Lucas Samaras

By Johannes Hoerning

Published in Technologies of the Self exhibition catalogue, curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan (delvazprojects.com), Marc Selwyn Fine Arts, Los Angeles (April 3 – May 15, 2021)

“My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between ‘I’ and ‘me’.” Marcel Duchamp, 1960

“Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet total commitment and attachment to any social unit implies a kind of selflessness. Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks.” Erving Goffman, Asylums

For nearly seventy years, Lucas Samaras has confined his artistic practice single-mindedly to the representation of selfhood. Nowhere, however, does the artist’s investigation into the formation and manifestation of the modern idea of self through a poietic mélange of sculpture, assemblage, film, photography, and painting disabuse the viewer of the essential disorientation produced by the very same modern idea. The all-pervasiveness of instrumental ways of living and valorization of ordinary desires and fulfillments, which are most often not of the self’s own making, continue to reveal that the disorientation of the self is the upshot of division and fragmentation of subjectivity. And yet, the self seeks expressive fulfillments despite the fact that, often enough, it openly denies its own fragmentation and the modern predicament that any framework for meaning has only such moral binding force as each of us has assigned to it. With the destruction of secure sources of meaning, any fixed values grounded in the authority of nature or tradition with corresponding natural hierarchies, the modern self is left to its own devices in making sense of the world and its own position within that world. Orientation must be provided by the self for itself. Yet all such self-referential production of meaning is prone to fall prey to the illusion of the self as a self-authorizing, isolated unit, able to give a meaningful account of itself to itself, thereby producing reliable self-knowledge; the self as an island of meaning.

This stubborn view has already been challenged by Hegel’s insistence that there exists a dialectic between self and world. Against Kant’s argument of pure practical reason existing outside of socialization, one that is traceable back to Aristotle’s concept of θεωρία (theory) as pure activity of the mind with no purpose outside of itself, Hegel insisted that in order to comprehend my self-relation, I cannot but do so through my relation to others. This, however, does nowhere imply the success or correctness of my self-understanding. It only goes to show that whatever or whoever I take myself to be is mediated by others’ recognition — or lack thereof. Deliberating about myself as a self is guided by norms not of my own choosing; it is, in one word, an ethical exercise. The subject is always ethically embedded, whether or not he or she recognizes this embeddedness. Such simple observation already presents a challenge to the still remarkably common undialectical assumption of a division between inner and outer, between a “private” inner mind accessible only to the subject and a “public” outer realm of intended actions and their consequences. What Hegel had urged his Kantian readers and everyone else to realize is that individual intentions and actions are expressions already bound up with normative expectations about the meaning of acting in particular ways and under particular descriptions. [1] It is on this complexity of individual power as reflected in actions and intentions that Foucault would base his concept of technologies of the self. By way of challenging the assumed epistemological privilege of our first-person authority and its common act of self-avowal, Hegel writes, “this reality [of actions and intentions] is a plurality of circumstances which breaks out endlessly in all directions, backwards into their conditions, sideways into their connections, forward into their consequences.” [2] Nowhere, perhaps, can this expressive and circumstantial dimension of action and intention be discerned better than in artistic production, whose meaning had come to be understood as severed from the artist’s first-person authority. If we take Hegel to be the first theorist of the expressive dimension of action in the early nineteenth century, Duchamp was the first to reflect this idea in the realm of art, one century later, in his first readymade, Bicycle Wheel (1913). Besides Duchamp, Jasper John’s Flag from 1954/55 was perhaps one of the first postwar works to suggest this separation of artistic intention from public meaning to an American audience. 

Artistic intention, too, issues in action but it would be equally wrong to insist that some pure inner state has produced the artistic outcome, and that such a state of interiority is accessible once the work of art stands before the viewer and invites interpretation. No artist, we can say with Hegel, then, can claim sole ownership of their intentions and their productions. Those who do suffer from self-delusion and labor under an ideology of interiority and pure intention. Such an idea is deeply rooted in the modernist imaginary about self-referentiality of artists and their production, neutral phenomenology, and neutral perception. On the contrary, assigning meaning to actions is informed by what one may call, with Hegel, Nachträglichkeit, often translated as retroactivity or belatedness. [3] What a work of art means is an ongoing, context-dependent process and ought to remain an unsettled — indeed, unsettling — question. Taking the historical and therefore contingent context seriously ought to upset longings for interpretative stability.

