Word: plasterers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rome's Cinecitta film complex, craftsmen are putting the finishing touches on an 18-ft., 550-lb. plaster statue of a male nude who could be a cousin of Michelangelo's David. From the neck up it is David-David Niven, that is. Niven has never seen the colossus, which is intended for his aptly titled film The Statue. His features were copied from photos. But he has learned that it deviates in one significant way from the prototype. "The statue has a fig leaf," the actor notes. "And quite a large...
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...
...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...
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...
...would expect in a community as conscientiously intellectual as Cambridge, many objects in the exhibit show intimate knowledge and technical mastery of games notable artists play. Mercifully, student artists no longer feel obliged to concentrate on drawing from plaster casts and copying masters...