of dramatic curiosities but for one quality: his laconic Tightness of arrangement. "In his use of space," one of the catalogue essays rather absurdly claims, "Segal is close to the minimalists," because, apparently, "Segal's figures energize their spaces." (And what sculpture, minimal or other, does not?) Nevertheless, Segal knows exactly how much distance to allot between one figure and another, how much emptiness should come between a silhouette in a bar and the profile of a metal letter, and how to maintain a kind of iconic austerity in an impure medium that could easily become cluttered with props and set dressing. Segal is no formalist, but his sense of the abstract underpinning of sculpture cuts down on what might otherwise have become a tough-but-tender street sentimentality. He is, as the catalogue suggests, a "proletarian mythmaker," though not in a political sense; and no other sculptor working in America today has done more to revive the human figure as a subject.

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