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Manic as Samaras' "transformations" are, they still possess a system and a history; his subverted objects have a common ancestor in Meret Oppenheim's surrealist icon of 1936, the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon. Yet they are not mere footnotes to Surrealism. Samaras has a way of undercutting, or predicting, his more "mainstream" contemporaries; in 1961, for instance, he laid 16 square textured tiles flat on the ground, four by four, as a sculpture. In the Whitney, it looks like a waggish parody of Carl Andre's floor pieces—until you remember Andre's sculptures were made years later.
Samaras is not the most easily approachable of men. His efforts seem governed by Gide's famous plea, "Do not understand me too quickly." Compared with many other New York artists his age (36), he is almost a hermit. He shuns the art-world circuit, living and working in a cluttered container of a brownstone apartment in Manhattan which, in its contents, resembles one of his own boxes. An ironic reclusiveness directs his talk. Conversations are apt to falter and go brown under that sharp gaze. This is part of a strategy common to Samaras' art as well. "People go about," he says, "being nice or un-nice, talking to you with monotonous expectations until you do something to make them stop; then you wait for them to get their balance and you watch them reconsidering you. It's implied that you know something about them—otherwise you couldn't know how to go against the grain. The surprises may not always be beneficial, but I find that I need to give to others a sharp kick in their head's ass."
Epic of Narcissism. One reason—perhaps the main reason—why Samaras has been such an upsetting presence in New York is that his privacy alter nates with moments of obsessive, and for some people embarrassing self-display. Thus in 1964 he took the whole contents of the room he had occupied in his parents' house and exhibited them at the Green Gallery ("In my mind I was giving myself the honor of making my living space as important as any thing else, before posterity had the chance to do it or not do it"), giving his mess the dignity of a historical style, like a period room at the Metropolitan. Part of his Whitney retrospective is devoted to Autophotographs—Polaroid snapshots Samaras made of his own body. Bizarre, candid and mostly unreproducible (by now, Samaras must have the most lavishly documented penis in Western art), they constitute a veritable epic of narcissism. "I could tune up or tone down emotion. I could move a little to the left or shift this and that and be my own critic, my own exciter, my own director, my own audience."
A closed system indeed: the hope of Samaras' work is to be self-fertilizing, like the mythical hermaphrodite. Everything in it returns, sooner or later, upon the self. The body becomes an artifact and in turn generates more ground on which art can claim a similarity to organism.