Lucas Samaras, who sang his own song louder and in more keys than any other postwar visual artist, creating a very diverse body of work in which his own sleek body, bearded face and personal effects took center stage in countless shape-shifting forms , died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He is 87.
His death, from complications of a fall, was announced by Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, which represented Mr. Samaras for more than five decades.
Emerging in the late 1950s among a generation of artists, including Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemannwho pushed the American art world in daring new directions after the strictures of Abstract Expressionism, Mr. Samaras (pronounced suh-MARE-us) is a wild card even among many people.
Dull cartoonlike pastels coexist with raw plasterwork and jewel boxes elaborately decorated with wool, glass, straight pins, knives and sometimes taxidermized birds — animistic objects like made in the 1960s.
In 1964, after leaving his childhood home in West New York, NJ, at the age of 28, he carefully transformed his sparse bedroom studio into a work of art. Presented inside the Green Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, the room is a stark display of place and loss in the form of deadpan conceptual art.
“This is my past, complete — a piece of biography — the real thing I can do,” Mr. Samaras told a reporter from The New York Times, noting that the room, which cost $17,000, was “without nibbles” from collectors. during the exhibition. (Most of the furniture went to the Salvation Army and the rest to Mr. Samaras’ new apartment.)
Since then, Mr. Samaras’ inner vision has only sought further horizons. In a series of “autointerviews” he conducted in the early 1970s, he asked himself what was now the most important question about his work: Why are you interested in yourself? He replied: “I use myself and therefore I don’t have to go through all these strange kinds of relationships like looking for models and pretending artistic distance or looking for workers or looking for some geometry symbol. I also myself because it is still not common to use oneself.”
He pressed himself: Is that what you call narcissism? To which he responded: “Call it what you want. I do things.”
Lucas Samaras (his family name means “saddle maker” in Greek) was born on September 14, 1936, in Kastoria, in the West Macedonia region of Greece, and grew up amid the devastation of World War II and the Greek civil war. When he was a baby, his family home was damaged by artillery, killing his grandmother.
His father, Damianos, a furrier, left for a few years to work in New York. Mr. Samaras became very close to his mother, Trigona, and two aunts who were seamstresses and allowed him to cut patterns out of paper. In 1948, the whole family moved to the United States, settling in New Jersey.
In his youth, Mr. Samaras worked briefly for his father in the fur trade. That experience shaped a strong feeling for the materials, partly through an aversion to fur that the work produced.
“Fur is a soft, smelly, sweaty, soft thing,” he once said. “And then I used pins: a hard, shiny, sharp substance.”
In 1955, he won a scholarship to Rutgers University as it was becoming the crucible of the American avant-garde under the professorships of Mr. Kaprow, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks and later Roy Lichtenstein.
Along with students and friends such as Robert Whitman, George Brecht and George Segal, he helped sow the seeds of conceptual art, Pop Art and what would become known as performance art, based on a philosophy of destroying the artificial. that barrier between art and everyday life.
At the artist-run Reuben Gallery in the East Village, Mr. Samaras is a leading performer in “18 Happenings in 6 Parts” by Mr. Kaprow, a landmark 1959 event that used chance, nonsense, cheap materials and mundane action in ways that repurposed early 20th century Dada for the Cold War era.
Mr. Samaras, who was studying acting at the time at the Stella Adler Conservatory, also participated in leading art performances by Mr. Whitman and Mr. Oldenburg, who said Mr. Samaras helped to setting the rules of the new form.
“When I started doing these performances, I wasn’t very clear on what I wanted them to be,” Mr. Oldenburg once said. “Lucas identified them for me.”
But Mr. Samaras’ theater days were short-lived. His own performance-related fantasies, he explained, were too elaborate to perform on other people, and so he began to channel those impulses into sculptural work and writing. “I am, in a sense, making Events, but they are only for myself,” he said in an interview with Artforum magazine in 1966.
During a two-year period at Columbia University studying art history under Meyer Schapiro, he plunged into making art, often in long-term, repeated series. (His box sculptures, which became a trademark of his work, are numbered beginning in 1962.)
Although he interacted with artists such as Joseph Cornell, who began making Surrealist-influenced assemblage boxes in the 1930s, and with the vibrantly colorful Funk artists of the Bay Area, Mr. Samaras goes against existing trends and movements, sometimes almost like an outsider artist.
In 1969 he discovered the Polaroid instant camera, which became a magic lantern in his hands, opening avenues of experimentation that continued for the rest of his life.
Working in the modest confines of a one-bedroom apartment on West 71st Street, he creates hybrid portrait-paintings, often nude self-portraits covered in dots and swirls. He also took advantage of a manufacturing quirk that left some Polaroid prints vulnerable to temporary manipulation under their Mylar protective layer, seizing the opportunity to shape incredible scenes he called “Photo-Transformations,” where his body or parts of it appear amid maelstroms of color and swirling forms.
Writing about these images in the 1988 book “Lucas Samaras: Objects and Subjects, 1969-1986,” art historian and critic Thomas McEvilley noted that Mr. Samaras “often presents itself in hideous and menacing guises as a kind of werewolf or nightmarish apparition, both offering its nakedness and repulsing those who wish to approach it.”
Mr. Samaras himself has said that he always strives for a quality of “attraction-avoidance,” presenting viewers with stark choices and nothing but ambivalence. In the late 1980s, after what he calls “a pseudo-transformative kind of epiphany,” he radically shrunk the previously tight-knit social circle around him.
Due to reduced contact with friends and relations, he has practically become a recluse in a new apartment and studio on the 62nd floor of a 1980s high-rise in Midtown Manhattan, where he lives alone, tending to hide the curtains and eat the same food, soup. , almost everyday.
“You can’t live in a constant state of ecstasy,” he explained of his decision. “You need so many pounds of pain, so many pounds of frustration, so many pounds of dissatisfaction and so on.”
But despite this cloistering, his work remained highly visible in the art world, which admired Mr. Samaras didn’t seem to know what to do with him yet. He has received several retrospectives over the years focusing on different aspects of his work, examples of which are in major public collections around the world.
He is survived by his sister Carol Samaras.
In 2009, he represented his native Greece at the Venice Biennale, exhibiting a piece, “Ecdysiast” (HL Mencken’s grand, Greek-influenced euphemism for a striptease artist), in which he recorded the reactions of friends and colleagues as they watch a crooked. video of him, at the age of 73, undressing.
In early self-interviews and writings, Mr. Samaras often returned to the question of how his reflexive isolation and solipsism worked alongside his instinctual exhibitionism and visual extroversion.
“I am my own Peeping Tom,” he wrote. “Because of the absence of people I can do everything.” He added: “I formulated myself, I mated with myself and I gave birth to myself. And my true self is the product” — the art.
