Page 49 - Studio International - March 1973

(Far left)
Chair Transformation no. 25A 1969-70
Mixed media
Whitney Museum, New York
(Left)
Chair Transformation no. 8 1969-70
Mixed media
Whitney Museum, New York

make it more than a literate reference to what he `self'. Morgenstern, with his momentum of darker, but not necessarily deeper waters, where
willed to be his natural parentage. But words and their underlying melancholy — never spaces fill themselves up with aggressive debris.
Samaras reaches back. Some of his works, messages but always suggestive — belongs to the All the same, like Bachelard's chests, the boxes
particularly the reiterated play with the fork and family. Samaras offers contain the images of his poetic
spoon, in which they are metamorphosed into Then there is Samaras's earnest interest in the life. First and foremost, of his 'self' or at least his
gesticulating personages, belong rightfully to masquerade. I remember once at a party how mask which appears often on the side or the
the pre-nineteenth-century concept of the seriously he insisted that the guests be covered inner lid of a box, and is often nearly obscured
grotesque in which personification of objects over (by him of course) with face-paint. The by the fine sheen imposed by thousands of
was a more direct, less allegorical process. masque ball. The masque of the other. straight pins. Then, of bits of memory (this we
Some of his works, however, find themselves in Masques, in any case, that reminded me more of know when we know all he has made, including
the direct Rimbaldian line largely because, like Ensor than of the ethnological fantasies of the the words which tell us of his childhood).
the infant prodigy, Samaras never forgets his surrealists. Masque and transformation are Hypodermic needles, false teeth, old-fashioned
troubled conscience ('why was I spared ?') and among the obsessions. spectacles, and the filigree patterns that go
cannot forgo speculating on 'meanings'. The What, after all, are Samaras's treasures but with the accoutrements of another century.
dandy of Surrealism dosed himself with an commonplaces dressed up as poetry ? They can't be shut, but they can't be opened
irony which I believe is alien to Samaras's nature, The chairs are not like Ionesco's chairs, but either, which is about the way Samaras seems to
although, being educated, he can indulge in are like the true historical grotesques with their feel about his memory storage vaults. If you add
irony when he chooses. Then, too, there is ornamental base. Samaras is nothing if not hair, isolated teeth, broken glass and wretched
something about his process that is true to copiously inventive, and these chairs represent a looking stuffed birds to the inventory, you reach
Rimbaud's formula for making himself a seer : wonderful fusion of the ornamental (mirrors, that question which Samaras asks only once in
Samaras is capable of that long, immense and coloured wools, artificial flowers, pins, paints, his writings as far as I can tell : why was I spared ?
rational derangement of his senses. There is papers all used with pleasure, to amuse or to The monstrous in his/our history finds
certainly method in such a madness as his delight) with the uneasiness of the grotesque. expression obliquely in these boxes, and even in
hundreds of polaroid photographs of himself. By the mere tilt, a chair can become a grotesque the most recent set of variants which are the
His conclusion that he is inwardly 'an erotic in the grand tradition — the tradition before the chicken-wire boxes (like the mirror-prison in
sadness' is reached only after a systematic psychological ominousness that was added by us, fact). As light, even lovely, as some of them are,
exploration of its outward signs. the moderns. the associations with chicken wire don't stop
Yes, Samaras is closer to the nineteenth Perhaps we would have to deal with the boxes with chickens. The monstrous that is always
century with its prodigious figures of obsession as modern. Boxes seem to be proliferating in our with us, as the grotesque side of life, finds
than he is to the surrealists. One of his most century. But Samaras is not a Greek for nothing, expression in startling images such as a single,
extraordinary pieces, the 1966 Mirror Room, and his boxes can only be variants on Pandora's. lady's high-heeled shoe with two heels, walking.
always reminded me of Christian Morgenstern's They really don't have much in common with Samaras deals with matter lustfully. All kinds
sad note in his journal in 1896 'Man is Cornell's and they are absolutely alien to of matter come to his hand and he shapes them
imprisoned in a cage of mirrors'. The mirror Nevelson's, not to mention the hundreds of according to his questions. Whether it is the
palace of Samaras with its unfathomable depths others confining themselves to the four-walled cold sinuosity of ropes of sculpmetal or the
and its uncountable facets is a metaphor much enclosure. Some of Samaras's boxes are benign, scruffy softness of cotton-wool, Samaras
closer to the symbolist or the grotesque even funny. But almost all of them have a transforms it: matter for him can be
nineteenth-century sentiment than it is to any sinister undercurrent of feeling deriving from malevolent or generous, menacing or
contemporary way of feeling. Far from being a the fact that Samaras almost always arranges his sensuously seductive, but it must always be
monument to Narcissism, which is how I have boxes in such a way that they can be neither educated. Like any good obsédé, he inundates
seen it referred to so often, this effusive fully opened nor fully closed. Gaston Bachelard himself with his images, a basic horror vacui,
expression of ambiguity more nearly suits the has shown us how evocative boxes, drawers and which he calls hunger, being his impetus.
cosmicizing ways those nineteenth-century chests can be, but he was thinking about the `Call it what you will', he says of his
poets, above all Rimbaud, dealt with their `happy' spaces. Samaras navigates in those proliferations, 'I get things done.'

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