Freeze!

George Segal

For a Jew, a cultural heritage is a living thing. For a New Yorker, even the streets are alive. Thankfully, then, New York's Jewish Museum is not solely in the business of preservation down through the centuries. Along with Jewish history, it has a surprising commitment to the visual arts today.

Still, the museum wishes to do more than to showcase such Jewish artists as Chantal Akerman, Camille Pissarro, and Chaim Soutine. It also considers them—or asks that they consider themselves—as Jews. In the case of George Segal, it bought a Holocaust memorial not long ago, and a show at the Jewish museum now pleads the case for Segal as a mirror of itself. Stripped down from a full-scale retrospective elsewhere, it makes him out to be a keeper of America's conscience.

Unfortunately, that puts more on a perfectly decent artist than he can bear. Conscience may or may not make cowards of us all, but the museum has shied away from Segal's finest years. It also avoids confronting what a social conscience might mean in art today.

Take mine black

Segal always comes off as the humanist of Pop Art. Instead of comics and car crashes, he offers existential despair.

Alone at a diner, a man nurses his toast and coffee, while a lone waitress turns away from his stark meal. Bathed in the light of a movie marquee as if under an x-ray, a laborer stretches to place a single letter almost beyond human grasp. Above him, the blank line waits for the title as if expecting the meaning of life. One hopes the theater is not showing Armageddon.

Pop Art relishes the ordinary, but ordinary people are notoriously absent from much of it. Not from Segal's work, and his trademark body casts make them white as ghosts. Talk about modern art reveling in the concrete. Segal revels in plaster as he sculpts his friends. Covering them in soaked medical bandages, he then uses the figurative casts instead of freehand sculpture.

No doubt fortunately for his subjects, plaster dries quickly, and Segal slathers it on. He gladly accepts its blotchy accretions. The white strips, as loaded as a de Kooning brushstroke, turn gestural painting into Pop appropriation.

Segal places his cold, white actors in real settings, not painted backdrops—a store-bought lunch counter, a cast-off neon sign. Each set, a human artifact now barren of life, contrasts with the inhuman people and the mechanical means used to sculpt them. To view the work, one must step onto the same stage, only to step off again, unable to survive its static rigor and unready to confront the living world it describes. Although I can claim to remain in living color, I come to feel that I belong in neither world, theirs or my own. If an actual lunch counter represents a lunch counter, what then can I represent?

The garish white body casts and the neon's glare merely darken their surroundings, like the insistent white paint of Wayne Thiebaud's bakery counters. One knows somehow that the coffee is black, the toast a midnight meal. Segal may use an instrument of healing, but do not wait for reruns of The English Patient. One can see why his later work includes a Holocaust memorial rather than a tomb for a gorgeous woman and her love. The absence of the sitters and their former imprisonment within both add to the air of desolation.

Politics and the inner voice

Pop Art is notoriously short on conscience, like Andy Warhol at a disco. It derives its kick from a culture moving too fast for reflection. It shows that products aimed at transitory desires can outlive high-toned art, like Styrofoam that refuses to biodegrade. Like Warhol's car crashes, however, it can get pretty scary for all its cynicism. At his best, George Segal nurses his fears and degradation well.

Yet Segal's deathly silences may sound too sentimental for words, and often I have to agree. The art world almost certainly would, too. I can see why Segal's retrospective began in Canada rather than following, say, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg at New York's Guggenheim Museum. To put it bluntly, all art now stands under suspicion of humanism these days, and George Segal acts guilty as charged.

Segal treats conscience as an inner voice. He takes the urban landscape for a universal symbol of despair. Ironically, he thus tends to put conscience beyond politics and beyond place. In the 1990s, just as political art finds a site for rebellion, something seems awry.

Humanists and their Holocaust memorials put guilt up on a pedestal, right alongside heros. Or so a postmodern critic might say. Western tradition and its grand aspirations create fictions, at the price of too much suffering along the way. Art has long served the powerful, and a museum's silence, or a gallery's, is also modern art's way of shutting people up. A few years ago, city workers did manage to knock over one of Richard Serra's sheets of rusted steel, which blocked their view at lunch. It took a bulldozer and a court case.

Segal's characters alone suggest what he overlooks. The white casts tune out differences of race. As at the diner, his men bow their heads while women turn away. For African Americans, women, and many others today, art's silence has a dangerously precise meaning. Take Cindy Sherman's demure librarian, from her Untitled Film Stills. As she reaches up, in almost exactly the pose of that man on a ladder, one sees not just a person but an object of desire silhouetting her breasts.

One gets Segal's message right at the exhibition's entrance. In a fairly recent work, of Abraham casting out Ishmael, Sarah glowers and stands apart. Although Segal has also depicted Abraham's taking the knife to Isaac, in a stark bronze at Kent State, here more than the biblical story has changed. There Abraham himself heeds an unseen father's voice and moves to kill. Now all nuances of cruelty vanish in a fatherly hug.

