LUCAS SAMARAS • POLAROIDS FROM THE 70'S

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LUCAS SAMARAS • POLAROIDS FROM THE 70'S

LUCAS SAMARAS
Peder Lund has the pleasure of welcoming you to the exhibition Lucas Samaras: Polaroids
from the 70s. The exhibition shows a selection of central works from Samaras’
Polaroids from the 1970s in which Samaras himself is the subject matter, photographed
in his studio and home.
Samaras began using a Polaroid 360 camera in 1969, which gave rise to the series
Auto-Polaroid. In 1973, the Polaroid Corporation gave him an SX-70 camera, which
he used in his subsequent exploration of the medium, during which he further manipulated
his motifs. Such manipulation is especially pronounced in the series Photo-
Transformations.
Despite the artist’s central standing, consolidated by many purchases by and exhibitions
at major museums around the world, the work of Lucas Samaras has never before
been shown in Norway. The exhibition at Peder Lund therefore provides a unique
insight into Samaras’ art, hitherto inaccessible to the Norwegian public.
Lucas Samaras was born in Kastorias, Macedonia in Greece in 1936. He moved to the
USA in 1948, at the age of twelve. He studied art at Rutgers University from 1955 to
1959. While he was there, he met Allan Kaprow, George Segal and Robert Whitman,
all pioneers of happenings and performance art. Samaras is a multi-media artist who
has worked with most media. What unifies his work is his enduring personal awareness,
both physical and psychological. It is this that forms the central thread running
through his work. Samaras’ art is hard to describe and categorise, although the art
historian Matthew Naigell has characterised Samaras using words such as “archetypal
post-Dadaist, post-surrealist, and post Abstract-Expressionist.”
Lucas Samaras’ photographic self-portraits made use of, what was at the time, the
new Polaroid technique, which appealed to him both for its intimacy – it is highly
suitable for private, self-reflective images in a domestic setting – and for its chemical
properties. The chemical properties enables him speedily develop a picture that can be
manipulated and embellished with a painterly quality before the photosensitive material
hardens and is fixed. The resulting self-portraits are narcissistic, in that they offer the
artist the possibility to view the results of his grimaces and posturings almost immediately.
The new technique is so rapid that it can be compared with grooming oneself
in front of a mirror. In this sense these are captured mirror images. No less significant
is it that these pictures were produced in a context in which performance art, with its
interest in boundaries and its explorations with body language, was crucial to the neoavant-garde’s
activities. Exploration of the artist’s own body and facial expressions
did in addition become an important theme in the new medium of video art in the late
1960s. Parallels to Samaras’ performative self-portraits are found in contemporary
video works by artists such as Robert Morris, Hannah Wilke, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman
and Dan Graham, to name but a few of the most important.
Lucas Samaras works in a neo-Dada or neo-avant-garde tradition. His photo-transformations
constitute a topical exploration of the classical avant-garde’s themes and
expressions, formulated in the new media of his day. The neo-avant-garde set out to
reaffirm, reorient and explore afresh many of the radical expressions and processes
that changed the course of art from Gustave Courbet onwards, and which were further
pursued in symbolism, expressionism, Dada and surrealism. It is this tradition Samaras
continues, rather than the formalistic, which is traced through Paul Cézanne and cubism
and, which led to constructivist sculpture and abstract painting.
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Samaras’ Polaroids from the 1970s are indebted to a deep romantic impulse. The classic
works art of the avant-gardes are clear forerunners and models, which Samaras
interprets anew and brings up to date in this work. His Photo-Transformations are
concerned with themes that were utterly central to art in the latter half of the 19th–
and the first decades of the 20th century, namely the male artist’s self-portrait, more
broadly – the male nude, and generally, the naked self-portrait. The depiction of naked
men has dominated many important periods of art history, such as Greek and Roman
antiquity, when the healthy, well-trained male body – the sportsman and the warrior –
was idealised as the ultimate example of beauty and noble form. This idealised view
of male nudity was revived during the renaissance. But during the 19th century – with
the growth of modern, bourgeois society – a crisis in relation to the artistic depiction
of nakedness occurred. This was partly true of the female body, 1 but particularly so of
the male body. Art historian Petra ten-Doesschate Chu has called this “the ‘crisis’ of
the male nude.”