In an exemplary nuanced fashion, the instability of self and the ideology of interiority have been the linchpins of Lucas Samaras’s work, beginning with his early installations, his chair transformations, and, most famously perhaps, his series of 135 numbered boxes dating back to the early 1960s, when the artist was in his late twenties, after studying under Allan Kaprow at Rutgers and Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University. To represent the dialectic of selfhood, the artist made perspectival use of mirrors in his early self-portraits, before introducing into his works mirrors as objects in their own right, alongside photographs of his own face and an X-ray of his own scull. Already in Box (1963), two silver acetate mirrors line the inside of a pin-covered box, and the sides are connected by colored knitting yarns which are pulled taut once the box is opened. Alongside other human-scale mirrors produced between 1967 and 1970, Samaras revealed one of his favorite early artistic strategies in his 1966 installation Room No. 2, an eight-by-ten-foot cube covered with rectangular mirrors, both inside and outside. This participatory work, now part of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery collection in Buffalo, New York, engages the self’s externalization through the mirror image, endlessly multiplied inside the cube, as well as the self’s common expectation of retrieving the externalized through recognition of oneself as oneself in the mirror’s reflection. Whether or not the self recognizes itself in its externalized form of the mirror image or in the product of one’s labor, for example, is a question of the self’s integrity — or what some may prefer to call authenticity. Yet, it appears that the idea of authenticity, suggesting as it does an attainable state of self-transparency and inwardness, has been anathema to Samaras precisely because acts of externalization are not to be understood as isolated, as if the self somehow possessed an essence or pure form of interiority which is capable of expressing itself deliberately as authentic. This anti-essentialist and therefore anti-modernist critique of authenticity and of the act of authenticating both the self, its desires and feelings, as well as objects in the world, is traceable throughout Samaras’s work. A more recent iteration of the mirror installation was his Hebraic Embrace (1991–2005), part of Documenta 14, in which Samaras utilized the same square mirror panels that had covered his Room No. 2 but now, instead of a room, the artist positioned four equal-sized mirrored columns on a mirrored platform, whose sculptural symmetry and suggestive title might invoke the Hebrew tetragram denoting the ancient Israelite name for God (yud hei waw hei).

From his sculptures, “AutoPolaroids,” and “Photo-Transformations” to his recent digital distortion of personal photographs and archival material of his childhood in Greece, the artist continuously discusses the relation between self, self-perception, and the memories, desires, and feelings that are authorized by the self. While the critique of the authenticator was initiated by Duchamp’s act of notarizing “this is the original ready-made” on his 1919 assisted readymade L.H.O.O.Q, and taken further by Piero Manzoni’s gesture of declaring Marcel Broodthaers’s body “an authentic work of art” in his Declaration of Authenticity No.071 (1961–62), for Samaras, the problem of authenticating has to be addressed chiefly by recourse to questions of selfhood, self-assertiveness (sometimes reaching levels of self-obsession), and by confronting the illusion that one could ever live entirely within oneself. For Samaras, then, we could say that the self is the readymade, something for whose production others are responsible just as much, if not more, than we are ourselves.

Samaras’s other large-scale installation, Room #1 (1964), in which the artist transported and reinstated his bedroom at the Green Gallery in New York, takes this critique of the relation between self and authenticity perhaps to its furthest. By staging the most intimate aspects of his life while at the same time withholding from view the artist’s physical body, Samaras dysfunctionalized his own bedroom as well as the mnemonic stuff with which it had been filled. Through the substitution of image and body, which is at the same time a substitution of externalized form and self, Samaras achieved a dialectic representation of what, for him, determines the nature of self in lieu of a fetish of authenticity: its relationality. Everything that happens to the self, or in the name of self, does so within a multiplicity of relations between the self and itself, between self and world, and between self and other(s). And it is precisely through the constitutive multiplicity and messiness of these relations that the self bears an imprint of constant instability. By contrast, a self that sees itself as given, rather than as constituted in an ongoing fashion, is what one could call a reified self. Such a notion of the self, or so we could say, has been the chief target of Samaras’s critique of the ordinary or esoteric understanding of the self, that takes becoming as being, or praxis as essence, and fails to recognize the powers that have acted upon it and shaped it toward its present condition or identity. Recourse to essence, implicit to the very notion of authenticity, explains away the relational, and therefore neglects the inherently instable nature of the self. To whatever degree the self reflects existing institutions and values positively by affirmation or negatively by opposition (if such choice is an option and can be made clearly, which is seldom the case), the self’s relation to its social background and situatedness is a process of negotiation. Such negotiation takes place either consciously and potentially politically by way discursive contestation of values, or unconsciously by way of introjection and response to some form of repression. The latter mode of internalization has the tendency to produce what is known as adaptive preference formation, a state in which the self adapts its preferences in order to reduce the tension between the preference of a desire that something be the case and the belief that it isn’t or cannot be made the case. Simply put, it is the adjustments of wants and desires to possibilities. [4] This leaves us with the rather unsettling possibility that what we say and think about our “true” preferences, and what others say and think about theirs, may indeed not be true at all.

