Word: plasters
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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...
Today, nobody loses any hair under Segal's hands. In his perfected technique, hairdos are swathed in Saran Wrap before the plaster cloths are applied. In the case of nudes, Vaseline is used wherever the plaster might pull on body hair. But Segal can never cast the whole figure in one piece-a complete cast would cut off the body's pores from the outer air and might prove as lethal to the model as gold paint was to the hapless girl in Goldfinger...
...hand or the flick of a wrist, but rather the whole attitude of the body. Says he: "You have to know the gesture you want, and then there's always the question of whether the human being can hold that gesture for the 20 minutes it takes the plaster to dry." The result is that artificial postures disappear, and his models slump into poses that are brutally natural. "People have attitudes locked up in their bodies, and you have to catch them...
...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...