It was the avant-garde that returned to this problem and broke down the boundaries of
propriety and social taboo. Gustave Courbet (1819–77) was the first artist to persistently
paint challenging nudes of contemporary women. And it was Courbet who picked
up the thread from Rembrandt, applying a personal, critical, and ruthlessly analytic
gaze on the artist’s self-portraits. Of greatest significance for Samaras’ self-portraits
are Courbet’s depictions of himself in melodramatic poses, 2 such as the paintings Man
Mad with Fear (1843) and The Desperate Man (1843), in which his face is distorted and
his body has lost its footing and is falling, physically out of balance due to psychological
tension. This trend was pursued further by some of the post-impressionists and
symbolists, most notably van Gogh and Edvard Munch; and following them, by the
German expressionists, among whom it was Karl Schmidt-Rottluff who came closest
to Munch and van Gogh in intensity. 3
1 In the 19th century the female nude was celebrated in the form of goddesses, odalisques and allegorical figures. Prostitutes
and so-called “cocottes” could also be also depicted in minimal attire, but were a cause of controversy and scandal, as for
example Eduard Manet’s Olympia from 1863.
2 Courbet’s many romantic self-portraits are interesting in forging a new, free and independent role for the artist, although less
relevant to an understanding of Samaras’ art.
3 In the field of neo-expressionist painting, this type of portrait and self-portrait art attained particular prominence among English
painters in the 1950s and 60s, such as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.
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Lucas Samaras’ Polaroid self-portraits are given a painterly treatment, and it is the
coarse distortions, the brutal physicality and the shattered aspects of pictures such as
Munch’s Self-Portrait in Hell (1903), van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1888)
as well as Schmidt-Rottluff’s Self-Portrait from 1906, with its coruscating colours, that
we see echoed in Samaras’ work. Like the artists of some 70 years earlier, the distorted,
decomposed aspect of the facial expression, and the manner of depicting it,
constitute an image, or a symbol, of an internal conflict, anxiety, or a disjointed and
chaotic psychological condition.
In some of his pictures, Samaras plays with typical neo-avant-garde situations, such
as the kitchen scenes of low budget social-realist films (a typology exploited by Cindy
Sherman in some of her film stills, and by Bill Viola in some of his early videos), film noir
devices, such as the shadow of a Venetian blind across a face and its background, or
more romantic, film-inspired scenes, in which someone stares dreamily up at a plant or
a tree with a strong backlight framing the silhouette-like figure.
But what makes some of the photo-transformations particularly evocative is the combination
of the naked body and stylised hand movements. These are marked, vulnerable
bodies, decaying, covered in rashes or scars, or bodies wrapped in yarn, or hidden behind
a woven cloth so that the head and body are buried and almost concealed. These
images disrupt our notion of the pure, harmonic and balanced body. There is an ardent,
almost electrical force that makes some of the pictures seem as if a sacred light or
aura emanate from the body. They bring to mind Walt Whitman, who in one of his most
potent metaphors compared the body’s nervous system, and its lustful observation of
the bodies of others, with electrical currents. In the poem “I Sing the Body Electric,”
originally published in the first edition of the celebrated collection of poems, Leaves of
Grass, from 1855, Whitman sings the song of the male- and the female body:
”…You linger to see his back and the back of his neck and/shoulderside. / The sprawl
and fullness of babes …. the bosoms and heads of/women (…) The swimmer naked
in the swimmingbath …. Seen as he swims/through the salt transparent greenshine (…)
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In some of Samaras’ works as well, the bodily references are rendered erotic. The artist
of the classical avant-garde who stands out as the clearest forerunner of Samaras’
photo transformations is Egon Schiele (1890–1918). It was Schiele who confronted the
crisis of the male nude with the greatest forthrightness, as in the picture of himself masturbating,
a generalised “masculine” figure with an enormous bright red erection in the
picture Eros from 1911, or the frightening self-portrait in which he depicts himself as a
mutilated, bestial hermaphrodite, with footless legs and the body hair of a satyr. In this
sensationally scandalous picture – with the title Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait), from
1910 – Schiele has portrayed himself as utterly consumed by sexual urges. The sexual
organs, the navel, the nipples and the eyes are all bright red, as if these organs and
erogenous zones were aflame with desire; as if the body had been hollowed out and a
powerful red electric light placed inside it. That everything is governed by natural urges
is reflected in the way the figure floats in the pictorial space, utterly detached from social
hierarchies and anything that might keep him physically anchored to the ground. 4
Like several other avant-garde artists, Samaras suffers not only from acute narcissism, 5
he also has a familiar penchant for identifying with martyrs. Art is something that is created
through major personal sacrifices and physical suffering. The body is stigmatised
with society’s hostile nail marks resulting from social crucifixion. In one of his pictures,
he assumes the role of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows, an explicit echo of Schiele’s
motif on the same theme in his poster for the exhibition at Galerie Arnot in 1914–15,
Self-Portrait as St. Sebastian.