Part of this rather complicated picture of adaptive preference formation — one that is difficult to put into words let alone represent aesthetically — are technologies such as self-subjection to rules and their internalization as products of one’s own will, as though issued by the self, rather than as externally imposed. Such technologies make it possible for the self to willfully confuse those technologies as products of its own free will that are deemed necessary for reasons of social stability and economic prosperity; a certain act of self-disciplining against unwelcome, because unsocialized instincts. Nietzsche offers a psychologically compelling account of “internationalization” as inward-turned aggression initially directed outward, in his Genealogy of Morals, II, 16: “All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards – this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his ‘soul’. The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two layers of skin, was expanded and extended itself and gained depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed. Those terrible bulwarks with which state organizations protected themselves against the old instincts of freedom —punishments are a primary instance of this kind of bulwark — had the result that all those instincts of the wild, free, roving man were turned backwards, against man himself.”

With the exception of his cluttered and entirely unorganized Box #1 (1962), the first of his numbered series of boxes, neurotic acts of disciplining, self-control, and disavowal of instincts might well be at work in Samaras’s decades-long arranging, regulating, and documenting of objects inside and on the outside of his boxes, often used repeatedly over the years with slight variations in color or size. Their neat compartmentalization bespeaks certain attempts at formalization of and domination over the means and technologies available to the self and its representation in artistic production. It is at the level of structuring of the self —the forces that work on it and those that the self takes to be of its own making —that Samaras also appears to suggest where we ought to locate the possibility of freedom: as Hegel would say (much to Nietzsche’s distaste), Freiheit ist die Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit (freedom is the recognition of necessity). And what is of utmost necessity, Samaras reminds us, is that the self must build a narrative for itself so as to appear to be in control — boxlike with a sense of orientation, portable, and ordered — but one which allows still for an interpretation in terms of freedom and agency.

In Samaras’s early boxes, ease of handling suggested by the objects’ size was challenged by the obsessive use of nails, razors, or knives. These materials indicated that some kind of violent ritual had taken place, in which the box served either — or both — as means of shielding valuables from theft or/and as objects of violent penetration and predatory attack. “Don’t you think,” asked Samaras once, “people have to attack other people one way or another with words or actual physical attack or power or something? Don’t you think there is a biological need for you to attack either me or somebody else?” [5] Known from other postwar artists outside the U.S. and around Samaras’s time, ranging from Günther Uecker and his 1963 TV auf Tisch and 1964 performance of hammering nails into a piano, to Tetsumi Kudo’s Proliferating Chain Reaction (1956–57), a “junk anti-art” sculpture of unprocessed wood covered by industrial paint and nails, the logic of penetration in Samaras’s own work dates back at least to his 1961 work Untitled (Blade). In this work, the artist applied liquid aluminium onto a wooden panel, which then served as material base into which one single razor blade was inserted right at the center in an act of parsimonious determination—Fontana’s intention initiated but left unexecuted. Such a performative act of asserting material heterogeneity against the modernist monochrome and its pretense to self-referentiality, allowing instead for the blade to cast a shadow on pure pictorial surface as the result of an outside source of light, also recalls Piero Manzoni’s aim exemplified through his Achromes to turn the canvas into “a living flesh, direct and scalding.” [6] Manzoni’s bread rolls and cotton balls, too, had cast shadows onto pure monochrome plains.

