Lucas Samaras: Mirrors, Nails and lots of Polaroids

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Artist Lucas Samaras is a very unique case. As he mentions in one of his “self-interviews”, if he had to choose a label for himself it would be “sculptor”. However, his practice evades any restrictive definition. From painting to sculpture and from sculpture to polaroids, video performances and installations, the Greek-American artist creates his own universe in which he can experiment with any medium, and the result is, regardless of the materials, coherent mainly in terms of subject matter, which is produced and formed in such a way as to provoke and raise questions. 

From aluminium foil on furniture, monumental installations and utensils, to the mirror, nails, paint stains and colourful woollen thread, these are some of the materials considered distinctive of his work since the 50s. The process of reusing materials and objects begins in 1969 with "chair transformations", a series in which his wording and light irony appear, aspects that will define him. His furniture/sculptures are transformed in various ways, while also acquiring different dimensions, for example, the stacked chairs entitled "sculpture #22" is a work that reaches 2.4 meters.

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Samaras’ obsession with the self, his presence and experience in space, art, life and the process of constructing and deconstructing a means of expression or thought, constitute his main subjects. Through illustrating and transforming himself or transforming objects into something new he escapes each restricting identity, enjoying the pleasurable, open interpretation of “becoming”. As he notes in his self-interviews “I like self-references”. A statement that is confirmed through his work. He approaches the collective by referencing the individual 

In 1968 Samaras builds his first iconic mirrored room. As he has said, that is the time when he “immediately felt like a professional artist”. This room would be followed by many other similar ones that would constitute his Magnum opus. Large spaces, which could be characterized as psychoanalytic action in a minimalist form: these are mainly wooden large-scale constructions that can host a human body (e.g. mirrored room #2 was 2.40 x 3.04 x 2.43) and are lined entirely with mirrors. Within the spaces, he also includes mirror-covered furniture such as tables and chairs. 

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The witty use of the mirror motif in an installation that evokes a residence constitutes a turning point for the work of Samaras, who goes from self-analysis to the creation of spaces for each viewer to directly experience their own self. The morphology of the “living room” is not random. The artist wants to emphasise that even in the most basic uses of the house, even in our most "insignificant" moments, we are always with ourselves.

Although Samaras self-identifies as a sculptor, he is mainly known for his Polaroids in '72. Playing with the inside-outside binary is what characterises his whole work. Use and disuse. Thought and impulse, the symbolic and the literal. His photographs are a preparatory stage of all his thinking and work. They subtly accompany and explain, like a legend on a map, his own transformation over the years. In his images, he tests all the materials and all the techniques that he will later apply in works that are complete and autonomous such as the mirrored rooms. Polaroids are his primary research tool to which he constantly returns.

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In a film he directs and stars in, titled “Self”, we see him diligently eating a series of photos of his relatives. Through self-deprecation and irony to the point of ridicule, Samaras manages to talk about trauma and its hereditary nature, its connection to raising and taking care of each generation. This work shows how Samaras, starting from something personal, deals with the social aspect of the self, in other words, with something non-individual.

His so-called "Self-portraits", which, paradoxically, are not his Polaroids, are part of this line of thought. Samaras plays the game of trust between viewer and artist. He presents x-rays of his body, broaching at the same time the matter of the inner self but also the similarity between people, and by extension the problematic of identity today. How can one know if this self-portrait is really the artist's? The change of position between the viewer and the artist is important. As in the furniture with mirrors, so in his installations, Samaras manages to fetishize not only his own self but also the self of others. His whole work is a journey to “we” after first dealing with “I”.

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Samaras obsessively tries to make sculptures, reusing objects and negating their identities (e.g. the table, the chair, etc.), while at the same time regenerating them as different versions of furniture that are not for use. His famous boxes from the 60s are one of the most important milestones in his career. Through them, he makes the connection between beauty and pain.

Curator and art historian Anne Rorimer writes for “Box #53” (Art Institute of Chicago, 1965): the essence of his art lies in his ability to produce associations connected with bodily response particularly related to pain or repulsion within a framework of beauty [...] Samaras’s main artistic concern is to confound beauty with pain, for “I cannot separate beauty from pain”, he maintains (Rorimer 1973, p.3). The decadence of the shiny and colourful surfaces reaches the level of kitsch. The amount of decoration, pattern, texture and colour also seems to become oppressive through the way in which it overloads the object, an effect that the critic Kim Levin has described as “obsessive, intensely private, almost hallucinatory” (Levin 1975, p.46).

Samaras’ sculpture-objects are in some of the world’s most important art institutes such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the MET, Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art and he is one of the most important figures of post-war contemporary art.

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