Nowhere to Sit Down

By ROBERT HUGHES

What is made of wire, plywood, silver foil, Cor-Ten steel, pins or plastic flowers? What is by turns rigid, pulpy, fat, skeletal, fretted, glittery and flaccid? What is made half of wood and half of rainbow-colored wool; has wheels that can't turn, and a spike to skewer the unwary bottom? What balances on four legs along a wooden beam, or pops like some disconcerting jack from a polka-dotted box? Anyone who went to Manhattan's Pace Gallery last week to see Lucas Samaras' latest exhibition will immediately know the answer: a chair.

At first the show looks like an exercise in frustration: a roomful of chairs in which there is nowhere to sit down. As with his earlier boxes, crusted with pins, embroidery and glass shards. Samaras has taken the commonest sort of household object and subjected it to bewildering transformations. The chair as furniture recedes, and a primitive fetish, bristling with memory and menace, takes its place. It is the kind of baroque sensibility that would see a shoe as the hearse of a dead foot.

For Samaras, chairs "are like the molds people leave behind when they get up," and as such they can be invested with a Joycean range of associations. To a common viewer, a soft chair of cotton wool may evoke clouds or suds. But to Samaras it suggests a lamb, and by extension how Ulysses escaped from the cave of Polyphemus--tied under a sheep's belly. Another chair, made of wire gauze transfixed by wooden dowels, became for Samaras a parody of minimal sculptors like Robert Morris, while the sticks slide in and out "like the swords a conjurer thrusts through a box with a victim inside it."

What involves Samaras is a balancing act between his own obsessions with beauty as eroticism ("To be an artist is to be God, and I don't know anything more erotic than that") and the history of style. His catalogue note lists more than 80 chairs or images of chairs that inspired him, ranging from Van Gogh's chair and Tutankhamen's golden throne to the collapsing sofa at the Palisades Amusement Park. These allusions are filtered through an elaborate visual language and come out as something much more than historical puns.

That a Greek, born in Macedonia and carrying the ceremonious richness of Byzantine art among his childhood memories, should now display such a taste for the elaborate is no surprise. The shock of Samaras' work is the level to which he carries this intensity of image and surface. At worst, it can become hysterical cake-icing; kitsch is never far away. But at their best. Samaras' chairs, the color of ikons and leprous peacocks, can upset one's expectations about the world of objects: they are erotic, subversive and hilarious all at once. sbRobert Hughes

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