The Little Giant: Barbara Ségal’s Dash and the Legacy of Marble Sculpture

Meg Byron

At first glance, a seemingly unassuming laundry detergent bottle stands alone on a pedestal in the Neuberger Museum of Art. Yet, a closer look at the work, the natural veins of the stone signal the artist’s choice of material, reveals that this “found object” is an artwork of masterful carving.

Dash, made in 1994 by the artist Barbara Ségal, is a life-size marble sculpture of a Dash brand laundry detergent bottle. Ségal used the technique of inlay to recreate the bottle’s label using Verona marble, rouge royal marble, Belgium black marble, and onyx. But why—why would someone carve a laundry detergent bottle out of marble? What is it about a bottle of Dash laundry detergent that makes it worthy of being carved out of a luxurious, revered material, continuing the medium’s legacy in Western art history?

Ségal sculpted Dash with the intention of testing her abilities to mimic a real-world object in the spirit of her ancient inspirations. The artist’s ironic play with marble hints at a largely erased and obscured history of polychrome sculpture. Polychromy is the application of multiple colors in a single work of art. Ancient Greco-Roman statuary depicted what was important to that society: their gods, the ideal human form, and other subjects. Thousands of years later, the statues remain, helping historians draw conclusions about a culture from the past to better understand it. Yet, the ancient sculptures passed through the filters of scrutiny and preferences of various artists, art historians, and viewers over time before arriving in the present moment.

Many artists working in the Renaissance promoted a strong desire to move past what people of this era considered the “degenerate” and “backwards” Middle Ages, fueling the hunt for aesthetic purity in the arts[i]—that is, a higher condition of artistic practice that signaled artistic development away from the perceived impure. One course of action they took was the rejection of color in statues. Inspired by antiquity, where achievements in fields such as the arts, humanities, and philosophy signaled it as the pinnacle of progress, artists of the Renaissance found a way forward by looking back.

Many artists in the 15th century regarded the painting of sculpture in the Middle Ages as defilement of the sculpture’s pure form. They looked to ancient Greco-Roman statues, all but completely white, as examples of the aesthetic purity they desired. Neoplatonism, a philosophical call back to antiquity that conceptualized the physical world as a lesser copy of the perfect, abstract world, further bolstered these views. Thus, creating sculptures out of white marble was akin to channeling a higher level of consciousness. What they did not know, or perhaps knew but ignored, was that ancient statues were polychromous.

 Renaissance scholars often did not experience the ancient sculptures’ polychromy; time and weathering wore away the paint applied on top of the marble. Any remaining paint was cleaned off, regarded as leftover dirt.[ii] There is debate in the world of classical art history whether the knowledge of colorful ancient statues was truly unknown, or if it was known but erased in place of the cultural narrative of the time. What cannot be argued, however, is the strength of the Renaissance’s legacy in terms of cementing the classical, white statue in Western art history, demonstrated in famous works such as Michaelangelo’s David (1501-04) and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1581-83).

While Dash is not polychrome in the sense of having paint applied to its surface, it uses the colorful potential of marble to bring qualities to this work that challenge these paradigmatic Renaissance and Neoplatonic visions of marble sculpture. This is especially significant when thinking of the way that scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 18th century text History of Ancient Art cemented the supremacy of the Renaissance interpretations as fact. Winckelmann cited the white statues of antiquity as examples of racial superiority during a time when colonization and slavery tore across Africa.[iii] This landmark text continued a legacy based on a false narrative of ancient history.

Ségal’s Dash exists within the long history of marble sculpture. Its colorful body is a product of marble inlay inspired by the artist’s formative years studying marble carving in France and Italy, specifically the Florentine chapels featuring mosaic marble inlay and the interior of the chapel at Chartres. Color was a part of Ségal’s artistic practice from the start, not unlike her ancient predecessors. Drawing on the scholarship of archaeologists such as Vinzenz Brinkmann, recent major exhibitions like Gods in Color show that, for the ancients, an uncolored sculpture was lifeless. Therefore, color gave that life to the statues of their gods.[iv] Dash is not a sculpture of a deity, but for Ségal, to set in stone what American culture values—perhaps even what it worships—functions similarly. Additionally, to inlay color is to embrace what color and colorful marble offers to the form of the stone sculpture.

The debate surrounding polychromy is at times contentious. In recent scholarship it has been given a platform, and the literal and metaphorical cleansing of color both in the past and in the present has been asserted as symptoms of a deeper cultural issue with color in the West. In that Dash is a cleaning product, and if what Western culture values is a sort of purity, then Ségal’s work is even more ironic in pointing to how that society values cleanliness as an important piece of its foundation, adding to her play with value. To point out that ancient sculpture was not white, and in fact was considered unfinished if it was left so, disturbs a deeply rooted Western cultural, racial, and social identity.

Dash is part of the legacy of classical sculpture because it disrupts the popular narrative. It is a polychromous, marble sculpture of a valued object in its society, echoing the ancient Greco-Roman praxis behind their statues. If the Renaissance took the form and left color behind, then it is within Ségal’s oeuvre that color and form co-mingle in marble once more.

[i] Kim Hart, “Why Do People Still Think That Classical Sculptures Were Meant to be White?,” Artsy, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-people-classical-sculptures-meant-white

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, 1968 ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1766).

[iv] Liebieghaus Museum, “Gods in Color: Polychromy in Antiquity,” Online Exhibition, 2020, Accessed December 18, 2020, https://buntegoetter.liebieghaus.de/en/

Somebody Had to Break the Rules: Barbara Ségal’s Dash and Advertising

Veronica Murphy

Artist Barbara Ségal chisels, etches and inlays stone to craft ornate representations of children’s dresses, Birkin bags, and designer jackets that comment on status and material culture. In 1994, Ségal used Verona, Belgian black, onyx, rouge royal, and sienna marbles to form Dash. In the context of 1990s feminist reflections on American culture, the public’s growing criticism of general media, and identity politics, Ségal’s detergent bottle aptly weighs upon the artist’s upbringing of upper-middle-class American suburbia.

Concentrated Power envisions Dash as a catalyst for dialogue around mid-century family dynamics and the printed and televised media that reinforced them. American product advertisers focused on the suburbs of the 1950s and ‘60s - particularly the white, nuclear family, much like Ségal’s own. The loss of her father at age 10, however, left the young artist and her mother at odds with the commercialized, domestic lifestyles of women suggested by marketers. Dash detergent ad campaigns promoted the authority of a woman within the household— while Ségal’s Dash demonstrates the suppression of her jurisdiction outside of it.

Female empowerment of the ‘60s, as characterized by print media, often depended on a woman’s usefulness to her husband and children. Print campaigns depicted the devoted mother tasked with laundry and other housework, while assuming that dad, the breadwinner, was at work. In a Dash detergent ad from 1962 (fig.1) an overburdened but focused-looking mother and two children are tackling the household chores. Laundry is strewn about the kitchen on chairs and in baskets. The young boy’s presence here is ambiguous: is he adding a towel to the overflowing baskets, or helping her load the washer? The daughter, off in the corner, is presumably taking care of the dishes with her back turned. Though the mother and her son have partially hidden faces due to their positions in the ads, marketers hid the daughter's face completely, removing any focus on her.

There is clear division between what is expected of young boys and young girls, in Dash advertising from that era. Young boys deserve praise for assisting mothers while young girls are responsible for their own domestic undertakings, unloading some of the chores off of mom’s plate. In Céline Morin and Regan Kramer’s Women in American TV Series (1950s to 2000): Proto-Feminist Heroines? Morin and Kramer analyze the roles of women within the televised families of America over a recent 50-year span. Morin and Kramer argue, “Women, particularly mothers, were encouraged to be full-time homemakers... accompanying the post-war economic boom, society— and the media — focused powerfully on the family, where, it was hoped, clearly defined gender roles would reinforce social cohesion.”2 Midcentury Dash product advertising illustrated this desire to promote a lift style that unconsciously enforced gender roles in order to achieve social cohesion; in other words, the nuclear family. According to print marketing, delegating a domestic role with the duties of the home to women was their means of contributing to the functionality of a community. In the visual context provided by midcentury advertising campaigns and Morin & Kramer’s claim, women’s responsibilities as homemakers strengthened a status quo deemed fit for societal fulfillment. Under this assumption, Advertising in 1950s America proposed national morals based on the suburban homes of the upper-middle class. More specifically, how its families functioned within them.

