Transformer: Lucas Samaras - mixed media, PaceWildenstein, New York, New York - Cover Story

Art in America, Feb, 1997 by Ken Johnson

Human chameleon, master of disguise, Lucas Samaras always makes you wonder, who is this guy anyway? Sometimes he seems an outsider, an eccentric visionary or a holy fool; other times, one of the art world's canniest professionals. His works usually come across as psychologically fraught -- dreamy, obsessive, angry, fetishistic, narcissistic or grandiose. But he shifts with such mercurial unpredictability from one mode to another -- from tiny Polaroids to sofa-size abstractions; from walk-in mirror rooms to Cornell-like jewelry boxes; from delicate, surrealistic dot drawings to crudely expressionistic cast metal figures -- that it is hard to discern a single consistent identity. Rather than revelations of inner truth, Samara's works seem like masks that he puts on or takes off in a teasing game of hints and deceptions.

A recent two-gallery exhibition mounted by PaceWildenstein to celebrate the artist's 60th birthday afforded ample opportunity to ponder the essential character of this bewilderingly protean artist. The 57th Street space hosted a retrospective sampler of the varieties of artistic endeavor Samaras has pursued since 1958, including photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, assemblages, jewelry and a video. This was installed in a crowded, boutiquelike manner, by contrast to which the downtown exhibition exuded a minimalistic order and clarity. The latter presented selections from just one body of work -- the "Photo-Transformations," tiny Polaroid photographs in which Samaras manipulated the photographic dyes while they were still developing to create strange, often monstrous distortions of his own image. (The 91 examples came from the artist's personal collection and were shown here for the first time.)

The "Photo-Transformations," widely and justly acknowledged to be among the best bodies of work he has produced, epitomize the Samaras problem. They orchestrate a near perfect wedding of his two sides: his idiosyncrasy and his urbanity. By turns funny, scary, bizarre and numinous, these jewel-like, 3-inch-square images depict the artist transfigured by in-studio effect and/or by manipulation of the photograph. In one dated Feb. 9, 1974, the artist gestures wildly with his hands like a possessed preacher, with his melting face he seems to accost us out of a bad dream. On June 13, 1974, he portrayed himself with a sheet hanging from upraised arms; the sheet blends with his naked body and in the dramatic half-light of his little kitchen/studio, he seems portentously angelic. In another work (May 28, 1976), he pictures his own bearded, intensely staring visage with the antique image of a boy (his own youthful self?) projected onto one side of his face, creating a surrealistic conflation of the man and the child. In its oneiric evocation of the artist's unconscious and its demimonde of archetypal personae, the series might be construed as a kind of visual auto-psychoanalysis or shamanic quest. There is a captivating sense of adventure in this.

But at the same time as you detect a visionary attunement to the further reaches of imaginative possibility, you are also well aware of the highly conscious, systematically procedural nature of the project. The installation of identically sized and framed works in a horizontal row around the large, unbroken gallery space evoked serialism more than surrealism, and suggested a programmatic working out of permutations not unlike that of a Sol LeWitt or a Frank Stella. The tightly compacted compositions, the histrionic lighting and use of props, the frankly acknowledged artificiality, the lurid yet suave hues: all this bespeaks a highly cultivated esthetic and theatrical intelligence.

In the manipulation of the photograph, you feel more curiosity about the material itself and its possibilities than you do about the image's expressive urgency. Moreover, you can see how expert Samaras became. Nothing crude or obvious cheapens his alterations; his virtuosity produces pictures as rich in painterly as in photographic lushness. In one dated Oct. 22, 1973, streaks of light emanate from the artist's wide-open mouth, suggesting a mad, Baconesque scream. But you know the sow were produced experimentally by impressing radiating lines into the print; you feel more deleted by the artist's ingenuity and skill than moved by the feelings of honor, rage or pain that image would seem to project.

The way these aspects of the Polaroids mirror each other -- the transformation of self and the transformation of the medium -- gives the series its gratifying resonance. More significantly for Samaras's oeuvre as a whole, the fact that some kind of transformation is at the heart of both image and form suggests that what essentially drives Samaras's art is fascination not with the contents of his own psyche but with possibilities of metamorphosis. For all the apparent self-exposure, Samaras himself remains a curiously opaque presence; the images don't tell you who he is, what he desires, fears or dreams. He treats his body, like the photograph, as an object to be manipulated but hides his soul behind a dazzling display of wit, ingenuity and industry. Critics often speculate that Samaras's compulsion to change and the secretive nature of his work have to do with his experience as an immigrant -- he moved to the United States from Greece when he was 11 years old. But nothing in his work clearly represents this or any other autobiographical motive. His strategic capriciousness might be better explained by his exposure to teachers Allan Kaprow and George Segal at Rutgers, whence Samaras graduated in 1959, and his precocious participation in the Happenings movement at the end of the 1950s. These influences may well have inculcated an idea of art not as personal expression but as an arena in which to play any number of rule-determined games.