Page 59 - Studio International - June 1967

under the title Buddha Urinating, and there are a
George Segal Man leaving a bus 1967
plaster, painted metal, chrome, glass and rubber
88+ x 39 x 33+ in.
Facing page
Top left Ed Kienholz The State Hospital 1964-6
mixed media 10 x 8 x 12 ft
Top right Ed Kienholz Mayor Sam Edsel
Bottom right Ray Johnson Comb white 1966
collage
few symbols alluding rather obviously to sex and
sex stimulants, but Johnson's elegant style all but
overwhelms whatever latently shocking material
there is.
The new works are reliefs, composed of the small
rectangular plaques he habitually uses, with their
cargo of undecipherable cryptograms, and some-
times just lovely miniature abstractions, ranged on
a page which sometimes also bears drawings.
They are grouped around various motifs-a
whole series of hats, and a series of take-offs on
Marcel Duchamp's 1916 steel comb, for instance-
which are readable from relief to relief. Johnson's
fantasy is rich, and he has found metamorphoses
that are as telling as those of the Surrealists. The
comb becomes a writhing sea creature, a hat
becomes a breast, a boot becomes an edifice, an
exclamation point becomes a snake, and so on.
What he does with these disparate symbols,
though, is to minimize their importance within
his composition. His new works are to be read
plastically first, and only later for the legible jokes
and allusions.
The geography of sites for clusters of rectangular
shapes varies in each relief. Always there is a
perfect balance between the white of the page and
the shapes it supports. Even where Johnson's arch
visual puns emerge forcefully, they never subsume
the essentially plastic effect.
The new works of George Segal at the JANIs
GALLERY maintain the message of intolerable isola-
tion and loneliness which is often associated with
American life. In some ways, Segal parallels the
content of the work of Edward Hopper, who also
portrayed a desolate America of lonely pursuits:
movie palaces, cafeterias, abandoned city streets,
blind windows.
Segal continues to cast his white replicas in
pensive poses, blurring their features just enough
to take them out of the waxworks naturalism they
might otherwise suggest. In fact, he takes one step
out from his general technique (using real props)
by adding, in two instances, a motion picture to
the tableau.
In one, a girl is portrayed at a cafeteria table,
while a syncopated film of street and cafeteria
motifs rolls past on the window. A kind of stream-
3f-consciousness effect results, which adds con-
;iderable interest to his image.
In another, the real cab of a large truck contains
tense driver, seen from behind. It is night, and
he is moving into the bobbing lights and black
passion are not presented in sentimental terms, as tunnel of the highway. We see this from the rear,
they might have been in the 1930s, but in unre- hrough his windshield. Segal's film accurately
lentingly realistic terms, even down to the sym- simulates the real experience, but it also heightens
bolism of the black fish. And this, again, is charac- t, and makes it ambiguous at the same time.
teristic only of Kienholz. Not an ounce of real Here, his concern with two spaces-the interior
camp ever threatens the balance of black, serious )f the cab and the measureless space before it-is
humour and conscientious outrage in his work. he salient feature.
The theatrical aspect of Segal's work in many
Of quite another temperament is Ray Johnson, cases strikes me as ineffectual. Too much depend-
who also aims to shock now and then, but whose ;rice on the props, too little concern for the exten-
shocks are mild and gracious like an electric ion, the imaginative extension, of the imagery.
scalp stimulator's. Or perhaps not so gracious, but 3ut in his fusion of film and sculpture, I can see a
edgeless. For instance, in his new work at the )owerful possibility going well beyond the limita-
WILLARD GALLERY, there are a few theme pieces ions of his aesthetic to date. q
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