Claire Millikin – Encountering Lucas Samaras’s and Leo Rabkin’s Post-traumatic Boxes

Earlier this spring, I visited the Rabkin Foundation, at 13 Brown Street in Portland, to attend a small gathering. The event took place amongst an evocative exhibit of postwar American artist Leo Rabkin’s two- and three-dimensional works, paintings and sculptures. In the midst of conversations, I found myself drawn to a centering box sculpture, a kind of geometric grid of intricate folded paper suspended on fine threads within an enclosure of three clear acrylic boxes. Following the gathering, scholar, curator, and original head of the Rabkin Foundation, Susan Larsen delivered a heartfelt and insightful lecture about Rabkin’s life as an artist. These dual encounters—with Rabkin’s box sculpture and with the infusion of Larsen’s firsthand insights into the artist’s life and work—chimed with my contemplation, earlier this winter, of Greek American artist Lucas Samaras’s deeply personal interior spaces and artistic boxes. I’m drawn to the way both artists’ work emerges from an immediate postwar perspective, works that, in very different yet related box sculptures, I interpret as responses to trauma. These boxes, I suggest, are post-traumatic objects, art creations that meditatively and processually work through the aftermath of fascism and Nazism of the artists’ postwar context. My encounter with these works co-occurs with my interior reencountering of childhood trauma, revivified in the context of our increasingly troubled national politics.

Samaras, a multi-media artist best known for his radical experiments in self-portrait photography, manifested in his home space a deeply personal interior art form. Here I do not mean interior decor but rather a post-traumatic assemblage of self-reflection in and through art, as the artist surrounded himself in his apartment with his own artworks constructed of transformed everyday minutiae—paperclips forming gilded chains, chair cushions of clear vinyl across rolls of yarn, emptied washed vegetable tins filled with colorful pushpins—that create a palimpsestic mirror where the artist is surrounded always by the sustaining evidence of his own creative force. After his death, Samaras’s apartment was disassembled but not before being chronicled by a New York Times article showcasing photographs of this domestic museum. Poet and art writer Vincent Katz, in a 1994 interview with Samaras, describes the apartment’s contents as brilliant “strangenesses.”

Leo Rabkin’s posthumously created Rabkin Foundation supports art writing and displays Rabkin’s art in rotating exhibits sensitively curated by Curator of the Collection, Danielle Yovino. Born in the United States seventeen years before Samaras, Rabkin married German-born Dorothea Herz in 1958. Herz and Samaras share histories of severe trauma experienced in Europe during World War II, traumas inflicted by Nazism. Herz’s status as a Jewish child pressed her into hiding during the war; her twin sister later committed suicide resultant from this trauma. As Dorothea, writing in an English language class in America, searingly describes the end of the war (“Suddenly the thunder of the cannons, the blasts of the grenades, the shrill fast bangs of the machine guns had silenced. One could see the sunlight again and try not to breathe too deeply because the air was filled with the stench of countless corpses. We crawled out of the cellar”), we get a visceral sense of the terror she experienced. In America, Dorothea found Leo and Leo created around her their home as exemplar of his lyric contemplative art. This domestic encasing was part of a loving conversation with his wife, a Holocaust survivor. After Rabkin’s death in 2015, his New York City home was sold, his artworks now housed in Portland, Maine, where the foundation’s originator, Susan Larsen, lives. The Rabkin Foundation’s executive director now is art critic, writer, and filmmaker Mary Louise Schumacher.

In their responses to traumata of the Second World War, Rabkin and Samaras differ in style and focus. Samaras’s work stages a repeated confronting of the self as the locus of a trauma that cannot be fully processed but must be returned to and enunciated through the image of the self and through self-enrobing in art’s spatial presence—as room, as box, as material image. The self and the home, here, are tightly bound with art. Samaras’s childhood experience of village life in rural Greece during wartime was filled with bombings, the murder of family members, and horrific memories (that he inscribed in art) of victims of the invading Nazis, their corpses displayed as warnings to the rest of the village. It is understandable perhaps that as an adult he turned inward, creating in his midtown apartment intricate works of interiorization and self-manifestation, as if to tell himself over and over, I am alive, I am here, I create.

Rabkin’s work is lyrical, charged by soothing and enlivening colors and tends toward the abstract. Rabkin came to the trauma of war through a lifelong devotion to and empathy with his wife Dorothea. In their New York City home Leo’s art flourished, while the couple’s collections of Americana surrounded Dorothea, sheltering her after her survival of genocide.

In this short essay my focus is dual: I draw attention to fascism’s lasting harms and connect Samaras’s and Rabkin’s turn towards art as interior space that seeks to mend the ravages of trauma. I approach the work through a discussion of a few of the artists’ boxes. There is not room here for anything like an exhaustive discussion of the hundreds of boxes these artists created, but I hope my choices will reveal something of the variant responses to cultural and personal trauma (the two are deeply entwined whenever fascism rears its hideous face) created by them.

Consider Samaras’s Box #89. Here the artist has covered an ordinary dime store seamstress box (the date of this work is 1974 and this author recalls from her early childhood a similar box in grandmother’s sewing room) with sharp pins, the kind seamstresses and tailors use to set a cut pattern in place. The pins cover the box’s exterior so thoroughly that it would be painful and dangerous to touch. The exterior has become a kind of weaponry, a fierce protection of the box’s interiority. The closed box is banded with a rainbow ribbon which loops tightly and almost eerily around the box exterior with its multitude of pins glued to the surface. The effect is like an invitation made while turning away. And yet, entering the box rewards braving its external forbiddingness.