Early efforts of advertisers for many companies like Dash attempted to create empowerment through the wisdom of ‘the lady-of-the-house.’ While the economy of 1950s and ‘60s America flourished, women were concurrently denied career opportunities—yet embraced as the predominant consumers. This deceptive encouragement of the homemaker as the preeminent example of womanhood created conditions in which men still dictated the terms of acceptable womanhood, seemingly empowering them through control of the home but in reality, women rarely had that either. The flaw for genuine social progression is that female empowerment still resides within a patriarchal lens. Ségal’s Dash offers a subconscious embodiment of the complications belonging to women that not only reject these power structures. but actively reclaim them.

Dash reflects the artist’s interrogation of media-defined, dutiful femininity. The enhanced detergent bottle form caricaturizes a culturally assigned women’s labor. Customarily, laundry is a gendered undertaking delegated to the woman of the home. Ségal redefines the symbolic toil of a detergent bottle by crafting a marble sculpture using complicated carving techniques--typically, a man’s craft, particularly in Italy and France where Ségal trained. Utilitarian plastic bottles of detergent become a polished product in Ségal’s work. The luxurious material of Italian marble, often used for Renaissance or Baroque sculptures, creates a compelling discourse between materiality in branding, advertising, and the woman’s place in the middle. Laundry, a household avocation of the feminine, is now memorialized in the artisan labor of the masculine.

By the late ‘60s, a Dash print campaign emerged with the slogan, “Somebody had to break the rules.” Advertisers referred to the product’s new formula with “concentrated power,” requiring less soap compared to their competition, while simultaneously attempting to align with women’s movements. In a 1967 print advertisement for Dash detergent (fig.2) a woman with bare shoulders, large ball earrings, bold eye makeup, and a geometric bob-style haircut looks directly at the viewer. Instead of the motherly trope familiar to the early ‘60s, this model is the modern, progressive woman of the late ‘60s. Small text beneath the image reads, “The woman who wore the first geometric haircut broke the rules. Columbus broke the rules. Florence Nightingale broke the rules. And Dash broke the rules.” Columbus, the explorer that sailed to America, and Florence Nightingale, a statistician and founder of modern nursing, match the revolutionary nature of women with geometric haircuts, according to Dash marketers.

Mass media acts as a key component to social constructions of reality. Martin P. Davidson in The Consumerist Manifesto (1992) outlines the intimate relationship between media, particularly advertising and marketing, and social dynamics. Product advertisers not only seek to create a lifestyle that consumers desire but one that aligns with their best interest according to the social standards of their time. The upper-middle-class nuclear family model served as a successful way of reinforcing material and family values for profit. “It is advertising’s job to communicate, if not actually create, the right added values.”3

Dash detergent’s new printed advertisements mimicked the changing images of women and let mothers out of the kitchen. Ségal’s Dash signals this departure from the status quo and symbolic detachment from homemaker expectations. While product advertisers attempted to ratify the shift in cultural dynamics for women, their efforts were insincere. Women continued to grapple with patriarchal social dynamics. To position Dash, detergent advertisements as the courier for women’s progressive movements complicated things further. Rather than pursuing true social reform, product advertisers were reiterating current conversations in order to sell.

Social movements and identity politics of the mid-nineties recalled the 1950s and ‘60s and sought to expand the prescribed culture of women, family, and tradition. Though the artist did not consciously imagine her work as a social commentary, Ségal’s sculpture materializes criticism of power structures existing throughout time. The work also acknowledges the complications of female domestic duties. Depictions of women in mainstream media gave rise to complicated social constructions of reality. The dutiful housewives on the television and in print advertisements became living, breathing entities that burdened real women with confining, domestic expectations. Ségal’s Dash offers an expansive reality that unconsciously performs an inverse of historically gendered expectations. Shifting the ways that we might think about women’s labor, the artist inverts the meaning of a detergent bottle by carving it out of marble. Reimagining the feminine trade of the domestic through the masculine labor of sculpting creates a narrative that mirrors the women’s movements. 2 Ségal’s sculpture becomes an object that rematerializes female representation of empowerment, craft, and labor in the ‘90s reflects the roots of Dash advertisers breaking the rules in the ‘60s.

1. “About.” Barbara Ségal. http://www.barbarasegal.com/about.

2. Céline Morin and Regan Kramer, “Women in American TV Series (1950s to 2000): Proto-Feminist Heroines?” Clio. Women, Gender, History 48, 2018, 251–270. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26946057.

