Working in mulit-medias and multi modernist styles, Lucas Samaras is both artist and theoretician who regards his life as an art object. In his work, he has combined Performance Art, and many forms of abstraction including post-Dadaism, post-Surrealism, and post-Abstract Expressionism. In 1959, Samaras took part in the earliest "Happenings" led by Allan Kaprow, in which the audience participated with the artist in disconnected-seeming events. Kaprow described a "Happening" as an "assemblage of events" (Atkins 103)

Samaras has created assemblage figures and textured boxes from pins, nails, screws, cloth and plaster as well as erotic-seeming forms from wood, pins and rope. Of these objects Samaras has said that he fel...