IYP X Dia Beacon, New York
For over 60 years, Lucas Samaras worked fluidly across mediums including performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, film, and photography, in a manner that eluded categorization. The artist’s eccentric and uncanny objects often combine formal strategies of Minimalism—the cube, grid, and monochrome—with a Surrealist and Fluxus sensibility, cultivating the haptic materiality of everyday objects, among them boxes and furniture, and imbuing them with phantasmagoria and personal symbolism.
Such is the case with Cubes and Trapezoids (1994–95), two related bodies of work presented at Dia Beacon for the first time since their 1994 debut at Pace Gallery in New York. Accompanying the sculptures is Doorway (1966/2007), one of the artist’s signature mirrored rooms, further emphasizing Samaras’s enduring engagement with the cube as a vessel for the body, its image, and the psyche.
The Cubes on view, 24 totemic wooden volumes, are arranged in an expansive grid as specified by the artist. The volumes are coated in pale gray Nevamar laminate and feature cutouts of various geometrical shapes, appearing at once futuristic and primordial. The Cubes’ labyrinthian internal geometries were sketched out by the artist as he serially exhausted the structure’s possible permutations. A material index of Samaras’s move to a high-rise apartment building where he installed custom fixtures with the same monochromatic surface treatment, the sculptures merge the Minimal cube with interior architecture and autobiography, demonstrating how Samaras synthesized elements of formal abstraction with the personal, psychological, and domestic.
The corresponding wall-works, from the Trapezoids series, are made of eight irregular quadrilateral forms with oblique angles, nestled within uniform Masonite boards, and covered in the same gray laminate as the Cubes with an added latex-paint finish. While their surfaces are nonreflective, they nonetheless respond to light and complement the mirrored panels of the adjacent installation. Doorway, which was conceived in 1966 and only first realized in 2007, emerged out of a lineage of Samaras’s environments where he obliterated the divide between interior and exterior, private and public. The artist’s first Room #1 (1964), a restaging of his New Jersey apartment inside Green Gallery in New York, was followed by the first mirrored environment, Room #2, an inhabitable cube furnished with a reflective table and a chair at Pace Gallery in 1966, the same year he conceptualized Doorway.
Emerging as an artist in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Samaras took part in Happenings—participatory, intermedia events, initiated by one of his teachers, Allan Kaprow—and continued using his body as a medium in his own work, treating it as a performative site. In reflecting on his part in the Happenings, he contended, “I sort of thought of them as constructions—like constructing a box, let’s say, only on a grander scale.” Indeed, in 1960, Samaras turned to making his mixed-media boxes, ornate with personal or found objects, of which he made 295 in his lifetime.
By constructing boxes, or altering existing ones, and adorning them with an eclectic range of quotidian materials like beads, yarn, rhinestones, pins, nails, razor blades, and stuffed birds, Samaras underscored their tactility and disrupted their functionality, rendering them reliquaries of desire and repulsion. He often incorporated mirrors or reflective elements into the boxes, marking an enduring interest in self-image and reflection.
A scaled-up box with openings on two sides, Doorway is an embodied container in which one can participate both as subject and viewer. The structure frames a smaller mirrored cube (also with openings on two sides) protruding from its center, adding another layer of distortion and furthering the disorientating effect of seeing one’s image fragmented and dispersed. Exhibited together, the domestically infused geometries of Cubes and Trapezoids and the nested mirrored environment of Doorway evoke the body and its inner workings, perverting the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the messy realities of identity and interiority.
—Jordan Carter and Liv Cuniberti