3. Martin P. Davidson, The Consumerist Manifesto: Advertising in Postmodern Times (London: Routledge, 1994).

4. Karen Dill-Shackleford, How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Information and Entertainment Media in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

“Pink”, “Blue”, and Yellow Sienna Marble: the Liminal Spaces of the Gendered Object

REBECCA ELISABETA MARYA RIBEIRO

| “We can acknowledge not only the plurality of attitudes that third-wave feminism has reconciled with regard to issues of pop culture, pleasure, and the representation of the female body, but the variety of voices that always characterized feminizations...the pluralism of feminism itself.”​ |

Kalliopi Minnoudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist”

Women are like artists: they are often being critiqued by those who are not them. Dash, like many modern and contemporary works by female artists, turns this notion on its head, and opens up space for its audience to discuss and potentially critique these past criticisms posed towards women and female artists alike. 

Barbara Ségal’s sculpture Dash (1994), a marble detergent bottle, holds many female-coded labor associations through its silhouette, inlaid patterning, and title. The domestic act of laundry, combined with Dash detergent’s marketing strategies, speaks to and about the history of women’s labor. The work is both about—and not about—Dash in the way Ségal’s autonomy over and through her personal experience can point to the critique of both social engendering and art production.

Kalliopi Minnoudaki’s 2010 essay, “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist,” offers an analysis of female artists who speak to consumerism in their works and in turn emphasize the significance of plurality—both in feminism and the lived female experience. Culture-jamming, and its spirit of plurality, became one of many trademarks of the 1990s, moving through realms of the fine arts, literature, cinema, and the punky, amateur, girl zine. Culture-jamming clashes and combines high and low cultural, social, political, and economic symbols in ways otherwise not normally brought in conjunction.

Dash, a marble-inlay sculpture of a laundry detergent bottle, blurs the line between mass-production and craftsmanship, conformity and individuality; it is a culture jam through its immediate clashing of what is deemed high— the expensive, heavy marble art form—and low—the disposable, bargain brand consumer product. While Dash does not quite fit neatly into the category of readymade or culture jam, that which we presume to be more amateur, rough and maladroit in assemblage and aesthetic, the work preserves the differences between “high” and “low,” relying on the rebellious, fun spirit of cultural critique.   

But even within the white cube of the museum, this stone detergent bottle toes the line between high and low value. Dash balances the revered reputation of Italian marble, and the humility of the everyday object—an artwork, calling to an object of domestic work. But for whom and why? Is Dash about its eponymous brand, people associated with using laundry detergent, or something else?

Both Ségal and Dash rely on past histories and cultural criticisms in order to question them.

| “‘I think I’m a post-feminist. It’s okay to like lingerie and be sexy when it’s coming from a position of being a female and being powerful.” |

Barbara Ségal, The New York Times, August, 2000

Ségal is well-known for her critique of mass-consumerism in the realm of gender, often pointing to a feminine experience: little girls’ dresses, lingerie, and luxury handbags [as discussed in an interview with The Curator’s Salon in 2018]. Similar to how Dash speaks to the advertising history of a well-known brand associated with particular forms of domesticity, the silhouettes of dresses and lingerie create dialogue with generational expectations for women. Ségal—by inlaying marble—immortalizes and commemorates the “concentrated power” by which the actual Dash detergent was marketed as an object of American culture to American consumers, thereby showing how specific cultural values exist within it—even as social norms continually change over time.       

Ségal’s personal experience stems from the nuclear gender roles within a wealthy, white, American family in Westchester. Mid-century American advertising persuaded young girls and grown women alike to embody the domesticated housewife—and that alone.  Following her father’s death during childhood, Ségal saw her mother as both head of the household, tackling financial and domestic responsibilities, and as a woman that kept her elevated taste. In her complex, personally nostalgic works, the artist uses marble as a medium to empower and embolden the traditionally feminine, simultaneously countering the social pressures that often follow a standardized female experience. By the mid-1990s, other women were explicitly connecting with the “post-feminist” ideals from Ségal’s matriarchal childhood.

