One-Man Show

NEW YORK —  What makes a man turn away from the world and retreat into himself? It’s a question that comes to mind when examining the work and life of artist Lucas Samaras.

His first solo show in Los Angeles in 17 years is currently at PaceWildenstein in Beverly Hills, but don’t expect to see Samaras hanging about chatting up the local collectors. The 61-year-old artist is notoriously reclusive and rarely leaves his Manhattan apartment, which he refers to as his “partner.”

Filled with luxurious fabrics, glittering baubles and his own art, this magical environment is the backdrop for a diabolically beautiful body of work that straddles the worlds of the avant-garde and outsider art. Samaras’ manipulated Polaroid self-portraits are perhaps his best-known work, and the show at PaceWildenstein comprises 39 of these pieces from 1973-76, most of which haven’t been previously exhibited.

His output, however, stretches well beyond these darkly erotic self-portraits and includes environments constructed of mirrors; delicate pastel drawings; fetishistic boxes embellished with everything from razor blades and flowers to straight pins and glitter; sculptural works based on the form of the chair; Expressionist acrylic portraits; and geometric abstractions made of sewn fabric. Though the materials and scale of his work vary dramatically, its emotional tenor remains the same: fiendishly intelligent and remote.

Samaras is regarded as a key figure in the generation of artists who came of age in the ‘60s. He was taken on by the prestigious Pace Gallery when he was just 28, and his work has been the subject of dozens of books and catalogs and of several retrospectives (the first was in Chicago in 1971, the most recent in Japan in 1992). Moreover, in combining formalist issues of line and form with savage eruptions from the id, Samaras’ work looks particularly timely in the late ‘90s, when art seems to be turning away from the public and focusing more on the personal.

Although Samaras’ work is unabashedly revealing, the man himself is decidedly private, and one senses he admits visitors with reluctance to the sprawling maze of rooms on the 62nd floor of a midtown skyscraper, which he moved into eight years ago. He makes an effort to be hospitable, meeting his visitor at the elevator and offering a beverage, and at the conclusion of the interview he dutifully conducts a tour of the place. But he’s unable to hide that he finds company a bit tedious and that he looks forward to being alone again in his apartment--which, by the way, looks markedly different from the tiny flat on the Upper West Side that served as the setting for his work for 26 years.

“Emotionally I’d outgrown the old apartment,” says Samaras, who made the move over a period of weeks, carrying his possessions by hand to his new digs. “In the process of moving, I discovered the thing I wanted to leave behind was most of the people I knew. I realized I didn’t want to have any more of the stupid conversations knowing those people required, so I got rid of them.

“There’s no reason I’ve stayed in New York,” adds the artist, a handsome man who maintains his trim physique by taking the elevator down 20 floors every day, then running back up. “My attachment is to my home, and that could be anywhere--I could be in a jail cell for all I care, because 70% of my life is mental.

“And there are advantages to living that way, the main one being that you’re in control--I’ve always had a rich fantasy life, and it hasn’t changed over the course of my life. Of course, a lot goes on in my head that I’d prefer were not there, but most of that was imposed by other people.”

Samaras was born in 1936 in Kastoria, a town in the Macedonian region of northern Greece. He describes his birthplace as “a small town where people of a certain age leave to make a better life in another country.” When he was 3, he says, his father left and spent several years in France with his brothers, then moved again and settled in America.

Shortly after Samaras’ father left for France, Italian forces launched an attack on Greece that brought it into World War II. From 1941 through ’44 the country was occupied by German, Italian and Bulgarian forces, whose presence exacerbated the nightmarish cast of Samaras’ childhood.

Samaras grew up hearing lurid tales of atrocities perpetrated by the Turks. When he was 5, the house he shared with his mother was bombed, killing his grandmother and wounding an aunt.

“I saw her with her belly ripped open,” says the artist, whose archive of gruesome memories includes seeing a dead soldier tied to a tree and the bloated bodies of two drowned cousins.

In light of all this, it’s surprising to hear Samaras say “my childhood in Greece was wonderful because of the war.”

“People become closer in dire situations, so there was a camaraderie I liked,” he says. “And war is fantastic for children because you’re able to witness dramatic events, but it’s as if they’re being enacted. And all those violent things I saw happened to other people, not to me, and there’s a certain exhilaration in escaping catastrophe.”

Like most small-town Greeks, Samaras was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, and it was there, he says, “that all the nightmares were defined for me. It was theater and terror, and one learned of hell--even heaven was frightening. It was in church that I first became aware of art, but we also had relatives who were painters, so art was part of that world.”

Samaras left that world behind in 1948 when he and his mother joined his father in New Jersey. The reunion was not joyful.

“My relationship with my father was always strained,” Samaras says. “He was absent for most of my early life, and when we reunited, he wasn’t a father and I wasn’t a son--we just never clicked.

“When I arrived in America, I felt totally like an outsider. I didn’t speak English, but I was nonetheless thrown into a public school, and my way of surviving was art class--I didn’t have to speak there because I could draw. At that point, I developed an intense work ethic, which was probably my way of compensating for the fact that I didn’t speak English and had different interests than most people.

“In high school, I had a teacher named Fabian Zaccone who was a painter, and he treated me as an equal. My parents weren’t supportive of my aspirations to be an artist and were quite critical of me, but this man acknowledged me, which was a tremendous gift. He and my German teacher entered me in a competition for a scholarship to Rutgers University, which I got, and I studied there from 1955 through ’59 with [conceptual artist] Allan Kaprow and [sculptor] George Segal.”

After his years at Rutgers, Samaras studied art history in 1959 at Columbia with Meyer Schapiro. While he was at Columbia, Samaras became acquainted with Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Jim Dine and began participating in happenings being staged at the Reuben Gallery.

“I thought I wanted to be an actor then, so I studied with Stella Adler for two years,” Samaras says. “There was an aggressiveness to New York actors, though, a kind of a toughie stance that I didn’t like. But Stella was a throwback to the 19th century--she really carried herself like a diva, which I loved.

“At a certain point, I had to choose between an acting career, or happenings and the world of the avant-garde. Theater at that point meant Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller--America was thrilled with those guys, but I found them kind of dumb and provincial. The avant-garde, on the other hand, offered nonacademic possibilities, and the early happenings were wonderful. Like everything, they had a life span though, and eventually they became boring and they stopped.”

By the time Samaras lost interest in happenings in 1962, he’d already had three solo exhibitions at prominent New York galleries--of drawings, paintings, boxes and assemblages--that showed the beginnings of his mature style.

“It used to be said that artists had to go through their Surrealist period; mine started early and hasn’t ended yet,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve always been fascinated by [the horror of] Grand Guignol, but it must be combined with the structure of abstraction in order for it to be transformed into something more than just blood. Most artists who deal with horror--Paul Thek, Ed Kienholz, Bruce Conner, Damien Hirst--are too one-dimensional for me. Horror must be modified by classicism, and the raw matter has to be modulated.”

Until 1964, Samaras lived with his family in New Jersey, but when they returned to Greece, he moved to Manhattan and embarked on the solo journey that continues to this day. There are no marriages, long-term relationships, children or pets in his life, and he’s collaborated with another artist only once. In 1969, he and Kim Levin worked together on the film “Self.” Samaras says he didn’t like the relinquishing of control that’s part of teamwork.

His family’s departure was the catalyst for his first major work; at the Green Gallery in Manhattan, he installed “bedroom (Room #1),” an exact replica of the recently vacated room he had occupied in his parents’ home for 26 years.

The suggestion that his room was more alive for him than the people he had lived with all his life isn’t lost on him: “I’ve always felt an affinity for objects and prefer things that don’t move and have no volition of their own.

“And this is something I’ve been criticized for,” adds Samaras, who has a strong streak of paranoia regarding the position of his highly respected art. “My work has always been attacked because most people are afraid of things they see in it. In the beginning, it was the threatening materials; then it was the self-absorption and isolation. Isolation is a major part of the human condition, though, and it’s better to face it than to wait until your partner croaks, then spend the rest of your life weeping and wailing.

“For years, I did suffer terrible loneliness,” he acknowledges, “but I’ve reached the point where I no longer require the company of other people, because I finally understand that they’re incapable of making me happy--not because they won’t but because they can’t. It comforts me that there are people who respond to my work, and knowing they exist is enough. I don’t need to meet them. That’s part of why I never hunger for human companionship. If you have millions, what do I need two or three people for?”

This solipsistic philosophy found its perfect expression in 1969, when Samaras began taking Polaroids of himself. Paving the way for obsessive self-portraitists like Cindy Sherman, Mark Morrisroe and John Coplans, Samaras conducted an exploration of his own identity that resulted in hundreds of manipulated Polaroids of himself--in wigs, in dresses, nude, distorted to the point that he was barely recognizable.

“If there’s nobody else around you, use yourself,” he says. “I’m interested in my own face, of course, and when I look at images of myself from long ago, I feel tenderness toward them. But for the most part, I see only my physical faults. When I look at the Polaroids, I usually think, ‘Gee, that doesn’t look too good.’

“It seems inevitable that as you get older your work gets increasingly lousy. I hope I haven’t peaked, because I have an architectural bent which I’ve yet to express, and that’s something I’d like to do before I croak. The thought of designing a building for public use doesn’t interest me, but I’d like to live in something I built.”

Is there anything he longs for? What fills his life other than art?

“I certainly don’t long for money,” he says. “I need enough to live comfortably and to be able to experiment, but other than that, what do I need money for? . . .

“I watch television and find myself entertained by whatever’s on--sometimes I see programs that make me cry. I used to travel, but I don’t anymore, because being in another place intensifies my sense of aloneness. And I always get this cemetery feeling when I’m in another place, especially if it’s a fancy, famous place. I can’t stop thinking about all the people who have died there.

“So, no, there isn’t much I long for, and things that seemed disappointing to me 30 years ago no longer disappoint me. People in New York wear their success on their sleeve, so young artists here feel competitive, and I felt competitive with the Pop artists. They got a tremendous amount of attention in the ‘60s, and I wanted to be in Time magazine too, but at a certain point, that no longer seemed important.

“My sense of myself has also changed. I was intensely critical of myself earlier in my career, but I have a kinder view of myself now. As you get older, you also develop a nicer view of extinction. When I was young, death was just a ferocious thing and it was all around me, but now it seems natural. And after death, I expect there’s nothing more than the intermingling of your atoms with other atoms, and that’s fine too.

“The prospect of the extinguishing of the ego doesn’t alarm me, because the ego--and the intermingling of atoms--exists merely to soothe us while we’re alive. And we need to be soothed too, because life is terrifying.”

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* Through Sept. 20 at PaceWildenstein, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (310) 205-5522.