From a more autobiographical perspective, Samaras’s formal usage of the box as container in light of his own displacement from his native Macedonia has important parallels to Duchamp’s project of La Boîte-en-valise (1941–68), as well as to Man Ray’s poetic album Objects of My Affection (1944), a collection of personal photographs of mnemonic objects the artist was forced to leave behind in Paris before his move to Hollywood in 1940. All three artists left their native countries and eventually settled in the U.S. By reproducing his life’s work in miniature form, allowing the artists to arrange and partially determine the mode of reception and distribution before any museum could do the same and render the avant-garde practice of Duchamp (and Man Ray) part of dominant culture, La Boîte-en-valise and Objects of My Affection had anticipated the institutional co-optation of the artists’ own work and that of avant-garde practice in general. In addition to his own reflections on acculturation, Duchamp’s declaration in 1952 that “everything important I have done can be put into a little suitcase,” which we might also take to be true of Man Ray’s album, introduced a double act of defiance against their own recent historical reality of displacement, exile, and relocation by European war, as well as the usual demarcation between original, authentic artworks and their reproductions. The importance resides, under precisely such precarious conditions, in the reproductions assembled inside a box or album, rather than in their original objects outside, somewhere left behind in an abandoned studio, placed in a bourgeois home, for sale in a commercial gallery, or shelved in a cultural archive. [7]

Samaras, by contrast, did not first have to reproduce originals. His objects were always already boxed and portable such that no downscaling was necessary for the purpose of neat ordering and the artist’s suggestion of interpretative relations between otherwise inaccessible objects. Instead, in one of his smallest boxes measuring just about three-by-six-by-four inches, titled Self-Portrait Box (1963), the artist used several passport-sized photographs of himself, which all appear to be taken around the same time, suggesting a concern with the routinized act of identification and validation of identity. The overlapping arrangement of the photos appears accidental rather than neatly ordered, as though the act of transporting the box and the hammering of nails into its wooden outside, rather than the careful placing by the artist, were responsible for the order revealing itself to the viewer. Self-Portrait Box therefore evokes reflections on perpetual exile and dislocation, which in Duchamp’s case was both true of his personal whereabouts between Paris, the unoccupied south of France (to where he traveled disguised as a cheese merchant to complete his work on the Boîte), and his future home of New York, as well as of the (re)production process of works requiring the gathering of information on color and composition of the original works across transatlantic locations. 

In Samaras’s boxes, the representation of self is situated in an unresolvable tension between multiplicity or reproduction of a single image of self and the inflicted, perhaps self-inflicted, violence onto the self as that singular, stable, and recognizable unit. Whatever objects serve Samaras as allegorical anchoring of self are always protected from outside violence and manipulation and, at the same time, subject to precisely such violence and manipulation. The self’s integrity, if there is such a thing, is therefore never intact, or intact only momentarily in case of armistice. Duchamp, too, had famously multiplied his self-image in the form of his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy (an identity born in 1921 after a photograph by Man Ray), or on the Wanted $2000 Reward poster (1923) as “George W. Welch, alias Bull, alias Picken … known also under name Rrose Sélavy.” Adding to this strategy of multiplying, in the case of Samaras, the box serves both as the securing of self and as the locus of violence inflicted onto the self. The many ways in which intersubjective mediation both secures and unsettles what we come to experience as organized identity under the rubric of self, in Samaras’s practice, always takes the form of an oscillation between abstraction and representation, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, realism and idealism, affirmation and rejection, self-indulgent kitsch and sober self-assessment. Lest we fail to confront the ongoing process of self-formation and transformation, the work of Samaras, as well as that of Duchamp and Man Ray, though in their case much less violently, has all along suggested that we will remain short-changed of self-determination for as long as we are holding on to a static representation of self. Any image of the self, which envisions its needs, desires, intentions, and interests as the individual ego’s very own creation turns out to be, more often than not, the mere product of self-delusion. This attests to Samaras’s works a remarkable level of transparency and truthfulness with respect to the conflictual nature of the self. There is no shortage in his oeuvre of bare confrontation of traumatic events (not concrete ones, perhaps, but traumatic events in the abstract as part of every human being’s life) that are the result of the self’s experience of instability but perpetual need for stability, often at a self-defeating price.

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1. See Robert B. Pippin’s remarkable study Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), here especially chapter 6.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 389, quoted in ibid.
3. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 153.
4. See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
5. Quoted in Barbaralee Diamonstein, “Lucas Samaras,” Inside New York’s Art World (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 347.
6. See the Manifesto of Albissola Marina (1957) signed by Piero Manzoni, among others.
7. See Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in Times of its Technological Reproducibility, published in 1936, around the time when Duchamp began assembling his miniature reproduction for Boîte-en-valise.