La Biennale di Venezia
53. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte
Venezia, 7 giugno – 23 novembre 2009
PADIGLIONE GRECIA
Lucas Samaras and Matthew Higgs in conversation
March 2009.
Matthew Higgs: Paraxena takes place fifty years after your debut solo exhibition at New York’s Reuben Gallery in 1959. What characteristics, if any, of that earlier period continue to resonate in your approach towards both daily life and to making art?
Lucas Samaras: I don’t think that I work that way. I like the idea of numbers, almost in a pseudo-astrological sense. I was born in 1936, which makes me think about what I was doing in 1966, 1976, or 1986. Somehow when things are not happening or working I start to think, “Well, if it didn’t happen under a year ending in a ‘three,’ perhaps it might happen under a year ending in a ‘six’ or a ‘nine’,” you know? But outside of these numerical associations, I can’t think of anything that links the present to 1959. There’s no practical synchronicity with either what I’m doing or with how I’m currently thinking. And so each particular year, or each decade, or what I remember of them, has its own quality. But I don’t see these qualities as being a reflection of what is happening today.
MH: You moved from Greece to the United States in 1948 and became an American citizen in 1955 at the age of nineteen around the time you enrolled at Rutgers University. Could say something about this transition?
LS: For the first five years of my life in the United States I constantly dreamt of going back to Greece. Then one day the dreams stopped. However the foreignness continued. I didn’t make an effort to lose my accent, so people automatically knew I was from somewhere else. College was a big cultural shift for me. It was like opening a door. When I went to Rutgers University I found people who were complementary to me: we could discuss things outside of whatever regular kids might talk about. It was very different to the experience and conversations you might have with your family. And I was transported. This mental shift was probably as dramatic as the physical transition from Greece to the United States.
MH: Paraxena includes sculptural works from the mid 1960s juxtaposed with photographic and video works produced between 2005 and 2009. I don’t see these relationships as being a retrospective or historical gesture. Rather it seems to me there’s something more fluid about the positioning of these older works in relation to the recent works?
LS: This makes me think back to the early 1960s, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Monet’s huge water lily paintings. Most of us in New York hadn’t seen them before, and they arrived at the right moment; all of a sudden it was as if they were new. I really think images have that impact: that when you see them for the first time that is when they are born, so to speak. Throughout history certain artists’ work has become obscured, often for decades, centuries even, and then somehow it is resurrected, and it is effectively reborn. I wouldn’t mind if aspects of my earlier work had that potential to resurface and become new again.
MH: The idea of re-privileging, or reconsidering your earlier work resonates in a number of the images in the recent Nexus photographic series, which incorporate both earlier and more recent images of your own work – including self-portraits – set against a digitally created backdrop that resembles a tiled wall. How did these images come about?
LS: The ‘tiled’ images in the Nexus series emerged partly from the experience of walking through New York’s subway system, transferring from one line to another. The subterranean walkways often have tiled walls, and the tiles are interrupted with images, pictures – advertisements. I thought it would be interesting to create my own walls, in a sense; and replace the advertisements with images of my own work. In the process of doing this, it not only allows me to partly inhabit an aspect of the older period, but it also gives me a pause, in that I’ve been able to create something fundamentally new out of materials from my past.
MH: Over the past decade you have returned to photography, embracing new digital technologies and the post-production possibilities offered by Photoshop. Significantly you have started to take pictures in public space.
LS: Certainly in my photography, the relationship with public space began with my digital work in the late 1990s when I started taking pictures in New York’s Central Park. I had discovered the Leica Digilux camera. It was magical. It was as if I didn’t have to think. The digital Leica allowed me to translate the outside world into my own world. More recently I started to focus on images of chairs. The chairs were ordinary. I would see them abandoned throughout the city. Working with the Leica and Photoshop produced a kind of magic that reminded me of the sense of discovery I had when I made my first Polaroid photographs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Working with digital post-production tools enabled me to put some kind of magical ‘dust’ on the images of the chairs, making them ‘sing’ almost. Even though the images depicted discarded everyday objects, it was the idea that in this garbage was a kind of treasure; that there was worth in it. I was trying to imbue these objects with a dignity that I couldn't have imagined before.
MH: Around 2005 you started producing the iMovies. What prompted this return to the moving image?