Egon Schiele is also significant when it comes to Samaras’ photographic staged selfportraits,
which have played an important role in his career since the 1970s. In one
series of photographs, Samaras performs a kind of pantomime, where he – as in some
of the painted self-portraits – not only pull faces, but also makes figures and signs with
his hands. 6
4 Bjarne Melgaard’s The Lightbulb Man (1996) is a treatment of the same issue and vision.
5 In Norway and Sweden, Kjartan Slettemark is the artist who resembles Samaras most closely in the use of his own body as a
motif.
6 In 1914, the photographer Anton Josef Trcka took stylised photos of Schiele, for example Egon Schiele with Raised Arms and
Egon Schiele Forming a Figure with his Hands.
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The combination of vulnerable nakedness, intense erotic drive, psychological instability
and physical suffering, with elements of bindings and bondage, is a feature of Samaras’
photo-transformations that offer clear references to the contemporaneous Vienna
Actionists. In one of these, the screen in front of the face resembles gauze bandages,
à la Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and the open, screaming mouth – visible through the hole
in the cloth – flashes its teeth like a mad dog. This constitutes an artistic homage to
Francis Bacon’s famous pope painting of 1953, based on Velazquez’ Pope Innocent
X; the scene on the steps in Odessa from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin
(1925); Munch’s Scream (1893); and Willem de Kooning’s Woman series. The edges of
the orifice and the potentially erotic zone are here rendered dangerous by the castrating
set of teeth. This work is firmly rooted in the history of the avant-garde, and yet it is
a remarkably original, simple and condensed expression of a terrifying archetype that
men carry deep in their unconscious. Moreover, Samaras avoids the fetishist version of
this motif, as does Nancy Grossman around the same time.
The strongly expressionist self-portraits must be seen in conjunction with Samaras’
mirror cabinets. The forerunner for the mirror installations on which he worked alongside
Yayio Kusama and Dan Graham, was probably Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (1923,
1937, 1947), a bizarre psycho-spatial apparatus, which Schwitters saw as expressing
erotic wretchedness. Samaras’ mirror installations are as confusing and fragmenting
as a kaleidoscope. This type of spatial organisation reflects the image of a divided self;
someone who is unstable in relation to his spatial surroundings and in all likelihood
also in terms of what psychoanalysis refers to as “object relations.” The frightening
and expressive keynote in all this is the insistence that the price we pay for modern,
urban, sexually emancipated and norm-transgressing narcissism is fragmentation. In
the original myth, Narcissus’ punishment was to be frozen in his own mirror image;
in the modern world, with its noisy metropolises, its horrors of electric bombardment
and its pornographic scenario of total exposure, the punishment comes in the form of
instability and insufficient orientational routines in the gap between desire and pain,
harmony and dissonance. It is Samaras’ precise articulation of this disquiet that makes
his art so vital.
Subjects 1969–1986” (1988–89). In 1983, the International Polaroid Collection in Cambridge
arranged the exhibition “Polaroid Photographs 1969–1983,” which opened at
the Centre Pompidou in Paris before transferring to the International Center of Photography
in New York and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Eight years later, the Yokohama
Museum of Art organised the exhibition “Lucas Samaras – Self: 1961–1991,”
which was also shown at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2003–2004,
the exhibition “Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras” was shown at
the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the exhibition “Lucas Samaras”
at the National Museum in Athens in 2005. In 2009 a solo exhibition with Samaras’ art
was shown at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Samaras’ works have been purchased by major institutions including: the Art Institute
of Chicago; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA; Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis;
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Australian National
Gallery, Canberra; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
s. 1
s. 2
s. 3
s. 4
s. 5
s. 6
Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation 6/14/74, Polaroid SX-70 photograph
Lucas Samaras, Auto-Polaroid, 1969-71, Polaroid photograph
Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation 11/6/73, Polaroid SX-70 photograph
Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation 10/27/73, Polaroid SX-70 photograph
Gustav Courbet, Den desperate mann, 1844–45, oil on canvas
Lucas Samaras, Auto-Polaroid, 1969-71 (Part 1), Polaroid photograph
Lucas Samaras, Auto-Polaroid, 1969-71, Polaroid photograph
Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation 7/16/73, Polaroid SX-70 photograph
Lucas Samaras, Auto-Polaroid, 1969-71, Polaroid photograph
Anton Josef Trcka, Egon Schiele, 1913, photograph
Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation 12/20/73, Polaroid SX-70 photograph
Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949, oil on canvas
The text is written by Åsmund Thorkildsen, Director at Drammen Art and Culture
Museum.
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