Word: plaster
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...extreme case of the reverence accorded to Beuys' work in Germany happened two years ago, when one of his pieces-a bathtub on a stand, dotted with bits of sticking plaster-was mistakenly used to cool beer during a party in the museum where it was stored. No damage was done to it, but the owner sued and was given $94,000 damages by a German court, a verdict happily greeted by Beuys as a victory over the "exploitative self-interest" of the beer drinkers. Plainly, something had happened to the avant-garde in the half-century since Marcel...
...shined the penlight into the dark, revealing familiar furnishings: a washbasin and a toilet. He squatted behind the door and ran his hand along the wall. He silently counted the ceramic tiles, seven across from the right wall, four up from the floor. Liddy picked at the soft plaster until the tile came loose. Again using one of his handmade tools, he removed the tile and slipped it into his coat pocket. Liddy plunged three fingers into the vacant hollow and withdrew a small white paper slip. In the same motion he placed the paper in his pocket, replaced...
Mexico's "guided democracy" has become so ossified that presidential election campaigns every six years are little more than repetitions of what voters cynically dismiss as "the great paint job." P.R.I. campaign workers plaster every available wall, hut and bridge with absurd slogans (TO NATIONALIZE IS TO DECOLONIALIZE) that make a mockery of the party's claim to be revolutionary. In fact, the campaign is a sham: since the reign of Calles (1924-28) every P.R.I, nominee has been personally selected by his predecessor. The decision is made after secret consultations with a tiny clique of labor leaders, senior civil...
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...
...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 Courrèges boots. But as a rule...