Transformer: Lucas Samaras - mixed media, PaceWildenstein, New York, New York - Cover Story

Art in America, Feb, 1997 by Ken Johnson

Consistent with Samaras's pattern, the uptown exhibition entailed one large act of transformation: conversion of the modernist gallery into a small, glittery department store. Dark gray walls were striped everywhere by festive, floor-to-ceiling lengths of multicolored yarn; Plexi-fenestrated display cases were placed every which way and their mirrored interior walls multiplied the objects contained; works were crammed into every available space as though to avoid wasting any commercially opportunity. Stylistically, the installation reflected Samaras's taste for kitsch and his proclivity for visually dense and complex ornamentation. Whether or not he meant by this storelike installation to satirize today's commodification of the artist, there was something coolly sardonic about the deliberate violation of conventional esthetics of art exhibition.

In typically contrarian spirit, the uptown exhibition eschewed two of the most obvious ways to lay out a retrospective: it followed no chronological order, which actually made sense in that Samaras's progress has tended to be more lateral than linear and he often revisits and develops ideas from earlier periods. More problematically, the exhibition did not group things by series. Instead, it dispersed works among four obliquely named categories: Kiss Kill, Perverted Geometry, Inedibles and Self-Absorption.

The last category designates what many would regard as the most salient motive in Samaras's art. One of the earliest works in the show was a small, expressionistically painted, nude self-portrait from 1958, and self-portraiture recurs throughout his oeuvre -- usually in photographic form -- up to the present. Of particular interest was a grid of 18 small, black-and-white Polaroid head shots from 1969-70 in which the artist mugs theatrically in a variety of wigs and hats and thereby anticipates Cindy Sherman's work of 10 years later. What this series seems to make explicit is the impossibility of finding a true, essential self. One finds, rather, a multiplication of appearances, as one does, too, in the mirrored rooms, which reflect infinitely repeating and receding apparitions of sell. Yet Samaras's appearance never changes beyond recognition, and this paradoxical tension between self-permanence and self-mutation may be seen as a central theme in his self-portraiture. Lately, transformations of age have added new wrinkles to this enterprise. In a 10-by-8-inch color print from 1996, the naked artist strikes a taut, choreographic pose against a white, yarn-striped wall. Unlike John Coplans, Samaras doesn't highlight the decrepitude of aging flesh. Stiff slim and vigorous looking, he gazes fiercely at the camera, projecting a considerable erotic charge. Nevertheless, however fit he seems, he's got the body of a 60-year-old man; he's metamorphosed from a wild young man to a wild oldish man and the contrast to remembered images of the artist's younger self gives the picture much of its dramatic interest.

The category Kiss Kill points to Samaras's frequent creation of surfaces that can be both attractive and menacing. One of the earliest works in the show was a small white, impastoed painting sprouting a grid of razors all pointing at the viewer; nails, knives, tacks, pins, needles, crushed glass and other threatening objects and substances recur throughout Samaras's oeuvre. That this goes hand-in-hand with sumptuously appealing decorative surfaces may lead one to suspect a personality in conflict between desire to be loved and fear of being invaded. But again, as with his self-portraiture, you never learn why this man should so vigilantly defend his boundaries. In the iconography of another eccentric assemblagist, Joseph Cornell, whose curio-packed boxes are often recalled by Samaras's intricately ornamented boxes, you feel in touch with the artist's emotional life, his yearnings for certain pretty young women, his aching nostalgia. Samaras, however, never allows such intimate accessibility to his inner life and this gives his work an emotionally astringent quality.