Not all women that partake in housework do it for their husband or children—some women have made a career out of it and do it for other people’s husbands and children. Some don’t do it at all. When a role is placed onto an individual, their power can be lost. It is a reclaimed feminine authority promoted by Ségal that brings domestic empowerment to the forefront. Starting with a raw stone base for her sculptures, the artist controls every aspect of the work’s creation, from color to detail, making the assembly-line product become highly specific.

| “The thing is important insofar as it can bear content, but the reason it can bear content is because it is empty, fillable, manipulable, subject to external motive force.” |

Fred Moten, A Poetics of the Undercommons

Despite potentially appearing as one at first glance, Dash is not a readymade. While the readymade—that which is already produced, and then reassigned in value—can have multiple meanings coexist within it, the mimicry of a readymade object can do the same. In A Poetics of the Undercommons (2016), Fred Moten claims that we as a society rely so heavily on meaning that even nothingness is something - more specifically, Moten states, the “nothingness” of the Black identity. In relation to women, however, Moten’s statement sheds light on the history of women being “fillable, manipulable, subject to external motive force” via patriarchal capitalism. The riff on the readymade, as Dash offers, holds and preserves “nothingness” in multiple ways: one, the simultaneous erasure and reworking of the female identity done by consumer brands; and two, the “nothingness” that is an object. Once stripped of the work done by consumer brands, the object in its purest form is devoid of meaning, holding a “nothingness” that one feels compelled to insert meaning into, even if that meaning stems from its lack of connection to something that was once given valued meaning.    

Domestic paraphernalia—such as a box of Brillo pads and a detergent bottle—hold and access multiple histories and perspectives simultaneously. The way one views laundry detergent in the 1950s differs from how one views it in the 1990s. Moreover, many advertising companies still tokenize minorities as a false means of inclusivity, and quickly return to a narrative that has been promoted for generations. In Ségal’s marble inlay process—while the stone itself is solid—the artist carefully chooses, places, and inserts other external materials into its base. While it presents as cohesive, each facet has significance, both on its own and of the whole. It shifts depending on current cultural context, just as a commercial item remains an open vessel for changing social values. This thinking within multiple histories allows us to not only examine a timeline of attributed values, but also recognize history’s repetition.

| “It is the ability to ride the line between high art and consumer culture, and hence to the permeability and instability of cultural boundaries.” |

Lucy R. Lippard, “Introduction,” from Cécile Whiting’s A Taste for Pop : Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture

Ségal appropriates the physical labor of sculpture to reassociate the physical labor of housework—both having been controlled historically by men. Much like the ever-changing expectations for women, an art medium’s uses can often feel dependent on how they were once controlled by the art world. While Lippard, in her introduction to Cécile Whiting’s A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture, speaks directly to mid-century works existing during second-wave feminism,  artists like Ségal are reinventing and rewriting the expectations for art media and subject matters in the late 20th, and into the 21st, century. Through her classical Italian and French training, Ségal “culture-jams” the medium of marble by acknowledging and denying its entrenched history in religious artworks and monumental architecture.   

Dash’s​ Italian marble challenges the conformity and impersonality of the everyday, household object, contesting Dash’s notoriety as the cheaper laundry alternative in the 1990s. Marble has been used for everything from pagan architecture to mythological nudes to historic monuments—and in Ségal’s work, the form of a cleaning product. Through Lippard’s sentiment, Ségal’s high material and low subject matter blur the line between not only economic—but cultural—value. Dash balances that which is heavy, solid, and expensive, and that which is fillable, ephemeral, and of easy access. Dash required physical strength, precision, and focus in order to be achieved. The specificity of intarsia (inlay) technique not only adds to the quality of the work, but also speaks directly to the artist’s individualized identity: a sculptor classically-trained in Italy and France.  

| “Consider the complex ways in which objects are not only engendered, but also engendering.” |

Tag Gronberg, “The Gendered Object; As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste”

There is something terrifyingly charming about a 1967 Dash advertisement stating: “though dressed like a man, there was no mistaking that she was all female.” The viewer is caught at a crossroads: despite denying gendered clothing trends, how is it that this woman is “all female”? Is it because she is still partaking in the feminized act of laundry, or does she truly have autonomy over her femininity and how she wishes to define it?

For a period of time in the 1960s, Dash’s slogan was “Somebody had to break the rules.” Laundry branding has focused on the female laundress throughout the decades, while simultaneously approving of the modern woman who kept up with the times. Books like [The Gendered Object], and [As Long As It’s Pink: the Sexual Politics of Taste], opened discussion around engendering objects of the everyday, and the binary expectations it creates for the consumer’s gender identity.