Fringe benefits

And yet art's conscience begins with a single viewer, with the shock and contemplation of a single work of art. Maybe that is why no one can agree just when Postmodernism begins, and Pop Art might be a good place to look. At least half the thrill of late-modern art lies in asking when art first turned on its masters. All art may work that way, in fact, even before Modernism gambled on an avant-garde.

Take Segal as a humanist. Maybe, but what did that big word use to mean anyway? His universal man is trapped is trapped in urban decay and the politics of class. Look again, by contrast, at Pop artists now grandfathered into Postmodernism. Warhol's Marilyn Monroe never saw past the fringes of success.

Besides, Segal's juxtaposition of cast and set adds a harsh irony. If anyone should feel real in Segal's stage sets, why not me? But I have entered the wrong play, and museum-goers cannot touch the work of art.

For centuries, starting with the first cave paintings, art has left humanity's mark on the world. Surely a true humanist should do the same today. Yet Segal's people resemble ghosts in a more palpable reality. If they resemble characters in a play, for them the word cast takes on new meaning.

From the caves on, too, the actors in art's drama have been doers, as hunters and heros. Segal catches people on the margins before they can hope to act. A man drowns at midnight in a cup of coffee, caffeine's bitter stimulus unable to help. He and the movie marquee suggest that representational art only freezes human gestures. The definition of art as frozen music starts to sound chilling.

Segal's juxtaposition of cast and set helps in another way. It puts his art in liberating touch with the familiar world. Posters have reduced Edward Hopper's paintings to existential icons, too, but I can never forget their beautifully realized natural light. In the same way, I run up against that solid lunch counter. The work refuses to abstract experience away. Instead of a pedestal or even Léger's skyscrapers, the man at the marquee perches on a cheap ladder.

Black, white, and shades of gray

Segal's famous contributions to Pop Art, then, can still work. Oddly enough, by slighting them the Jewish Museum wants to make the artist more profound. Instead, it trivializes art that, all too often, is begging for it. The show goes out of its way to stress other stages of Segal's career.

As one might expect, Segal started out as a painter, with all the expressive bravura of a minor Abstract Expressionist. Then came the well-known work of the early 1960s, but after that he again broke the balance between plaster cast and object. First he painted the casts over in tart blues and other bright colors. On top of the bandage swaths, the expressionist brush looks trivial or redundant.

At the same time, as Segal himself prospered, his subjects turned away from people down on their luck. He began a series of portraits, including one of his dealer, Sydney Janis, next to a prized Mondrian. Only Segal's eye for a sitter's personality makes this bearable. I especially like a portrait of Meyer Schapiro, one humanist to another.

Next, he tried inserting his casts in three-dimensional enactments of modern paintings. But the vocabulary of literalism then backfires. Segal has little interest in mind games about plays within a play. He simply reduplicates a favorite work in his special vocabulary of lifelessness. Art may well outlast the ages, but one need not count it among the undead.

Besides, I cannot say I care for Segal's increasingly formalist taste. If I ever begged to be alienated from modern art, I did not have these works in mind.

Most recently, Segal has killed the color at last but kept the paint. He covers entire scenes in monochrome grays. Maybe a mature artist, even an African American, no longer thinks in black and white. Still, without that contrast, he serves up just another representation of the obvious. It hardly helps that Segal has such easy stories to tell. A forlorn line of men and women, for example, signals the Great Depression.

Terminal

Segal's Holocaust memorial shows him at his slickest and least effective. Its body casts, spread out to form a Jewish star, mute the chaos of death. Its barbed wire holds no threat to the viewer, far from the terror of Marina Abramovic's prisons and bodily suffering. When he tackles politics, Segal returns it to the history books—or worse yet, to the eternal. One gets the message right at the exhibition's entrance, with that sacrifice of Isaac.

Still, like the selection overall, that curator's choice of opening serves Segal unfairly, and I can never dismiss him altogether. Segal's images take root in my head, and the staging adds a humbling sense of humor. How can I stand apart from it all, enjoying my despair?

My favorite of Segal's works may actually date from not all that long ago. Down at the Port Authority bus terminal, he has cast a line of commuters. Their frozen postures go well with the long waits everyone hates and has come to expect. Perhaps they beg a little too much for attention, but then so do others at the Port Authority, including those in real need. The police have shouted freeze at them often enough, too.

The commuters remind me too of another palpable darkness, the station's upper level, where I often waited to head back to college. Late at night, it functioned emotionally as my own sad diner. I could see why John Barth ended his first novel at a bus station and on the word terminal.

In that one work, the comings and goings of people like me stand in well for Segal's old appropriated sets. Maybe the best thing is to remember those sets whenever one can. That way, even at the Jewish Museum, one can accept the artist's limits—and one's own. As a Jew of sorts, my own conscience starts with at least a mild joke.

One can even better accept the limits of politics in a postmodern age. By reviving an older notion of conscience, the Jewish Museum asks one to recover a history for humanism. Today's assemblages quote the art of the museums cleverly, but not all political art begins with art-world politics. Abraham's embrace—like a last wish from one of Postmodernism's flawed, stubborn, and anxious parents—still holds a moving warmth.

jhaber@haberarts.com

George Segal's retrospective ran at the Jewish Museum through October 4, 1998.