George Segal: Love's Labors Cast

George Segal traps his subjects' basic yearnings in plaster and presents them to us as Everyman's. "I don't want to be explicit; I want to evoke feeling."

By casting his models in a casual stance or pose, Segal aims at revealing mental attitudes as well as traits of character: "People have attitudes locked up in their bodies and you have to catch them.... A person may reveal nothing of himself and then, suddenly, make a movement that contains a whole autobiography."

Despite a deep compassion for his fellow man and an intuitive grasp of what plagues him, Segal is not interested in sociological interpretation. Rather, he probes man's psyche. Allan Kaprow, Happening pioneer and friend of Segal's, claims that the sculptor assumes psychic possession of his models. Those who have been cast by Segal tend to agree. Just as man at times can feel imprisoned within himself, Segal, by imprisoning him in a mold, can capture his solitude and uncertainty. The thought that not only the sitter's physical likeness but his feelings as well are held captive lends (text continued on page 200) eeriness to those figures Kaprow has called "vital mummies," as another has likened them to "those hapless Pompeians."

Superficial resemblances aside, there is little to link Segal's figures to the victims of Pompeii; he has too much faith in man, too much love for the human body and an optimistic belief in the continuation of life--with all its tribulations.

But a sense of loneliness does pervade much of Segal's work. His subjects often seem alienated from their physical or spiritual environment, trapped in situations over which they have little or no control, or in roles they mindlessly perform. In his more intimate sculptures, he dwells upon the failing effort of people to reach out and touch one another. As he focuses on the individual in isolation or on the precariousness of interpersonal relationships, Segal strips his sitters of artifice and pretense: "You can't assume a social or artificial posture, for even then the body reveals certain truths about itself." The discomfort to the sitter is such that he can't pretend to ignore it--he has to accept and relax. Adds Segal: "My models are just as stoic and brave, or screaming and hysterical as they really are. It is very hard to be a fake with that kind of wet discomfort over such a long period of time."

All of Segal's sculptures are made in a series of abandoned chicken coops, 300 feet long and a mere eight feet high, lost in a rural pocket of New Jersey some 30 miles from Manhattan. Visiting this unique and now almost legendary studio, it is impossible not to be deeply impressed by its starkness, relieved only by casually scattered plaster figures looming in the crepuscular light, the leftovers of a ten-year activity. Haunted by ghosts, it is also pregnant with those as-yet-unrealized works that will born in its workaday-world atmosphere.

A neighbor once chided Segal for calling himself a sculptor, since he didn't chisel his works out of marble, as had all famous sculptors in history. Segal smilingly replied that an artist uses whatever materials he finds in good supply and can afford. At the time he started modeling those lumpy human forms that could have stepped right out of the pictures he had previously been painting, plaster was an obvious choice of material. He remembers buying it at a lumberyard for eight cents a pound. He also admits to never having had the time, the assistants nor the tools and equipment necessary to work in the "noble" materials--bronze, stone and marble.

Segal's decision to use plaster, whether for want of marble or by inclination, was consistent with the assemblage aesthetic of the Fifties and the predilection of artists at that time for broad gestures, raw materials and unfinished appearances. For Segal, plaster may have had the advantage of not possessing inherent artistic qualities; it also permitted speed of execution and it was cheap.

More important, of course, than the material itself is the use to which the artist puts it. A Segal figure, it should be realized, is not a facsimile of a human form but an approximation, roughly one eighth of an inch thicker. The sculptor covers a model, either clothed or nude, with bands and swaths of fabric dipped in hydrostone, a tough and resilient plaster used in industrial models and in medical casts. Hair and face are protected with Vaseline and the genitals are covered with Saran Wrap, while the nose is left exposed for breathing. The casting proceeds in sections--lower body, upper body, head and hands--and the model has to hold a given pose for up to 40 minutes at a time until the plaster has sufficiently hardened to be removed. The cast is then ripped open at a seam on the back or side.

Reassembling the sections is more exacting than making the mold. A pose can rarely be held without variation throughout the casting of each piece and a model's mood or ability to concentrate may have changed in the course of the session. But since the plaster shell is thin and flexible, the artist can manipulate and adjust details of form, stance or gesture. As the wet plaster soaks through the model's clothes, it catches the musculature and bone structure underneath. In addition, the surface is worked over to tone down or accentuate certain features. "Originally, I thought that casting would be fast and direct, like photography," says Segal, "but then I found that I had to rework every square inch."

