December 1, In the hands of Lacan, it was also art in the service of psychoanalysis. Why then would the psychoanalyst suppress such a dynamo image behind a panel, even if it offered an ironic hint of what lay beneath?
It is the most dominant element, glowing with a subtle light from a second sun hidden somewhere outside the frame. Lucas Samaras, who once flirted with a career in psychoanalysis, is also a science fiction movie buff, I learned.
He loves the solitude of empty landscapes, which, in movies like these, result from alien attack or historical cataclysm. These movies also challenge, albeit in melodramatic ways, the comfortable, narrowly defined, middle class lifestyle that Samaras never wanted to be a part of, especially in postwar, McCarthy-era America.
With a multifaceted body of work, which can be hard to grasp, Samaras came up among a generation of art gods whose names conjure ready images. The unacquainted might first see his work on their terms: Samaras is precise like Chuck Close, syncopated like Frank Stella, succinct like Jasper Johns, acrobatic like Mark di Suvero, abrasive like Hans Haacke, and resourceful like Robert Rauschenberg. The audience on which he trained his camera included, among others, stewards of his career like Glimcher, editor Ingrid Sischy, and curators Marla Prather and Bernice Rose, as well as fellow artists Close, Oldenburg, and Johns.
By hooks of curiosity, voyeurism, distraction, disgust, or lust Samaras snares his audience, whether it is a self-portrait where he writhes naked in a jungle of pattern, an erect rose over his cock, or an intricate box construction begging to be manipulated. By , having achieved the bulk of his famous work with Polaroids, Samaras was able to claim that he had liberated narcissism. This, however, was not granting the same indulgence offered by pop art.
