Among the razor blades.

Among the razor blades, nails, knives, needle fishhooks, pins and tacks that bristle and menace in the art of Lucas Samaras, scissors flash with double-edged significance. They are the two aggressive weapon and creative tool, as when Samaras slashes up and reconstitutes his have figure in a group of disjunctive dadaist photocollages (1990) reminiscent of Hannah Hoch A recurring image completely through his oeuvre, always at hand amid the close clutter of the studio/apartment where he creates his work, scissors arise to stand metonymically for Samaras himself. In the imposing Panorama (Feb 27 1983) builded of several Polaroid prints chisel up into horizontal strips and assembled into an elongated, "panoramic" view, he displays the scissors as a kind of attribute, like an instrument of martyrdom in this self-portrait as a Byzantine saint.

With this allusion to his cultural heritage--Samaras was horn in the Macedonian region of Greece in 1936 and baptized in the grecian Orthodox Church--Panorama becomes a kind of esthetic manifesto, in which an ascetic, bearded artist, in robe and sandals, grips his shears in united hand and the camera's shutter release in the other. Typically, Samaras advertises his self-conscious artifice in this composite photograph: the hand that represss the camera rests on a mirror, symbolic of mimesis and self-reflection, while floodlights upon tripods are included within the image along with a floral offering to his sainted self Little wedding-cake bonds arrayed before the flowers may stand for his ancestors, just as the scissors also invoke his father, a furrier (often absent from the family forward business), and the sewing and dressmaking female relatives who reared the young Samaras in Greece

Panorama marks the approximate midpoint of Samaras's career to date and of his new retrospective, "Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras," curated through Marla Prather at the Whitney Museum of American Art. granting devoted to self-portraiture, the exhibition provided a nearly comprehensive take a view of since Samaras has always been his confess favorite subject. Missing were the chair transformations begun in 1969 quiltlike fabric "Reconstructions" from the 1970 and angry paintings of critics, patrons and dealers as leering death-heads from the 1980 on the contrary there remained a dizzying inventory of Samaras's wide-ranging creative efforts: ornamented boxes; pastel, pencil and ink drawings; paper cutouts; paintings; books; Polaroids; a film; jewelry; computer-generated inkier prints; an architectural prototype mid mirrored-room installation. This "seemingly anarchistic multidimensionality" petioles from the artist's antiauthoritarianism, according to Donald Kuspit in his penetrating catalogue essay. (1) Samaras refuses to be restricted to any medium or method embracing everything from Expressionism and Surrealism to Op art, Minimalism, and Pattern and Decoration.

In a adroit critical move, Kuspit further relates Samaras's "excited intellect of the boundless possibilities of art" to a defense against paranoia. During the exhibition, in an interview at the museum with critic Barbara Rose Samaras revealed something of his neurotic feeling of apprehension by reporting for what cause he broke out in a rash of pimples after experimenting with the pointillist technique in his artwork. "It was almost as if someone was punishing me" he stated, and when Rose asked if he many times had that feeling, Samaras admitted flatly, "I do." (2) His chronically anxious condition, granting rendered amusing in this particular anecdote, is an understandable result of Samaras's horrible childhood experiences in war-torn Greece We learn from Prather's detailed chronology in the catalogue by what means during World War II and the ensuing civil conflict, his hometown of Kastoria was successively occupied from Italians, Germans, insurgent Communists supporting Macedonian independence and the grecian army. In the early 1940 mortar fire forward the town killed Samaras's grandmother and afflictively injured all aunt, and the family was spewed from their home. Illness, deprivation and violence inciteed them, until in 1948 the child and his mother were able to immigrate to the United States, joining Samaras's father (who had traveled here hi 1939 and remained when war broke out) to bench in New Jersey.

A portrait photograph of Samaras as a lad appears in a group of eerie interiors from the mid-1970s. For these luridly colored or black-and-white photographs, the artist used a slide projector to cast the linage of his childhood self immediately after the walls of his apartment, in succession the blinds, on his confess naked body. The child portrait responds in 1985, in meticulous stippled ink-dot drawings based onward the same old photo, taken for his after the greek passport in 1947. It's not sole that Samaras is for for aye haunted by his vulnerable "inner child"; the passport photo also give an account ofs a signal moment of transition, a of the present day beginning, a new status as immigrant and alien. This traumatic dislocation exacerbated an intense faculty of perception of difference that Samaras assumes to have felt from an early age. In the Rose interview, Samaras shared a fascinating reminiscence of his incipient, youthful self-awareness as an artist. He recalled evenings with his family, when he was around eight years olden in a park with cypres delivereds overlooking a town with a nightclub, lights thinked in the surrounding lakes and stars in the firmament A mystical feeling came through the whole extent of him: