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

Samaras memorialized his mother, who died in Greece in 1975, in a proposal for a freestanding mirrored chamber (1994-95). Its T-shaped plan derived from the initial of her first name, Trigona. The sketches and model for this unrealized project were included in the exhibition, as was the dizzying, 12-by-16-foot architectural installation Mirror Corner (1990), which one could circumnavigate in the company of other viewers and one's own myriad reflected selves. Emblems of the artist's unrelenting narcissism, the mirror pieces are also disconcerting, confronting viewers with their own pleasurable or perhaps embarrassing self-fascination. Uncanny in its potentially endless multiplications, the mirror is obviously overdetermined for Samaras: he is impressed by the illusion of infinite recession or expansion of mirrors reflecting each other, recalling the vast, oceanic sensation of his childhood epiphany; at the same time, he clearly aligns the object with his mother, confirming Kuspit's speculation that the artist "sees himself as he imagines he is [lovingly] mirrored in her eyes." (6)

Like the pencils and brushes that sometimes project from the ornamented boxes, or the scissors utilized and depicted in his art, the mirror is an essential tool for Samaras in his production of serf-portraits. It is a means as well as a symbol of introspection and an aid to his unsparing attempts at serf-revelation. Faced with his self-absorption, exhibitionism, masochism and aggression, we ponder his complex motivations and those of self-portraying artists in general. Traditionally, the self-portrait, on one level always an affirmation of being, may be understood to serve the quest for self-knowledge and the expression of feeling. Although postmodern artists and critics have questioned the very possibility, of such an "authentic" project, Samaras may force us to reconsider this position. Any inferences we may draw from these self-portraits about his personal character or affect must remain tentative, but it is certain that he is unrivaled among his contemporaries in his genuinely passionate and consistent devotion to the genre. In the astounding course of his work, moreover, through many mediums and decades, Samaras changes and grows old before our eyes.

Talking with Rose about self-portraiture, Samaras compared himself to manure, explaining how he uses himself as fertilizer for his art. This self-debasing analogy, perhaps intended to offset or mitigate impressions of an inordinate and "unrepentant" ego, seems to me unbalanced: it neglects the apparently fertilizing function art has served over time in Samaras's own personal "growth." If there was a kind of development observable in this exhibition, it wasn't so much stylistic as emotional or psychological. Art has helped effect a transformation in the artist, from the tortured youth of the AutoPolaroids to the enchanted sage in the recent Photofictions, 47 of which were shown at PaceWildenstein gallery, New York, during the Whitney's survey. Here Samaras has put the scissors aside, or almost: they reappear as tiny motifs scattered along with knives, forks, flowers and other autobiographical elements in the retrospective Photofiction Untitled (ABC #1), 2002. The violence of his earlier work is entirely subdued in these new color-saturated, hallucinatory pictures, where his body often merges with luxuriant nature in the serene setting of Central Park or with a gorgeous floral still life in the psychedelic Untitled (Orchid #44), 2002.