Sculpture: Forbidden Toys

War, like illness, sometimes affords its survivors unique insights. Sculptor Lucas Samaras, 32, grew up in Macedonia during World War II and the Greek civil war. Now a U.S. citizen, he still remembers “the bombings, the hiding, my aunt’s ripped belly, the sound of executions, the strange pride in being visited by a catastrophe.”

He also recalls that, in a household of overwrought women, he was often left alone as a small boy to play with forbidden toys: sharp umbrella spokes and matches from the kitchen, pins and needles from the sewing box, mirrors and broken glass from a chandelier. These perilous playthings metamorphosed themselves in his mind into icons against the savage man-made destruction outside. Today Lucas Samaras continues to craft them into prickly, disturbing drawings and assemblages. They suggest that pain and anguish lurk in the commonest household object, yet at the same time they glitter with a prideful joy.

No Exit. The many facets of Lucas Samaras will be mirrored in an exhibit of 125 drawings and constructions that goes on view next month at Manhattan’s Pace Gallery. Included will be drawings that date back to the early 1960s, when he and other young artists were rebelling against the prevailing mode of abstract expression. Samaras’ way of celebrating the long-ignored object was to summon up his disturbing Macedonian memories. Matchbook and spectacles, in a 1962 ink drawing, were depicted with the stark frontality of a Byzantine icon. Samaras also created silvery, pin-encrusted books and boxes that suggested silver reliquaries. They were packed with knives and razors, nails, stuffed birds and X rays of skulls trepanned by pins, together with photos of Samaras.

In his latest work, Samaras has in effect dismantled the reliquary. He has ranged twelve or 18 mutants of the same relic—for example, a knife—in a clear Plexiglas case, calling the group “transformations.” At the same time, he has not entirely abandoned books and boxes. Painted cutout silhouettes of the latter hang in their own black frames, subtly suggesting the ax about to fall. A curiously shaped book, its ten pages cut in lacy patterns and stippled with rainbow dots, contains Samaras’ own moody, erotically Joycean fantasies (even Grove Press, he claims, refused to print them). Samaras’ most celebrated boxes are his huge, walk-in mirrored rooms (TIME, May 3), and his latest one will be a nine-foot-tall tower. An exercise in claustrophobia, it will force visitors to shrink as they climb its inner stairs. When they reach the reflecting ceiling, they will find that it has no exit. “There is an element of threat,” admits Samaras.

Cutting Satire. For all his cult of objects, Samaras has never become as famous as the pop artists with whom he first exhibited. If Claes Oldenburg or Tom Wesselmann turned out a strawberry sundae, it looked good enough to eat. Samaras filled his sherbet glass with nails and topped it off with a razor. Such cutting satire made it impossible for dealers to promote him as part of the bland pop school. But this year dealers are pushing the school of no-school. The premium is on artists whose versatility makes them impossible to be pigeonholed. Samaras neatly fills that bill. Says he: “I don’t want people to be able to look at my work and say, ‘Aha, that’s a Samaras.’ I want Samaras to be more than one person, lust as Picasso is.”