Lucas Samaras

 

 

 

Photo-Transformation, 1974

Manipulated SX-70 Polaroid photograph

3 x 3” (7.62 x 7.62 cm)

Museum purchase

© Lucas Samaras

 

 

 

 

Lucas Samaras (Greek, b. 1936)

In 1969, the Greek-born American artist who—since the early 1960s—had been widely known for his jewel-, pin-, and glass-shard-encrusted boxes and sculpture linking danger and beauty in a theatrical embrace, turned his attention to photography. Photo-Transformation 3/3/74 is one of a significant body of Polaroid SX-70 images created between 1973 and 1976, in the course of a long-time examination of the potential of photography as an erotic, highly charged medium for autoportraiture. As Arnold Glimcher noted in the catalogue for the 1965 University Art Museum (UAM) exhibition Lucas Samaras: Photo-Transformations (New York: E. P. Dutton and California State University, Long Beach): “From the incense and pageantry of Greek orthodoxy, Samaras, the wizard, in league with extraterrestrial power, summons the magic that belongs to the ancients.” Here, Samaras’s hot-lit, red-green torso—sealed in the malleable Polaroid envelope at the moment of the photographic “event”—is seen against a writhing ground dense with distorted forms that can be read as the “L” and “S” of his name. In 1981, the Museum purchased this image, which appeared in the 1975 exhibition and traveled with it to five museums across the United States and Canada, thus preserving an essential essence of one of the UAM’s most provocative projects.