On Not Introducing George Segal

Judaism, Fall, 2000 by Margaret Olin

I MISSED MY CHANCE TO MEET THE LATE AMERICAN sculptor George Segal. [1] The request to introduce him came on short notice, and I couldn't get there. After all, I comforted myself, George Segal needs no introduction. His ghostly plaster presences, like white figures of absence, are familiar to any likely audience by now. I first confronted them in 1979 in Vienna, a year marked by the gregarious loneliness of the American abroad, by finding companionship among the many other foreigners there, most of them Eastern European. We'd meet evenings below the Ringstrasse between gleaming escalators leading from the University to the bank, or above ground on the pedestrian street, where men armed with gadgets perpetually chopped vegetables, in store-long profusion, month after month.

But these plucky efforts at modernity continually stumbled against the stony evidence of an imperial past, one of which was the baroque palace that housed the newly opened museum of Modem art. Once it was home to a baroque art collection, amassed by princes for whom baroque art was contemporary. In the nineteenth century, professors and their students gathered there to study art history. Now, tucked under rococo painted nymphs and satyrs on the ceilings, surrounded by plaster-cookie walls, were whole rooms devoted to Chicago Imagists and their Austrian kindred spirits, the fantastic artists.

It was in the otherwise deserted first floor that I saw the Segal figures. They were scattered here and there at cafe tables, real ones, where real coffee and pastries could be consumed. Seated alone, they seemed to invite company. I didn't understand their appeal at first, but I knew they exuded the United States. Of course, they were Americans in quite a literal sense. Segal, who cast these plaster statues from real people, no doubt used American acquaintances as models. Later I realized that for me, an American in Europe, they signified not the presence, but the absence of Americans. These homogenized white creatures seated among all the pomp of the absent Viennese nobility marked the empty spaces where Americans might have been. I spent a moment among them, sipping coffee with my absent compatriots.

Years later, I encountered Segal's figures again. Different ones, of course, but unmistakably his. These figures were in San Francisco. I saw them unexpectedly, while viewing the Golden Gate Straits from above the terrace of the San Francisco Arts Center. Here they spoke of an environment just as alien to the coast of California as the figures at the cafe in the Museum of Modem Art had been to Vienna. Their piled, or rather, draped postures identified them as Holocaust victims. A lone "survivor" overlooked the sea from behind his scrap of European barbed wire. The sun-whitened bodies seemed too tall, too straight, too healthy, too beautiful. This was the Holocaust, viewed from America, Europe's tragedy, acted out by figures that, when I visited them in the Viennese palace, had seemed to be negative spaces from my home country.

The more the presence of the Holocaust itself is felt in the lives of ever fewer, the more it has been increasingly present, in the absence that visual representation provides. In retrospect, the 1990s may seem to have been the decade when the Holocaust secured its place in popular culture. It won Academy Awards with two hugely successful fiction films, Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List, and Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, and two documentaries. It won a Pulitzer Prize for Art Spiegelman's Maus. [2] A number of new films and plays about the Holocaust appeared, and a new Broadway production of the Diary of Anne Frank In the world of scholarship, the 1990s saw the publication of numerous books, but especially the controversial best-seller Hitler's Willing Executioners, and more recently, the controversial book by Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. [3] Visitors flocked to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and other newly-opened memorials and museums. A spate of belated mem oirs appeared, perhaps the final ones by survivors of the Holocaust itself; and a last-ditch effort, instigated by Spielberg, got underway to record vast numbers of survivor's testimonies on videotape while it is still possible, and make them available to scholars and the public in archives and feature films. [4]

Anxiety aroused by watching the Holocaust turning into second-hand memory, in preparation for becoming history, fueled another tendency that came of age in the 1990s: the interest in assessing the Holocaust as a subject for representation. Studies like James Young's, Reading and Writing the Holocaust, and, in a different sense, Lawrence Langer's investigations of the testimonies of survivors, as well as works by Saul Friedlander and others, tried to analyze the ways in which literature, film, art, memoirs and testimony have represented the Holocaust. [5] Conferences were mounted, including the one at which I was asked to introduce George Segal, who was engaged to deliver the keynote address.