Page 48 - Studio International - March 1973

(Below)
Box no. 48 1966
Mixed media
Coll: Don Judd
(Right)
Untitled Box no. 8 1963
Mixed media
Coll: Jon Streep

Strange to think of Lucas Samaras as a process, dada and surrealist treasury. But by now there
A but that is how he seems to think of himself. are enough emblems of Samaras's educated
`What are you ?' he asks himself in an auto-
home-made interview. 'Inwardly I am an erotic sadness, obsessions to persuade us that he is the real
thing. The Whitney Museum's retrospective
process outwardly I am a home-made process for with its horde of more than 375 objects leaves
no doubt. Samaras belongs to no school, but
unravelling meanings.' After almost fifteen
for years of observing this process, or the process's only to that tantalizing family in the history of
art in which the articulation of an obsession is
products, I am quite convinced that Samaras's
unravelling own assessment of what he is is often the best. the meaning of a life's work.
I don't mean that Samaras has an obsession
The forthgiving that characterizes Samaras's
meanings whole life (which he says, and I believe him, is which could be paraphrased with Freudian or
art historical allusion. Rather, he is obsessive by
his art) is a giving forth of everything that can
possibly be pitched into the surround, and that nature, and all the modes he has explored bring
naturally includes words. Not being Samaras, I him no closer to his end. There is nothing in the
and quite a few other people have chosen other world that could assuage his hunger for
Dore Ashton words to circumscribe the process. The longer I unravelling meanings. Hunger. Not only is the
follow Samaras's trail of coloured wools into his voraciousness of his appetite one of the key
maze, the more convinced I am that what he is is impressions such an exhibition offers; it is
an educated obsession. perhaps the key of his personality. The word
The fact is, he is educated. His Greek hunger itself appears all the time in his writings,
childhood filled him up with the modern and on a more obvious level, much of his work is
educated Greek's incurable hate-love of the lost about the processes inspired by hunger :
glory that was Greece. He was educated to lovemaking or plain eating. One of his earliest
myths, not only the heroic myths of antiquity, groups of 'transformations' utilize dinner
but the somewhat less elating myths concerning plates, eating utensils and tumblers in a classic
the Turks and even the Germans and the surreal treatment combining the familiar with
Communists during the Second World War. the unthinkable. Samaras says again and again
In his copious autobiographical notes he in his sub-language of artifacts that no hunger
constantly harks back to Kastoria, his myth-past, can ever be satisfied, whether hunger for the
his myth-path. But then again, in a much more raw and the cooked, or hunger for knowledge
mundane context, he was educated in America, (those books that cannot be opened; or that
in the normal liberal arts college way first, and bristle with caveats in the form of razors and
later, in the advanced contexts of Meyer pins.)
Schapiro's courses in art history. His education If I say we can know a man by his obsessions,
for being an artist, then, was more or less I am going too far. What can be discussed to
conventional. some extent is the way obsessiveness finds its
In view of his insistence, sometimes historical milieu. Here I find in the Samaras
coquettish, on the home-madeness of his self; geneology not only the obvious Freudian
and in the light of his perpetual interventions circumstances of his epoch, but a tradition that
via the word, one might have been misled into comes, almost without the intrusion of
believing that Samaras is not a true obsédé but a Surrealism, straight from Rimbaud, and
willed one who happened to mature under the certainly from the nineteenth century in general.
aegis of Allan Kaprow, George Segal and the Where the surrealist sometimes flirted with the
Rutgers crowd when they were dipping into the grotesque, he was usually too self-conscious to