Segal reminds us that Rodin was once accused--but later absolved--of making casts directly from the human body. This practice was as severely frowned upon as the recent practice among painters of copying photographs. Today, nearly everyone agrees that it is the result that counts, not the technique. It would be just as simple, according to Segal, to take any part of the body or the body as a whole, put plaster on it, let it set, take it off and use the negative mold to make a positive cast, thus faithfully duplicating the original. But then, Segal is not interested in literal reproduction and demands more artistic control and intervention: "I choose to use the exterior because, in a sense, it's my own version of drawing and painting. I have to define what I want and I can blur what I don't want."

Equally important to Segal is the environment in which he places his figures. Since Marcel Duchamp introduced the "ready-made" more than a half-century ago, we have learned that art can be not only what the artist makes but also what he finds and subsequently appropriates as his own. Segal's ready-mades are the props and fixtures, invariably mundane, that suggest rather than describe an environment. The chairs, beds, windows, tables, plumbing or whatever goes into a Segal environment are not merely props to dress an imaginary stage but plastic presences--like the figures, powerful in their own right.

The subjects of Segal's sculptures, predetermined and envisioned from the outset, are usually the result of significant encounters or particularly vivid recollections. The protagonists of his pieces are, for the most part, members of his family, friends and neighbors whom he presses into service. There is a parallel between Segal's finding people to cast and a stage director's casting a play. "I have to be very careful," says the artist, "to ask the right ones; a person's inner attitudes come out in the plaster somehow." Segal claims that in casting, he finds out a great deal more about people he thought he had known well.

"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 him next to an object, it also raises a question about the nature of that object."

Segal's slice-of-life presentations in environments that we are almost forced to enter have the effect of a disquieting confrontation, not unlike the sudden recognition of a human presence on a darkened stage. Watching strangers in the intimacy of their own home, we are made to feel we may be committing an indiscretion. Yet we cannot look away. Our gaze remains fixed as though we were spectators in an audience about to see dramatic disclosures.

In much of Segal's work, he experiments with love, that most volatile of sentiments, going from discreet allusion to brazen representation. In fact, there is something vaguely erotic about even those sculptures in which love relationships are neither hinted at nor implied. When Dry Cleaning Store, an important early sculpture, was returned to the artist from exhibition at New York's Green Gallery, the figure of the far-from-glamorous laundress, bent over her counter, had a shiny behind from an excess of public affection. This seems only natural to Segal, who sees an erotic impulse both in the making and in the experiencing of art--and not necessarily art with an erotic subject nor the art of his making. Could there be a more gratuitous gesture than Marcel Duchamp's selecting a urinal from a sanitary-supplies store and submitting it as a work of art to a 1917 "Independents" exhibition in New York? Yet Segal, who knew Duchamp, says: "I am sure that in his studio, some time or other, he must have run his hand lovingly across that cool porcelain that felt like a woman's icy ass."

Erotic themes kept recurring in Segal's paintings of the late Fifties and (continued on page 259)Love's Labors Cast(continued from page 200) early Sixties. In his sculpture, the first encounter with sexual love as a potential subject occurred in 1962, when he asked a newlywed couple who often came to visit to pose for him sitting on a park bench. Since the girl had posed for drawings, it seemed natural that the double portrait be in the nude--a traditional idealizing device with ample historic precedent. In this sculpture, the girl holds her hand possessively on the man's thigh. Segal recalls how the pose struck him as an ironic inversion of the tribal kings and queens in African sculpture: "Was this a young free breed sitting in tribal authority or were they mocking marital togetherness?"

As one pose prompted another, the young lovers were eager to comply. Segal cast them lying on a bed in tender embrace and called it Lovers on a Bed. The sheltering superiority of the woman, who was, indeed, the stronger of the two, is evident again in this sculpture. Segal admits that it taught him how people's private sensual lives can differ from their private mental lives.