LS: In the late 1960s I made a film with Kim Levin called Self, that we shot on 16mm. Around the same time I also bought a video set-up; it was a huge, cumbersome machine. At that time the video image didn’t have the same beautiful qualities of the Polaroid photographs; rather the video produced a grainy, almost brown image. I used to have friends come over to my apartment, and I would video them, just zeroing in on their mouths while they talked. When I’m looking at somebody I almost always focus at the mouth. Perhaps a slight glance at the eyes, but it’s the mouth that tells me what I want to know about someone. When the people saw their own mouths in the video recordings, they were always surprised at the movements that their muscles made. Even though I liked these experiments I wasn’t able to do anything with them. They were never shown.
It was years later when I got my first digital Sony video camera. I started filming again. And I was hooked, because, the Sony camera, like the digital Leica or the Polaroid camera, was able to give me immediate results that excited me. Eventually I started filming myself. I was in my 60s and my body was not, to me, as interesting anymore, but nevertheless I thought, “Fuck it. Who cares?” So I ended up making short films within my closed environment. However, after having spent some time doing that, I thought, “Okay, let me get my camera and go out and see other people.” And I had a slight sense of apprehension that people in the street were going to see me carrying a camera and assume I was a tourist. And it’s like you have to force yourself: “Okay, so they call you a tourist. So what?” It was just a question of breaking down the barrier that you put around yourself over the years.
MH: I would imagine that filming in the streets of New York with a camera of any kind is ultimately a fairly anonymous occurrence?
LS: Well, that’s what I found out later. But in the beginning, I kept thinking that passersby were looking at me.
MH: You’ve become a recognizable figure through the process of documenting yourself in the work.
LS: In a way we’re all children of Hollywood, especially older people like me. We saw how a star was created, this magic facade. In a way, that’s what I’m doing. I’m looking at myself and automatically I want to make my image better. It’s a way of manufacturing what nature has given you into a photographic presence. It’s like Rimbaud. You have this one iconic image of him, taken when his work was first published: this fantastic, spectacular face. Because we don’t have any other pictures of him, it becomes the defining image. Whereas if you had the opportunity to see him in reality, you would probably have said, “That’s not what you look like.” But who cares? It is all about the image. So that’s what I think I ended up doing; I ended up specializing in just the parts of me, or the aspects of my apartment for example, that I saw as a legitimate, and dramatic, and in a sense beautiful way of presenting who I am or what I look like.
MH: And over the years these are representations that you have continually updated.
LS: Over the years, as your face gets wrinkled and you start to lose your hair, then you find other ways of, if you will excuse the cliché, making yourself pretty. And in the recent Nexus images I’m comparing the two versions of myself. I’m putting an image of myself in my 30s, for example, next to an image of myself in my 70s; and it’s quite a shock, I’ll tell you. But ultimately I don’t mind it. It’s like Shakespeare. You have Hamlet, you have Lear, and you have Macbeth; you have these different characters, and with yourself you play different roles. I always wanted to be an actor, and I guess I finally am, in my own way.
MH: In the video installation Ecdysiast and Viewers (2006), you filmed closely cropped shots of the faces of twenty-four of your colleagues, peers and friends whilst they observed a short video of you removing your clothes. Can you describe the origins of this work, which seems to relate to your early experiments with video in the late 1960s and early 1970s?
LS: When I started making the iMovie films I was thinking about the Polaroid photographs that I made more than 20 years before: where I simply took off my clothes and took an instant picture. So I set up my video camera, and started to film myself undressing.
MH: Ecdysiast is another word for a striptease artist?
LS: There may be a striptease connection, but for me it just a word that describes someone who takes their clothes off. So I shot the video and then I looked at it, and thought, “Do I really look like that?” After some digital post-production work it stopped being totally ugly. I don’t personally mind being unpretty, but the work has to be dramatically unpretty. It has to be palatable.
MH: To both yourself and others?
LS: To myself first, and then hopefully for the audience. Increasingly I find myself in a sentimental relationship with time. I am now in my 70s, and my body looks like that of a person in their 70s. I am in this deplorable condition. I had the idea of other people looking at me, of inviting people to watch the film of me undressing and then recording only their reactions. I'm not actually performing physically in front of them; it’s a video they are watching, so there’s already a sense of distance. Their faces react automatically, without them being able to control their responses. It’s akin to a lie detector.
