ArtForum // Lucas Samaras at The Intermission
The first work luring visitors into “Master of the Uncanny,” the first exhibition in Greece in twenty years by Greek-born American artist Lucas Samaras, is a glittering treasure chest. Box #78, 1972, is covered with golden craft beads. Its interior is painted with brightly colored stripes enclosing a series of small wood compartments housing objects that appear arranged to suggest a dual potential to tease and to torture. Graphite and colored pencils stand like pikes; a needle sticks up with its tip pointing menacingly erect. There is a resin cast of (presumably) Samaras’s finger and some cotton fluff. A steak knife coolly slices through the arrangement. Surrounded by Samaras’s photographic self-portraits, Box #78 gives the impression that for him separating titillation from torture is impossible. The box—a cross between a cabinet of curiosities and a kink kit—reads as an allegory for Samaras’s inner world.
Samaras was an enigmatic member of the 1960s generation of New York artists. A student of midcentury greats such as artists Allan Kaprow and George Segal, art historian Meyer Schapiro, and actor Stella Adler, he cultivated his reputation as a loner to the point of solipsism, evidenced by the title of his 2003–2004 retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, “Unrepentant Ego.” His work weaves self-portraiture with erotic narcissism as if to aestheticize the idea of being horny for oneself. In his fixation on self-investigation as both subject and medium, he prefigured the way that social media has commoditized the self-image. He took watching others watch him watch himself to an extreme at the Greek pavilion in the 2009 Venice Biennale with Ecdysiast and Viewers, 2006, a film of the reactions of his friends and associates, including artists Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and his gallerist, Arne Glimcher, to his performance of a striptease.
