Word as Image Exhibition @ Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena - Organized by Alex Kaczenski

Word as Image

Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena

Through February 5, 2024

Liubov Popova (Russian, 1889–1924)

The Traveler, 1915

Oil on canvas

56 x 41-1/2 in. (142.2 x 105.4 cm)

Norton Simon Art Foundation

Llyn Foulkes (American, b. 1934)

Skull Rock, 1983

Oil on wood panel

20-3/8 x 20 in. (51.8 x 50.8 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Kati Breckenridge, Ph.D

The Norton Simon Museum presents Word as Image, an exhibition showcasing 20th-century artists who experimented with letters, words and symbols as visual motifs. Culled from the Museum’s collection, the objects on view offer humorous and thought-provoking encounters between pictorial and linguistic modes of expression. Artists whose work is in the exhibition include Pablo Picasso, Liubov Popova, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Llyn Foulkes, Robert Heinecken, Rafael Canogar, William Gropper, Ynez Johnston and others.

At the beginning of the 20th century, words appeared as elements in avant-garde compositions, where they were used to break down distinctions between art and daily life. In Pablo Picasso’s Still Life with Bottle of Marc (1911), splintered lines and shapes reinvent the genre of trompe l’oeil still-life. Only the legible letters “E,” “vie” and “Marc” prompt the viewer to perceive the central object, a bottle of brandy, and recognize the composition as a café scene. In Liubov Popova’s Cubo-Futurist painting The Traveler (1915), snippets of Russian words like журналы (zhurnaly), meaning journals, and II кл, meaning second class, evoke a train’s physical environment. Partial bits of text parallel the fragmented appearance of Cubist and Futurist abstraction while capturing the dynamism of early 20th-century modernity. 

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931–2006)

Recto/Verso, 1/5, 1988

Silver dye bleach photogram

Image: 10-1/4 x 6-7/8 in. (26 x 17.5 cm); Sheet: 20 x 16 in.

(50.8 x 40.6 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Darryl Curran

© The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago

As the century progressed, Pop and Conceptual artists responded critically to their social and cultural climates by inventing visual forms, sometimes co-opting contemporary cityscapes full of billboards and graffiti-covered walls. Claes Oldenburg and Ed Ruscha evoked Los Angeles through prints of monumental architectural letters, as both considered the city’s signage part of its essential identity. Similarly, Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup series (the Museum’s edition is dated 1968) appropriates the visual language of mass production and typographic design to blur the distinction between fine art and advertisement. Language also serves as an inside joke for many works in the exhibition, like Robert Heinecken’s photogram Recto/Verso, 1/5 (1988), which offers a critique of fashion magazines and beauty standards. Here a single legible headline, “A Neutral Presence,” ironically accompanies a distorted image of reversed text and superimposed women’s bodies, thereby interrupting the passive consumption of mass media.

Rafael Canogar (Spanish, b. 1935)

The Earth 14, 1969

Lithograph

30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Anonymous Gift

© Rafael Canogar

John Cage (American, 1912–1992)

Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, 1969

Silkscreens (8) on plexiglass set in a wooden base,

edition 39 of 125

14-3/8 x 20-1/8 x 10-5/8 in. (36.5 x 51.1 x 27.0 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mrs. Judith Thomas, 1970

© John Cage Trust

The exhibition features artworks that engage linguistic and art historical themes simultaneously. In Arthur Secunda’s kaleidoscopic lithograph Cathedral Voices (1969), inspired by Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen cathedral, intentionally illegible letters conjure the acoustic and optical experiences that one may have inside a religious building. John Cage, in his own nod to art of the recent past—Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel (1969), an homage to the great conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp—collaborated with printers, researchers and a graphic designer. The resulting sheets of Plexiglas are printed with fragmented letters that appear to float and fall in a kind of three-dimensional typographic symphony. Designed so that it could be reassembled to create new visual compositions, it likewise uses words and letters as a means of interrogating the creative process.

William Gropper (American, 1897–1977)

Untitled (Unfinished Symphony I), 1967

Lithograph

18 x 14 in. (45.72 x 35.56 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Anonymous Gift

© Estate of William Gropper

Ynez Johnston (American, 1920–2019)

Travels of the Sage Narada: The Other World, 1958

Color etching with poem by John Berry

19 x 15-3/4 in. (48.3 x 40.0 cm)

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mr. Robert A. Rowan

© Ynez Johnston Berry

Spanning the comical to the political to the conceptual, Word as Image calls our attention to how we are constantly “reading the image” in and out of museum spaces. Many of the artworks express ambivalence about the meaning and legibility of the text contained within, emphasizing instead the formal appearance of letters or numbers. As such, artists challenge us to consider language and image anew, by positioning words as an essential part of visual culture.

Word as Image is organized by Alex Kaczenski, the Museum’s graduate intern for the 2022-23 academic year. It is on view in the Museum’s Focus Gallery on the main level.

NORTON SIMON MUSEUM

411 West Colorado Boulevard

Pasadena, California 91105

www.nortonsimon.org

WORD AS IMAGE @ NORTON SIMON MUSEUM / AUGUST 11, 2023 – FEBRUARY 5, 2024

Robert Heinecken, Photographist: A Thirty-Five-Year Retrospective at LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art - Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

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

www.lacma.org