Segal’s Changing Perspective : Trying Out New Ideas as His 71st Birthday Nears, the Sculptor Has Combined HisTrademark Life-Size Cast-Plaster Figures With Photomurals of the Mean Streets of New York

“I’ve spent most of my working life trying to deal with my own emotional reactions to the world around me,” says sculptor George Segal, amid an installation of his recent work at Fred Hoffman Fine Art, a spacious new gallery in Santa Monica. “I cheerfully confess to being serious. I never pretended to be witty, detached or ironic.”

That’s the way it is with the internationally renowned creator of life-size, cast-plaster figures whose introspective manner and psychologically charged environments conjure up thoughts of human isolation and urban decay.

Always has been. Probably always will be.

He’s a native New Yorker who was educated in the 1940s at Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, Pratt Institute of Design and New York University, but he never expected to make a living as an artist. “There had never been a history of that in America,” he says.

Furthermore, he was out of sync with art trends. “My teachers were Abstract Expressionist painters, and the critics in that group spoke about marching implacably toward pure abstraction. I objected to shutting out the real world that I could see and touch,” he says.

Having no delusions about his economic prospects, Segal labored on his family’s chicken farm in New Jersey and ran his own farm across the road before becoming a staple of the New York gallery scene. Showing his first plaster figures in 1959, he was soon identified with the Pop art movement, but he is actually a narrative humanist who has become one of the 20th Century’s most enduring commentators on shadowy aspects of the American scene.

Which is to say that George Segal is a legend with a trademark style, but not that there’s nothing fresh in his art. In his current show--the first major West Coast presentation of his sculpture since his 1979 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art--the news is photography. Eight of the 11 major works on view integrate solid black or white sculptural figures with photomurals of New York’s mean streets. East Village images of cluttered liquor stores, a bus station, a dumpster and the graffiti-covered approach to a parking garage provide provocative backgrounds for figures who seem to be lost in solitary thought or hang out in small, silent groups.

Closing in on his 71st birthday, Segal says that “a few personal intimations of mortality” have pushed him into trying new ideas before it’s too late. Photography appeals to his democratic instincts because it’s “a much-maligned” art form, he says. But more to the point, his camera has provided an efficient means of intensifying the expressive quality of his work.

“Photography allows me to deal more directly with the energy and expressiveness of community thinking, the state of mind of a lot of people who live in a place, than the environments that I had been constructing so carefully for so many years out of real objects,” he says.

What’s more, the photographs--which he shoots himself and has enlarged in a commercial studio--reproduce sights that he knows intimately. “This an area where I went to school and many of my friends lived. It’s a neighborhood that I have loved for years. But it’s changing so drastically, with such a combination of energy and menace. It is increasingly devastated by collisions of different attitudes, different ideas, different cultures,” he says.

The changes are worrisome, but also exhilarating to an artist who thrives on visual evidence of what he calls “community psyche.” In “Chinatown,” for example, he has placed a black man sweeping the sidewalk in front of photomurals of two storefronts--one packed with Buddha sculptures, the other with salmon arranged so that they appear to be swimming upstream. Walking the East Village streets, Segal has looked for telling images to combine with figures, which he casts from friends and family members. At first the figures were “surrogates for myself as an observer,” he says. But in the most recent pieces, “Liquor Store” and “Guinness Gold,” “they are beginning to return to their own private dramas.”

Can Segal-watchers expect other changes in his work? “Maybe, maybe not. I never know how it’s going to work out,” he says. “What hasn’t changed is the simple fact that I am self-driven. I have never really worked for approval. I consider myself lucky that I have received any approval at all.”

* “George Segal: New Photo Sculpture,” Fred Hoffman Fine Art, 1721 Stewart St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3330. Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Ends Jan. 15.