Page 41 - Studio International - October 1967

`I had painted for ten years with an increasing sense of
George Segal, photographed by William Lipke
Man sitting at table 1961
plaster and mixed media, 53 x 48 x 48 in.
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
'This is the first piece / made using the casting process.
The figure is myself. It ended up a self-portrait with an Egyptian
feeling. I was fascinated by the plastic play of the innumerable legs.'
crisis and about 1958 felt I had to move into three dimen-
sions. Once I moved into three dimensions it became
easier for me to incorporate all the different things I was
interested in. I'm not interested in discussing methods of
casting or things like that. All I can do really is state a
larger intention.
`First, I'm interested in an open-ended way of working.
I don't want to shut out any possibility. I want to inten-
sify—if you were going to ask me what I was about— the
sense of my own inner life. I equally want to intensify my
sense of encounter with the tangible world outside of me.
I can't think of divorcing the one response from the other.
I differ from the Abstract Expressionists in that way, and
that seemingly small point makes a big difference in the
look of the work.
`The first sculptures I made were traditional in the sense
that I made an armature out of two-by-fours, wrapped
wire around the armature and burlap dipped in plaster
over them, the same way that department store manikins
used to be made before they discovered plastic. The first
figures I made were very expressionistic, and I sat one on
a broken real chair. The sharp edges of that real chair
really sent me flying, and I began to look at real objects
with their hard surfaces, different colours, as plastic
objects. I could compose the air around a figure, and
from the beginning it was not the figure psychologically
centered, but the figure in relation to a place or a situation
or a scene with the objects. Not props, but rather plastic
presences powerful in their own right.
`Where was the boundary? Where was my limit to the
work? Nobody could answer it for me. It was only
because I became more interested in this play between
interior-exterior that I decided to hack out just those
pieces I wanted. And when I had them all strewn around,
I had to reconstruct them. The trick is not to juggle them
like a school exercise, but to juggle them in a way that
they shiver in a sense to a real experience. I can't explain
that difference. Most anything you decide is a legitimate
clue to human behaviour or a road to a valid perception.
I suppose it is this kind of open-ness that I'm thinking
about.
`If I were going to deal with things immediately around
me, it meant that I couldn't shy away from any subject
matter. That really the most important things in my life
had to be faced and dealt with somehow in my work.
How do you do it? What do you choose to do? What do
you believe? When you box yourself into that kind of
point, you can't lose your nerve somehow.
`I'm still working down an area that I feel is virtually
unexplored by either me or anybody else. If you accept
the logic of using any real thing in the world, and if you
could perform some kind of an abracadabra, incor-
porate it into an art work and have it be expressive of
some internal crazy idea of your own, why then can't you
use real light as an expressive element? And it's precisely
this kind of feeling, this sense of "why not" that I think
is an indication of the vitality of the art scene in the
United States right now. The same phrase is being used
over and over again about different possibilities, and I
think it only depends on the calibre of the minds grap-
pling with the possibilities. Ceilings are still unlimited. I