As another object of the 1990s, we might ask: is Dash engendered? The second wave of feminism wanted to deny the “pink identity” of traditional feminism, while the third wave reclaimed it; while the second wave promoted the three-piece suit, third wave feminists found empowerment in reappropriating what it means to like “pink.” Dash as an artwork is both “pink” and “blue,” and at the same time, neither. If the act of laundry is “feminine,” it is not synonymous with female identity.

|“We have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.” |

Judith Butler, “Judith Butler on the Culture Wars, JK Rowling and Living in ‘Anti-Intellectual Times’”

Now, in what we might consider feminism’s fourth wave, many young feminists are finding the binary both claustrophobic and outdated. “Male,” “female,” and binary engendering cannot embody all identities, especially those who refuse a direct connection with terms such as “male” and “female.” Judith Butler, speaking from 2020 asks us to consider: if we are to be postmodern, are engendered ideals extinct?

Not quite.

Like the changing ideological emphases of the feminism movement, and the ever-changing gendered experience, ​Dash ​does not exist in singularity; it is never at any given moment confined to holding one, sole, unchanging meaning. Through its references to high Renaissance art, branding schemes, outdated gender roles, and various forms of physical labor, Dash relies on the recognition of history, and the ways it continually changes while simultaneously preserving its historic associations.

1. Kalliopi Minnoudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist,” in ​Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958 - 1968 ; [published in Conjunction with an Exhibition of the Same Title], ed. Sid Sachs (Philadelphia: Univ. of the Arts [u.a.], 2010), 94.

2. Roberta Hershenson, “Works That Appear Soft but Are Posed in Stone,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Aug. 6, 2000.

3. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, ​A Poetics of the Undercommons (New York: Sputnik & Fizzle, 2016), 14.

4. Lucy R. Lippard, “Introduction,” in ​A Taste for Pop : Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture, ed. Cécile Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4.

5. Tag Gronberg, “The Gendered Object; As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste,” ​Journal of Design History 11, no. 3 (September 1998): 264.

6. Alona Ferber, “Judith Butler on the Culture Wars, JK Rowling and Living in ‘Anti-Intellectual Times’,” New Statesman, Sept. 22, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

Reading Identity within Ordinary Objects

Shunyo Morgan

The rise of consumerism in the mid-twentieth century coupled with the increasing presence of mass media allowed everyday objects to grow beyond functionality and develop an identity. Through the proliferation of an image of an object placed in a carefully constructed context, consumers have distinct associations with any given brand that is controlled by corporate interests. This identity that a corporation works so hard to establish through media presence can be harnessed by an artist through their work; this is the symbiotic relationship between Pop (and other appropriative forms of) art and mid-century consumerism. Make no mistake, while this relationship is symbiotic, it is important to highlight the critical nature of this relationship as it elevates the potency of the artist’s commentary through the work in question. In the 1990s, Barbara Ségal created Dash, amongst other works that would play upon this relationship. She isn’t the first, however, to capitalize upon this intersection of art and consumerism. The Pop Art icon Andy Warhol and Pictures Generation artist Cindy Sherman created works that are household names such as Brillo Box (1964) and Untitled Film Stills (1977-80).

Artists like Warhol strove to interrogate the nature of mass media--what they communicate and how they do it. This mission is a common, constantly evolving thread for artists and critics which is what makes appropriation and authorship important considerations in these works. Artists like Warhol, Ségal, and others have turned a critical lens on consumerism and mainstream culture through their works, though their processes, experiences, and circumstances are distinct. For example, with Dash being created in the ‘90s, one may be quick to lean into a feminist interpretation. Another way this object’s circumstance could impact its interpretation is considering where Ségal was in her life or the other objects that she was creating at this time. Ségal creates the likeness of easily recognized objects to gesture at consumer, personal history, and women’s roles in the household as well as society at large.

Ségal’s signature can be found in her methodology, the use of old-world sculpting technique. While her recent oeuvre is more known to feature luxury brands such as Coach, Louis Vuitton, and Hermès and can be found in the collections of big names such as Rihanna and Malcom Forbes, the work featured in Concentrated Power, Dash, is in conversation with other works that Ségal was making at the time, such as Bon Amie (1992) and Charlie’s Robe (1989). These works presented everyday objects that could inform a viewer’s interpretation of the work in question. These works are marble carvings of simple robes that could be found in any household which is certainly in line with Dash, the marble likeness of a budget brand detergent.

As the artists’ experiences, background, circumstances of when the work is being viewed/shown/created is an integral part of the work this is also true of the audience. For example, some dominant associations a viewer may have with Dash are: women’s roles in that it’s a product often associated with women’s domestic labor, the role of color & materials in art history (more specifically in marble works), consumer culture, mass media, or even Pop Art in general. Roland Barthes’ theory of authorship can be applied to appropriation art and used to think about the roles of the author and the audience coagulate to give works such as Dash its own identity.