I also wanted to show the audience the artist’s position. The artist makes something and then they have to hear or read about people’s reactions to what he or she did. It’s horrible, you know? Like, how dare you judge me? But that’s part of being an artist. I just wanted the audience to be able to see these creatures who are effectively ‘criticizing’ me: but with their faces; without words.
MH: Ecdysiast and Viewers is reminiscent of your famous Sittings, large-format Polaroid photographs from the early 1980s: where you invited people to your studio to have their portraits taken.
LS: Oh, totally, yes.
MH: The sitters in those images were naked, and you were typically visible in the resulting images too, to the left-hand side of the scene. One characteristic of the Sittings works is that it is somewhat unusual to see an artist and their subjects simultaneously within the portrait image, and the images also reveal and document the process of their being made. Some twenty-five years later, with Ecdysiast and Viewers, you have returned to this complex relationship between an image, its production, and its subsequent reception. And then of course there’s an additional layer when Ecdysiast and Viewers is shown in public, you have yet another audience standing in front of the monitors, who also become witnesses to your disrobing, and the process of your being observed. Is it important that the audience recognize who the Viewers are? As they include many of your peers such as the artists Jasper Johns and Chuck Close?
LS: When I was making the twenty-four individual video portraits, I didn't necessarily think of them as being of interest biographically, except to the subject and the few people who would recognize them. I wanted them to be people I liked, or respected, or possibly even disliked. I wanted as many characteristic ingredients as possible.
MH: The first work a visitor encounters in the Greek pavilion is Doorway (1966–2007), a large mirrored structure, a kind of room-within-a-room. Upon entering the space they will be confronted with a reflected image of themselves. The piece functions, literally, as a threshold that the visitor must negotiate in order to enter the pavilion. Doorway is a kind of interstitial space. It’s not a room, nor is it a corridor space that leads you to somewhere else; it’s literally an in between space, but also a kind of obstacle. The work implicates the viewer, albeit in a very different way to Ecdysiast and Viewers. Could you say something about the genealogy of this work?
LS: Early on I had become aware of the work of Malevich and the Constructivists. I was thinking about structures and had a friend of mine build a box-like structure for me around 1960. Doorway is a kind of ‘arched’ or open cube, but a cube nonetheless. I began adding mirrors to the first box I’d had made, so that when you opened it you could put your face inside it and see it reflected on each facet of the box. In 1963, in a short story, I wrote about a mirrored room: a space totally covered with mirrors – walls, floor and ceiling. That was the magic thing: the floor and ceiling. My uncle had a fur shop, he had a place for people to see themselves in the coats and there were these three angled mirrors. But in my story you were completely surrounded by mirrored surfaces, so if you entered into the space, you would have been totally transposed into a different reality. So I had an idea for this kind of space in my mind. The first mirrored room was eventually realized in 1965 and shown at Pace Gallery in New York in 1966. It created an unheard of, unseen space. I also made plans for a mirrored corridor space, and in 1966 I made the first drawing for what would eventually become Doorway, which was finally realized in 2007 when it was shown in London.
MH: You will show three sculptures from 1965 in close physical proximity to the Ecdysiast video and the Doorway structure. The sculptures are made from reflective aluminum foil, encrusted with jewels, and depict three extremities of a body: the head, the groin, and the feet, represented by shoes. Seen together, they describe a fragmented body, with the assumption being that it is a surrogate for the artist's body.
LS: Well, the head is mine, but the shoes were invented; they weren’t mine. And the phallus isn’t mine. It’s almost an abstraction.
MH: But within the exhibition itself, a formal relationship is established between this fragmented sculptural ‘portrait’ and the video image of yourself undressing.
LS: Yes. With the Ecdysiast video the most embarrassing thing for me is the penis, because it’s limp and it’s hanging down. It’s not beautiful for me, it’s an aged penis. And I’m kind of tickled, probably in a negative way, every time I think about other people seeing it. My hope is that the other work around it is magical enough that people can excuse what it looks like. Nevertheless, I was interested in the colloquial description of ones genitals as being “The Family Jewels.” So with the group of sculptures, I’m displaying ‘actual’ jewels. Only they’re not real jewels at all, they’re in fact made from colored glass, which has a long tradition in the history of art. For example in the Middle Ages colored glass would have had religious connotations, pertaining to the saints, and so on. I’m interested in these kinds of informal associations that the work provokes, in creating a situation where one thing can lead to another.
Artext © 2009