The Rutgers Group: Garden State Avant-Garde - various artists, Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Richard Kalina

Samaras began his characteristically disturbing work when he was an undergraduate. He experimented with offbeat materials, and by 1959, the year he received his degree, he was making untitled works like the 15-by-9-inch printing plate, covered with wadded toilet paper and garnished with a grid of razor blades, that was included in this show. A number of the Samaras pieces in the exhibition had never been shown before or were appearing for the first time in 30 or 40 years. Of these, possibly the most interesting was a three-part folding screen, done in 1958, while Samaras was still an undergraduate. The bottom quarter of each panel is clad in aluminum foil, and the remainder painted in a stepped concentric pattern of freely brushed but tidy blue stripes--a configuration that calls to mind Frank Stella's paintings from the same period. (The two artists share a propensity for decorative strategies obsessively carried out.)

After leaving Rutgers, Samaras stayed closely connected with his New Brunswick friends, exhibiting with them, appearing in their performance pieces and, in the case of George Segal, letting himself be cast in plaster for sculptural tableaux. Samaras appears (along with Allan Kaprow and his wife, Vaughan; Jill Johnston; and George and Helen Segal) as one of the seated figures in Segal's 1962 The Dinner Table, among the earliest of the artist's fully realized large-scale works.

Segal, who still lives on a farm in the area, was a neighbor of Kaprow's, and showed with him at Hansa. He taught an extracurricular drawing class for the Rutgers Sketch Club, and in 1962 enrolled in the university's M.F.A. program. He and Kaprow had impassioned discussions about the shape of future art--an art that they saw as both popular in character and encompassing in its means, a "total" experience. By the late '50s Segal was placing roughly modeled plaster figures in front of his paintings and, soon after, into environmental settings of found objects. In 1961 he discovered that improved plaster bandages were being made at the nearby Johnson & Johnson plant, and, using them, he was able to cast figures of greater finesse and detail than previously possible. While Segal did not create Happenings himself, major performance events, such as Kaprow's 1963 Tree, were held on his farm, and the theatrical qualities characteristic of Happenings and environments became an important aspect of his work.

The exhibition's organizers, Joseph Jacobs and Joan Marter, were fortunate in having access to some of Segal's least-seen early sculptures. Three of them--Woman on a Chicken Crate (1958), Man in Elevator (ca. 1958) and Man with Folded Arms (ca. 1958), all plaster on burlap on wire armatures set against found-object backgrounds--were, when the organizers began their work, residing in a back barn on Segars property, along with a tractor and assorted farm tools. Cleaned up and placed in the exhibition, these sculptures, simultaneously mute and direct, exerted a powerful visual and emotional pull.