In his influential 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argued that an object’s identity appropriated by an artist and an audience member’s perception of the resulting work forms an intersection for understanding. This intersection essentially creates space for a new situation and therefore a new set of meanings. This strategy is a signature trait of in the artist Cindy Sherman’s use of appropriation, which is especially potent in her work from the 1970s as part of what has come to be known as the “Pictures Generation.”[i] In Sherman’s iconic Untitled Film Stills series, she took iconic stills of movies and reproduced them with herself as the star—seemingly recreating the familiar. Barbara Ségal recreated the familiar through taking an iconic product and reproducing it in her vision giving us Dash in the 1990s. While Sherman plays with an obviously recognizable moment creating almost an alternative reality for that still, allowing for a more homogenous understanding of work by creating a space for the audience to come to with their associations of the movie/scene being parodied, not depart from like what Ségal does. Ségal comes close to an exact replica working within the same space as a Dash bottle, creating a jumping off point for the audience’s associations with the work. Using this (almost) exact copy of an object, Ségal leaves room for the audience to help her complete the work by bringing their associations to the table. This being said, Ségal’s presence is undeniable with the marked difference between the sculpture and actual product eliminating the typical challenge to authorship presented in appropriation art replacing it with a question of its composition.

The materials of Dash are obviously different, significantly elevated, from the actual bottle as well as the actual color of the work when compared to Dash the product. This elevation of the Dash bottle, as well as the other works by Ségal during the ‘90s, is yet another thread to pull on when trying to approach Ségal’s work for interpretation. The implicit biases and beliefs that an individual viewer brings with them to Dash, the circumstances in which this work was created, Ségal’s intentions behind this work, the technique, and many other things that embellish the inlaid marble that is Dash is what makes appropriation a necessary consideration in examining this work. Acknowledging the power just one familiar image has and how that can be manipulated by and artist and interpreted by the artist and/or the viewer is what led the curators behind Concentrated Power to create such a widespread and robust reading of this humble sculpture of a budget detergent bottle.

In order to get behind the veil of the author, one must understand the development and significance of the role. In his essay, Barthes discusses the role of the author in modernity and his or her dished capacity in the role of writing.[ii] Barthes’ discussion of the author, especially its significance in modern works, is likened to positivism and capitalist ideology that was prominent at the start of the Modern era.[iii] The emphasis on the importance of the individual as well as the concept of author as the creator, beyond narration, is quite telling of how they contribute to the development of the work. In the early in the modern conception of the author, the explanation of a work can be interpreting it as the author confiding in the reader. Writing in the context of the 1960s, Barthes claimed that the author is born with the work itself and the work eternally exists in the here and now; the work is created for no other content than the one intended.[iv]

This is a progression from where the author stood at the beginning of the Modern era of the author as simply an individual who infuses themselves into the work. In this evolution, the author’s ego is thought to stand alone at the moment of creation for the work and materialize as the work itself. Therefore, the modern author’s role in the narrative portrayed by Dash is inextricably connected to Ségal. Her use of a widely recognized image plays towards Barthes’ central idea of the death of the author by giving birth to the reader (or in this case viewer). With a such a commonplace image, most of the audience will recognize the object of mimicry but most of the audience will have different experiences, memories, and stories tied to that object that come to the surface when faced with the object. Some of the general categories in which these associations might fall in are: female figures in their lives and the roles that they have played, the female experience, commercialism and consumer culture, or even academic associations. Barthes’ assertion of the author’s death is a tenet that we must accept but with some reservations. We must think of it as the establishment of a gradient rather than a total death with Dash, as Ségal is definitely present in the work but is not totally in control of the reins when creating meaning within this work.

[i] “Pictures Generation” refers to both an exhibition & the group of artists that exhibition represented. Active in the early ‘70s through ‘80s, these artists were critical of media culture and used appropriation art to vent these criticisms. Artists associated with this movement include: Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, James Welling, Paul McMahon, and Barbara Kruger.In 2009, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted The Pictures Generation 1974-1984 which showcased the works of these artists. Link to the Met Exhibition

[ii] For the context of this essay, like in other considerations of appropriation art, I will treat the novel and writing as discussed by Barthes as synonymous to a work of art.

[iii] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image – Music – Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 143.

[iv] Roland Barthes, Ibid., 145