Word: plasters
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This is the peculiar magic of the strange plaster figures of Sculptor George Segal. In a new show at Manhattan's Sidney Janis Gallery, he demonstrates that at 44, he has survived his early classification as a pop artist to become a major, if idiosyncratic sculptor subject to no label whatever...
...figurative painter and bought his own chicken farm to support himself. The farm was on the verge of bankruptcy and his works were not selling when, one day in 1960, a student walked into an art class he was teaching at a New Brunswick community center with a plaster-impregnated bandage marketed by the local pharmaceutical company, Johnson & Johnson. She asked Segal whether he thought it could be used as an art form. Segal took the stuff home, had his wife wrap him up like a mummy, and almost tore out his hair getting it off again. But the experience...
...encased in plaster from his toes to his zebra-striped bikini shorts, but for all that, the happiest man in Milan last week was probably Expatriate designer Ken Scott. At the height of a wild discotheque party, one of Scott's patent-leather pumps flew off and Scott himself caromed off the raised dance floor on his way to multiple fractures...
...suited to sketching because it is easy to cut, join, and texture with just a fingernail or scrap of wood. And he modified the lost-wax casting technique to cast directly from styrofoam, and even egg cartons, to bronze. (In lost-wax casting, one puts a refracting material like plaster around a wax shape one wants to reproduce, melts out the wax once the plaster hardens and then pours in molten metal...
Oldenburg had gone on from plaster to vinyl and canvas. In 1962 he dreamed up monster hamburgers and bed-size pistachio ice-cream cones. Since then he has sketched a myriad of delightful "proposed colossal monuments" for Manhattan, including a giant Teddy bear for Central Park, and a mountainous baked potato for the front of the Plaza Hotel. Conceivably, Manhattan's festival organizers also expected him to whip up the baked potato. Instead, he had the city hire two gravediggers, who dug a 3-ft. by 6-ft. hole in Central Park, then carefully filled it in. He called...