From tortured youth to enchanted sage: since the late 1950s, Lucas Samaras has been obsessively portraying himself in a variety of mediums. The artist's myriad auto-transformations were on view in a recent Whitney Museum survey and a concurrent gallery show of new work

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Sue Taylor

Among the razor blades, nails, knives, needles, fishhooks, pins and tacks that bristle and menace in the art of Lucas Samaras, scissors flash with double-edged significance. They are both aggressive weapon and creative tool, as when Samaras slashes up and reconstitutes his own figure in a group of disjunctive dadaist photocollages (1990) reminiscent of Hannah Hoch. A recurring image throughout his oeuvre, always at hand amid the dense clutter of the studio/apartment where he creates his work, scissors come to stand metonymically for Samaras himself. In the imposing Panorama (Feb. 27, 1983), constructed of several Polaroid prints cut up into horizontal strips and assembled into an elongated, "panoramic" view, he displays the scissors as a kind of attribute, like an instrument of martyrdom in this self-portrait as a Byzantine saint.

With this allusion to his cultural heritage--Samaras was horn in the Macedonian region of Greece in 1936 and baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church--Panorama becomes a kind of esthetic manifesto, in which an ascetic, bearded artist, in robe and sandals, grips his shears in one hand and the camera's shutter release in the other. Typically, Samaras advertises his self-conscious artifice in this composite photograph: the hand that controls the camera rests on a mirror, symbolic of mimesis and self-reflection, while floodlights on tripods are included within the image along with a floral offering to his sainted self. Little wedding-cake couples arrayed before the flowers may stand for his ancestors, just as the scissors also invoke his father, a furrier (often absent from the family on business), and the sewing and dressmaking female relatives who reared the young Samaras in Greece.

Panorama marks the approximate midpoint of Samaras's career to date and of his recent retrospective, "Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras," curated by Marla Prather at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Though devoted to self-portraiture, the exhibition provided a nearly comprehensive survey, since Samaras has always been his own favorite subject. Missing were the chair transformations begun in 1969, quiltlike fabric "Reconstructions" from the 1970s, and angry paintings of critics, patrons and dealers as leering death-heads from the 1980s. But there remained a dizzying inventory of Samaras's wide-ranging creative efforts: ornamented boxes; pastel, pencil and ink drawings; paper cutouts; paintings; books; Polaroids; a film; jewelry; computer-generated inkier prints; an architectural model mid mirrored-room installation. This "seemingly anarchistic multidimensionality" stems from the artist's antiauthoritarianism, according to Donald Kuspit in his penetrating catalogue essay. (1) Samaras refuses to be restricted to any medium or style, embracing everything from Expressionism and Surrealism to Op art, Minimalism, and Pattern and Decoration.

In a deft critical move, Kuspit further relates Samaras's "excited sense of the boundless possibilities of art" to a defense against paranoia. During the exhibition, in an interview at the museum with critic Barbara Rose, Samaras revealed something of his neurotic sense of apprehension by reporting how he broke out in a rash of pimples after experimenting with the pointillist technique in his artwork. "It was almost as if someone was punishing me," he stated, and when Rose asked if he often had that feeling, Samaras admitted flatly, "I do." (2) His chronically anxious condition, though rendered amusing in this particular anecdote, is an understandable outcome of Samaras's horrible childhood experiences in war-torn Greece. We learn from Prather's detailed chronology in the catalogue how, during World War II and the ensuing civil conflict, his hometown of Kastoria was successively occupied by Italians, Germans, insurgent Communists supporting Macedonian independence and the Greek army. In the early 1940s, mortar fire on the town killed Samaras's grandmother and severely injured all aunt, and the family was ejected from their home. Illness, deprivation and violence hounded them, until in 1948 the child and his mother were able to immigrate to the United States, joining Samaras's father (who had traveled here hi 1939 and remained when war broke out) to settle in New Jersey.

A portrait photograph of Samaras as a boy appears in a group of eerie interiors from the mid-1970s. For these luridly colored or black-and-white photographs, the artist used a slide projector to cast the linage of his childhood self upon the walls of his apartment, on the blinds, on his own naked body. The child portrait returns in 1985, in meticulous stippled ink-dot drawings based on the same old photo, taken for his Greek passport in 1947. It's not only that Samaras is for ever haunted by his vulnerable "inner child"; the passport photo also represents a signal moment of transition, a new beginning, a new status as immigrant and alien. This traumatic dislocation exacerbated an intense sense of difference that Samaras seems to have felt from an early age. In the Rose interview, Samaras shared a fascinating reminiscence of his incipient, youthful self-awareness as an artist. He recalled evenings with his family, when he was around eight years old, in a park with cypress frees, overlooking a town with a nightclub, lights reflected in the surrounding lakes and stars in the sky. A mystical feeling came over him: