When Lucas Samaras coined the term AutoPolaroid, the camera company wrote him a cease-and-desist letter. Eventually the artist convinced Polaroid to let him keep the term to describe a series of portraits he took between 1969 and 1971. First published as a spread in Art in America and then shown at Pace in 1971, the AutoPolaroids get to the heart of the artist’s well-documented use of the body, usually his own. A contemporary of self-reflexive performers like Ana Mendieta and Vito Acconci, Samaras not only marked the advent of a new kind of figuration with his experiments but heralded a ground-breaking technology, as well: the Polaroid 360 camera. Created in obsessive succession, these black-and-white images memorialize the creative potential unlocked by the introduction of instant photography to the mainstream market in the bluntest terms imaginable. Each exaggerated pose Samaras struck invokes the ephemeral nature of the newly commercialized medium. Provocative from their inception, Samaras’s self-portraits foreshadow today’s selfies in a way that makes them as potent as ever, if not chillingly prophetic.This month, New York's Craig F. Starr Gallery celebrates that seminal moment with a focused survey that includes what Samaras considers the first AutoPolaroid: a snap of Samara’s bare backside reflected in a mirror. “I think whether or not a first is important is up to the individual, but for me, yes this image is significant because I spent the next 20 years focusing on my body,” he explains. “It was obviously the right start.” Seriality is just as imperative to understanding the work. “That’s how I first presented them,” he says-, referring to the multi-image collages in Art in America. “Without the artist to put them together, they are not by themselves significant.”Repetition gives an appealing continuity to this portfolio, as well as to the rest of the 79-year-old’s prolific career. In the early days, before the Polaroid, Samaras painted himself nude. More recently, in “Album 2,” the artist’s 2015 show at Pace, he debuted a series of digital collages featuring his family photos as well as recent selfies. Transmorphed with Photoshop, these sentimental images enter a heady, abstracted compositional realm informed by the bittersweet nature of memory. Once removed from their context, these recent works put distance between the subject and the viewer, unlike the baldly erotic AutoPolaroids.In those images, the artist usually appears naked, contorting his face or limbs this way and that. Some are hand-colored, creating psychedelic backdrops for the clownish antics. “I hardly threw any away,” Samaras explains. “I would take a color pen and do dots on the areas that were too white or whatever. So even though it wasn’t right, I made it right.” Other times, Samaras employed props like rubber bands, which he strapped across his face to create new terrains. Although the images are sometimes wince-inducing, Samaras doesn't flagellate himself to the extent of Viennese actionists Gunther Brus and Hermann Nitsch. Instead stretching the human canvas to an extreme, Samaras focuses on the traumatic exercise of public self-reflection. Raw and sometimes embarrassing, the AutoPolaroids have the uncanny ability to make one feel instantaneously self-conscious.“What the really great artists do,” David Foster Wallace wrote, “is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.” This phrasing comes to mind when one is trying to pin down what exactly makes Samaras’s work so appealing and radical. His defiant transgression shows incredible loyalty to his vision. In contrast to artists like Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelley, who adopted characters, Samaras only ever plays himself. If the camera is the vehicle, he is the content of his art — the irremovable, sometimes cringe-worthy truth.“Lucas Samaras: AutoPolaroids, 1969-71” opens June 9 at Craig F. Starr Gallery, starr-art.com.
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