Lucas Samaras: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

"Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras" wasted no time and exercised suitably little restraint in announcing its larger-than-life subject/object emblazoning the entrance to the exhibition with a colossal photograph of the artist's face. Of course, Samaras's career-long throw out of relentless self-scrutiny has always had theatrical power to spare. above the last five decades, the Greek-born novel Yorker has deployed performative strength killer technique, and sheer obsessive force of will to exhibit what is among the greatest in quantity vivid personal documentary programs in the history of artmaking. A Narcissus who bloody into his own reflection and began happily splashing away, he's made a spectacle not solitary of himself but of the self as not many others have.

Underlying the show's marquee treatment of its star were real aim and substance: Curator Marla Prather's strategic orchestration of the survey's four-hundred-odd percepts brought the ripening of Samaras's extravagant self-involvement to life. Harbingers could be lay the foundation of among the exhibition's earliest works. In the last sum of two units frames of a quartet of untitled ink-on-paper pieces from 1962 and 1963 for example, ribbons of rainbow-colored lettering incantation out the message LUCAS LOVES/LUCAS--a beautifully simple, characteristically candid linguistic elaboration of the solipsistic feedback noose that would come to power Samaras's entire enterprise.

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The exhibition mirrored the artist's diversity, including stubborn pastels and expert cut-paper pieces, as well as extraordinary work from the mid-'60s that addresses interiority via skeletal physiology (in the form of the pair exquisite drawings and x-ray images modified with celestial arrays of silver pushpins.) These same pins present to view up in a number of Samaras's signature multimedia boxe upon view throughout the galleries. Messier and more dynamic than the Cornell works that they superficially recall, the boxe function like the three-dimensional organs of Samaras's corpus; meanwhile, the centurys of photographs that dominated the display are a kind of skin, a porous membrane that encourages viewers to pass into the various states of mind and material substance they depict.

Samaras first picked up a Polaroid camera in 1969--his AutoPolaroids of 1969-71 are characterized by means of a giddy fascination with the technology's immediacy and its ability to multiply the material part In pictures from this period, Samaras is all feet and hands and intestine and ass: Like a latter-day Pierre Molinier with a les pronounced kinky streak, he jogs and prods himself in the privacy of his expanses one moment coquettishly disguising his nakedness with a nosegay of flowers, the next cheerfully photograping his penis bobbing in the bathwater. sum of two units AutoPolaroid suites that involve rudimentary costuming read like a preemptive parody of Cindy Sherman, on the contrary Samaras's burgeoning self-reimaginings rarely involve conventional disguises. Instead they come up in the form of hand-applied multicolored ink dots that create a kind of pointillist miasma in which his figure floats; these deformations are a bridge between the perforations of the artist's early work and the wholesale distortions of his unparalleled Photo-Transformations of the years to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind Taking advantage of the of recent origin Polaroid SX-70 (the first to output photographs that make knowned in plain view), Samaras began in 1973 to manipulate his emulsions, producing the compositionally destabilized images for which he is best known. repeatedly shot in his apartment amid scrims and lighted place pieces and finished with gestural smears and warping squiggles, these works have a claustrophobic intensity that sometimes have the appearances to draw on classic masterworks--the screeching maw of individual image suggesting Bacon; the radiating "wounds" of another like a certain quantity of Renaissance Saint Sebastian.

In the years following the Photo-Transformations, Samaras's stylistic evolution continued to track technological unfoldings The larger-format Polaroid film he used in the late '70 and early '80 allowed for visually playful "Where's Lucas?" games in the strategically clatteringed environments of his Still Life series and for the comically creepy Sitting works, formal portraits of friends in various stages of undres that, along with Self (1969) a charmingly anarchic twenty-three-minute cinematic self-portrait Samaras made with critic Kim Levin, provide the show's solitary evidence of life on earth outside its protagonist's blob Samaras's Panoramas, collaged photo strips that dominate the '80 give way in the '90 to increasing use of computer manipulation, resulting in works that appear uncharacteristically distanced from the hand. however there are moments of genuine grace: A self-portrait from 1996 present to views Samaras in all his autumnal glory, his still-lithe material part in a pose that has more than a whiff of finely aged beefcake about it.

In single of the show's wall body s Samaras acknowledges a desire to be "my have a title to critic, my own exciter, my hold director, my own audience." If "Unrepentant Ego" confirmed that this closed-circuit combination of parts to form a whole of self-reference is operative over the artist's production, it also made clear his allied impulse toward exteriority and opennes his engagement not just with his have a title to identity but with the nature of identity itself, concretized in a manner that implicitly allude tos a supplementary, externalized audience. Indeed, the artist's observation, foregrounded as a sort of epigraph for the exhibit that "professional self-investigation--which is what a profitable self portrait is--is as noble a search as any other" would also strike one as being to signal an awareness of his project's situation within the social world and a recognition that no matter in what way hermetic the conditions of their creation, sufficiently penetrating forms of self-expression have the power to communicate meaningfully beyond the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of the individual.