In the center of this open box, on the top shelf, appears a miniature black and white self-portrait photograph of Samaras, encircled in a multi-banded halo that evokes Greek Orthodox icons. The self-portrait is set on cotton batting and contained by a fence of blue wire mesh. Flanking the self-portrait are a cache of costume jewelry pearls and a shadow self-portrait of Samaras on silver sheeting with the face over-scrolled by a carved fleur-de-lis. The box elegantly conveys a feeling of the self that is needful of protection and defense, and that protection and defense—against brutal childhood memories of fascist violence—comes from the presence and practice of art, creating art as a shield around the self, a shield of art which Samaras continually rebuilt around himself. This repetition and searching for safety is a hallmark of post-traumatic stress disorder. Here, box as a double for house emerges with clear symbolic force. The box is the interior space of intricate ingenuity that holds the self, intact despite being traumatized by the violence of fascism. Art becomes a means of survival even as its manifestation is that of flourishing beauty and mysterious presence. The rainbow ribbons encircling the box exterior connect to the artist’s contemporary moment with the rainbow as a sign of community and inclusivity (the rainbow as a symbol of LGBTQI++ manifested in 1978, with artist Gilbert Baker’s design, four years after Samaras created this box). Samaras’s use of the rainbow is striking for its evocation of communal safety in the context of a box that otherwise displays the self’s solitary need for rugged protection.

While Rabkin’s boxes’ direct address of traumata is less clearly legible than in Samaras’s work, I suggest that the same deep turn toward the interior—the home and the box—echoes in Rabkin’s gentle boxes. His preferred practice of creating boxes was to remake found objects and everyday boxes (strawberry cartons, cigar boxes, and the like) as sculptural works, handmade with textural details. I connect the many hundred boxes Rabkin created, his domestic practice of art creation, to the artist’s sheltering connection with his wife, Dorothea. For the Rabkins’ project of lovingly filling their home with collections of Americana memorabilia, this comforting and sustaining gathering of intricate, small, beauty and fascination, resonates with Leo’s painstaking creation of hundreds of small boxes. Consider the box Paper Meringue (the words “paper meringue” etched inside): the emphasis on fine, tactile work and mathematical balance grants the box a mysterious presence. Here Rabkin has suspended paper meringues (his neologism), tiny—about an inch in length and width—three dimensional fleurons of rice paper that the artist crafted by hand and then suspended with thin strong thread in geometric patterns of rows (four-by-six) and layers (two) so that forty-eight fleurons of curled rice paper gently suspend in the box. While the interior is painted black, Rabkin has set red plastic at the interior base and lined the walls with blue so that the “meringues” reflect as if against red earth and blue sky, or as if suspended in a deep pool at sunset. The box evokes ethereality and earthliness at once, comfort and a recognition of the fragility of all the buildings we create to hold ourselves safe. Paper Meringues is an artwork with a light touch but it is not an existentially lightweight piece. To experience this box is an exercise in grounding oneself, as the paper fleurets become manifestations of breath, and the box suggests the stability of embodiment. Where Samaras’s box conveys a traumatized sense of heft and risk, Rabkin’s box engages the post-traumatic mindscape by seeking, and creating, leitmotifs as light motifs. The lightness of the paper meringues suspended in their dark and color-lined box intimates an encounter with depth and a lifting up, a delicate suspension of survival in grace.

In writing about Samaras’s and Rabkin’s boxes I am fascinated by the way the boxes, created in the same postwar era, stand as the effects of meditative and processual responses to surviving trauma. A box too small for a human being to inhabit is yet suggestive of inhabitation. A container at once closed and open offers intimacy, containment. In each box a world is made exactly to the specifications of the artist. The painstaking minute attention to detail that characterizes both Samaras’s and Rabkin’s boxes suggests the soothing effect of creating the works (Schumacher and Yovino, of the Rabkin Foundation, note that the sheer number of small boxes that Rabkin created strongly suggests his pleasure in the practice of the work). It is a peaceful experience looking at these boxes. Rabkin repeated the paper meringue creations of minute flowers of curled rice paper in other work, notably a double-sided acrylic box in which the suspended “meringues” seem to float like eternal notes in an hypnotically orchestrated visual music. Rabkin also used this motif for one of his strawberry boxes.

 

Like Rabkin, Samaras drew on quotidian materials to create his boxes. This use of these everyday domestic materials itself performs a reordering of trauma. In the space where one seeks refuge—one’s home—the artists find the materials for their creation of boxes that yield a feeling of safe enclosure even as these enclosures intimate dangers beyond in time and space. If Samaras’s deploys more tactilely frightening materials, Rabkin’s light materials suggest the delicacy with which survival is achieved—and achieved daily on a day-to-day basis—in the aftermath of trauma. As we, in our contemporary America, face politics that distressingly rhyme with the earlier autocratic regimes that spawned brutal 20th-century wars and crimes against humanity, these boxes remind us of the lasting, lifelong, impact of cultural trauma. They are keenly relevant works for our contemporary era, as art becomes increasingly a key space for resistance to autocracy.