This first version of the lovers was intimate and poetic. Reflecting young love and "early sexual bloom," to quote Segal, it steered clear of the self-doubt, disenchantment and downright hostility that marked later versions. As the models for Lovers on a Bed lost their last vestiges of self-consciousness in his presence and grew increasingly bold, Segal was led at their urging to cast them while making love to each other. The artist pondered the difficulty of "plunging in, almost as a participant, yet keeping the distance required for doing the job." It's ironic that loveplay, so familiar to all of us, is so difficult to record satisfactorily. It thwarts most artists' efforts to grapple with it. Grappling--to come back to Segal--has the extra connotation of physical contact, the constant touch of the hand on the bodies of the people he is casting. Only the film director is forced into so direct a confrontation with his subjects, especially in seeking to record erotic actions. Like the film director, Segal is dependent on the right vibrations from his subjects. With his Lovers on a Bed models, unfortunately, they were all wrong. Their relationship had deteriorated in a year's time to the point where a deep-seated hostility of the man toward the woman foiled their attempts to act lovingly. It turned Segal off, made him dissatisfied with the cast and killed the desire to put the pieces together. Thus, the "fuck piece," as he wryly refers to his abortive venture, lies sadly discarded in a corner of his studio.

The theme of lovers on a bed was taken up again in 1965, when the artist cast his Couple on a Bed, now in the Art Institute of Chicago. Most striking there is the acceptance of conflict, the falling out of grace. The man is seated on the edge of the bed, brooding and turned away from the woman, who is stretched out and relaxed. "I have noticed," Segal says, "how quickly after intercourse two bodies exist again within their own boundaries."

Segal has cast a great many women, generally alone and unobserved, absorbed by routine occupations, vaguely narcissistic and not altogether unerotic, if only by inference. What shines through clearly is the artist's love for women. He finds none of their activities too trivial to be treated fondly. There is a long procession of subjects: woman shaving her leg in a bathtub, stepping from a shower stall, washing her foot in a sink, hooking her bra, putting on her shoes, combing her hair, polishing her nails, fixing an earring that has come loose, looking in a mirror or simply sitting on a chair. Segal's work depends and thrives on watching the people around him. Just as he wrenches qualities from objects--color, shape, texture, memory associations--he selects pertinent gestures in people, favoring those fragile and delicate ones that flash by in the blink of an eye but are incredibly telling.

Could there be a subject more banal than a woman shaving her leg? Yet Segal revels in the eroticism of that bathroom scene: "If you live with a woman, the bathroom is a natural place to be nude and a place often inviting erotic play." Critics have compared Woman Shaving Her Leg to a Venus rising from the sea, seeing in it not a specific occurrence but an archetype and praising her not for what she does but for what she promises. In trying to understand the comparison of Segal's work to classical art and mythological themes, we have to conclude that the whiteness of the plaster has a great deal to do with it. Place the cast of a girl sprawled on a mattress upright against a wall and she turns into a caryatid begging for company that will help her support the roof of an imaginary temple. And since we are all living in a museum without walls, we will understand the sculptor when he refers to yet another great culture: "When looking at Woman Washing Her Foot in Sink, I was struck by how much her pose resembled that of women I had seen in erotic Hindu temple sculpture who stretched their bodies to their anatomical limits for the glory and celebration of sex raised to religion."

In a series of women sitting on chairs, Segal makes his purest statement. The artist's logic is simple and direct: "I love women's bodies. I love and collect chairs. Chairs are magical containers of the body." But what intrigues him in particular is the soft, voluptuous form of the women against the straight hard lines of the chair--"that springboard for erotic pleasure," he says. In no work has that precarious balance between woman and chair been better achieved than in Pregnant Woman, a 1966 commission for Playboy (see The Playmate as Fine Art, January 1967) that seems to defy rather than comply with the Playboy image. Yet the girl is beautiful, the scene is moving and the chair has all the properties Segal ascribes to it.

More powerful sometimes than a full form or statement is a fragment or allusion. In a recent interview, Segal admitted to Dick Bellamy, his longtime friend and onetime dealer, that the fragments must have their beginnings in some kind of erotic or sensual impulse, an attempt to "define bits of lips, fingers, breast, folds of flesh, intricate lines." He asked himself what they were: "Notations? Loving comments? Lyric statements? Glimpses of things seen before?" Their poetry is so strong that when left on the floor, they look like spring leaves and when hung on a wall, they seem like bits and pieces of a cubist collage--the highest accolade, in the artist's estimation. They are like words barely spoken and sweet compliments between lovers. One of Segal's most recent works, Lovers on a Bed II, is yet another version of the theme that haunted him throughout the Sixties. It is tender and intimate but much less virginal than that first bed piece. Obviously, the people portrayed are knowledgeable and mature; their pose radiates a long familiarity with sex and a capacity for sexual abandon. Stretched out, relaxed, their limbs touching, they are bathed in sensuality. It would seem that, for Segal, the good feelings are back again.