Robert Heinecken, Photographist:
A Thirty-Five-Year Retrospective
LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
February 13 - April 24, 2000
Robert Heinecken emerged as part of the Southern California art scene in the mid-1960s alongside artists such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Wallace Berman. As a photographic innovator, conceptual artist, educator, and theoretician, Robert Heinecken’s work has been consistently marked by his original use of techniques and materials. Rarely does his work consist of images that he actually photographed himself; more often, he uses found images from magazines and discarded negatives. These sources provide the raw material through which he addresses his real subjects: images and the culture that creates them. Perhaps that is why critic Arthur Danto coined the term "photographist" when describing Robert Heinecken and his work. Combining the words "photographer" and "artist," a "photographist" is a photographer who transcends the boundaries of photography, while creating works that examine the nature and meaning of the photograph.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art – LACMA – presents a major retrospective of the work of Robert Heinecken. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Robert Heinecken, Photographist: a Thirty-Five-Year Retrospective, provides the first comprehensive opportunity to explore Robert Heinecken’s role in the development of contemporary art. Including approximately 100 works, the exhibition provides an in-depth re-examination of Robert Heinecken’s artistic career and its ongoing influence, including work of the 1980s and 1990s, supported by carefully selected historical pieces that demonstrate the roots of the artist’s concerns as well as his formal development.
"Robert Heinecken is an innovator whose contribution both to contemporary photography and to contemporary art in general clearly needs to be seen and understood by a wider audience," said Tim Wride, LACMA associate curator of Photography. "LACMA is delighted to have this exhibition in Los Angeles where Heinecken spent most of his long career as an artist and educator. I hope the show will serve as a reminder of the leadership role Los Angeles has played and continues to play in contemporary art."
Robert Heinecken’s work resists easy categorization because it has no unifying, trademark style. For an artist of Robert Heinecken’s generation, the lack of an easily identifiable style proved somewhat of a drawback. While his working method and cultural interests prefigure that of many younger contemporary artists, Heinecken has remained relatively unrecognized by the general public. Although Robert Heinecken’s artistic style frequently changed, the approach to his subject matter remains consistent—a rigorously analytical and conceptual sensibility leavened by biting wit and humor. The basic tenet of Heinecken’s work is how the intent and function of a photograph cannot be separated from the ways in which it is experienced. Because photographs can function in multiple ways—art, advertisement, propaganda, memory—context is crucial to their understanding and influence.
Since the beginning of his career in the early 1960s, Robert Heinecken has been particularly interested in exploring issues of context using mass media imagery. Because he harbors a keen suspicion of power and those who wield it, the mass media, advertising, and pornography have been consistent targets of his investigations. Featured throughout the exhibition are approximately 12 of Heinecken’s often subtly altered freestanding cut-outs of the mid-1990s. An innovator in the area of "photo-sculpture," these more recent artworks present commercially produced figures that have been subtly altered, such as Barbara Campaign Fund Raising in Middle America, 1992. Former first lady Barbara Bush is presented with the two folksy men who were "Bartles and James" in the ubiquitous wine cooler advertising campaign of the late 1980s. John Wayne and Princess Diana are paired in another. Pamela Lee Anderson, Elvira "Mistress of the Dark" and other celebrities are also utilized in this area of the exhibition.
Another contemporary grouping is of Robert Heinecken’s large-scale relief collages. Created out of magazine advertisements, these dazzling and often humorous interpretations of the god of destruction and regeneration include Shiva Manifesting as a Single Mother, and reflect the artist’s continuing explorations of consumerist images as markers of cultural identity. All four major works in the "Shiva" series will be presented.
The artist’s often-scathing analysis of the news industry forms the basis of a third grouping of the exhibition. This section includes selections from the "Waking Up in News America" series of interrelated works in various media of 1984-86. Journalist and former anchor Bill Kurtis narrates the tale of how network anchors are chosen, in a presentation that blurs the line between reality and fiction. Other works featuring Joan Lunden, Connie Chung, and others document the faces that enter our homes via the news in "videograms" taken directly from the television screen.
Also featured are Robert Heinecken’s work with altered magazines and books. In the 1970s and 80s, he began to alter magazines by cutting, pasting, and inserting imagery from a variety of sources. He would often replace these altered publications back on newsstands for sale to the general (and unsuspecting) public. Heinecken’s goal in juxtaposing graphic sexual material with glossy advertising and editorial imagery in the altered magazines was to lead to an examination of obscenity in a consumerist, media-driven culture in a scathing, confrontational, and often humorous manner. At the same time Robert Heinecken wanted to emphasize the raw power of these images as outlets of expression.
Supporting these four main areas of focus are free-hanging black-and-white transparencies of advertisements from 1963, selections from his Visual Poems of the mid-sixties; various photo sculptures from the mid- to late sixties; the complete Are You Rea series; selections from the T.V. Dinner series; The S.S. Copyright Project "On Photography" from 1978 which constructs two portraits of writer Susan Sontag from a montage of found photographs; selections from the He/She SX-70 and text series, and other important early works.
Catalogue: This retrospective is accompanied by a fully illustrated 149-page catalogue with essays by exhibition organizer Lynne Warren, MCA Curator, A. D. Coleman, David Pagel, Susie Cohen, and Irene Borger. The catalogue is distributed by the University of Chicago Press, and is available at the Museum Shop for $29.95.
This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and is supported in part by the Jory and Joseph Shapiro Fund, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
LACMA Coordinating Curator: Tim Wride, associate curator of Photography.
LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
