California (Wet) Dreaming
Robert Heinecken’s maverick career
V.N. Pin Up, 1968. Black-and-white film transparency over magazine-page collage; 31.8 x 25.4 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift of Daryl Gerber Stokols.
Robert Heinecken was a pioneer in the post-war Los Angeles art scene during a time when the photo world resided in New York. Describing himself as a paraphotographer, he worked across multiple mediums, including photography, sculpture, video, printmaking, and collage. Heinecken recontextualised images culled from newspapers, magazines, pornography, and television, to produce collages and assemblages, double-sided photograms, darkroom experiments, and rephotography. Although Heinecken was almost never behind the lens of a camera, his photo-based works question the nature of photography and radically redefine its perception as an artistic medium. His oeuvre exposes his obsession with popular culture and its effects on society.
A mantra from California for making photographic art: reproduce, reverse, resize, recombine, repurpose. And make sure that the picture contains a naked woman. Repeat this enough and your life will be sublime.
That’s the course pursued by maverick American photographer Robert Heinecken (1931-2006). Now, eight years after his death, he’s receiving belated attention from the photo establishment in the United States via a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Heinecken had the misfortune, or the good fortune, to develop his entire career beyond the confines of New York City. He established the photography programme at UCLA and made it one of the most important in the country. Toward the end of his life he moved even further off the mainstream map, to Albuquerque, New Mexico. With the exception of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, California didn’t get much traction in the East Coast photo world during most of his career. It’s not really serious out there, ran the standard objection, too many drugs and too much surfing; not really for photographers at all, just process geeks with unhealthy ideas. All this helps explain why Heinecken’s only presence in the citadel of photography was through some important group shows in the 1970s and 80s, and it further explains why his name is so rarely listed among photography’s innovators. The MoMA exhibition gives New Yorkers a chance to understand exactly what was going on and what they missed (a 1999 survey out of Chicago never made it to the East Coast).
Early on, Heinecken committed himself to an experimental vision of photography. As he put it, “What might result from a person’s experimental concepts should consist of circumstances which are flexible.” That flexibility produced every possible sort of image manipulation, pre-Photoshop; from collage and sculptural iterations to magazine interventions, Polaroids, installations, and appropriations. The one thing he didn’t do much of, was straight photography. The criticism that he – like fellow Californian John Baldessari – wasn’t really a photographer, is accurate to a degree that makes his work congenial to a time when medium-specificity in art is out of fashion. Heinecken was as aware as Warhol or any conceptualist, that the real impact of images was through the mass media, not through the masters of art photography, and he ransacked popular media, from magazine advertising to television news reporting. One of his most inventive projects involved directly exposing photo paper to television images of the 1981 inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the first actor-president. The resulting camera-less ‘videograms’ hark back to the beginning of photography and look forward, in their cynicism, to an awareness of media politics as spin and image control.
Television fascinated Heinecken in a way that the current generation must find quaint, but at the time it was the only media game in town. He found its images both rigidly stereotypical and sequentially bizarre. Surrealism on TV (1986) consists of three slide projectors flashing random images taken from TV screens; it seems to suggest a logic of desire and stimulation buried deep below the obvious chaotic surface of the commercial medium. On the other hand, the parallel images of TV Newswomen Corresponding (also from 1986) demonstrate just how uniform and narrow were (and still are) the gestures and appearances of anchorwomen. Faith Daniels and Barbara Walters enact almost identical dumbshows of hairstyle, clothing, and expression.
He could have chosen anchormen, but women have a special status in Heinecken’s work. In fact, they were possibly his only subject. Or rather, images of women. A product of his time (the 1960s), Heinecken captured the explosion of sexual imagery (and energy) by putting a nude woman in almost everything he made. Many of his images involve appropriated pornography – the MoMA exhibition displays warnings for the morally faint-of-heart. By current standards, it looks pretty tame and very hetero, but it is relentless, and there is no getting around the fact that Heinecken had an appetite for sex and its imagery. Yet his magazine appropriations, in particular, reveal an apparent political purpose behind all the politically incorrect pussy. Heinecken would insert into relatively innocuous news magazines like Time or Newsweek, pornographic images that countered antiseptic, anodyne advertising with raw exploitation. Heinecken did other less sexually explicit interventions, including placing black bars over the eyes of people in the pictures, but that act of censorship also recalled pornography. The point seems not just to be that the American media is hypocritical when it comes to sex (selling it but not showing it),
but that the media – and perhaps photography itself – is fundamentally pornographic; that is, all about second-hand thrills from the passive act of looking, whether the subject is lesbian self-pleasuring or the horrors of war in Indochina.
Most of the work is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and it is not hard to see why it wouldn’t have been very popular with John Szarkowski, MoMA photography chief through much of Heinecken’s career, and even less with his successor Peter Galassi. Purely formal nuance, visual sophistication, or, for that matter, most of the decisions that contribute to what happens inside the frame of a photograph, were not Heinecken’s major concern. Although he wrote about the manipulation and control of light, and his work investigated photo processes often in delicate ways, his deeper interests appear to focus on what pictures were (and still are) doing to us – directing our desires, controlling our behaviour, invading our dreams. In that awareness – and not just because he was hooked on porn – he remains our contemporary. ‹
EXTRA: exhibition “Robert Heinecken: Lessons in Posing Subject” in Contemporary Art Center WIELS (Brussels, Belgium), 16.05 – 17.08. http://www.wiels.org
Cybill Shepherd / Phone Sex, 1992 Silver dye bleach print on foamcore 160 x 43.2 cm The Robert Heinecken Trust Courtesy of Petzel Gallery, New York.
Typographic Nude, 1965. Gelatin silver print 36.8 x 17.8 cm Geofrey and and Laura Wyatt Collection, Santa Barbara, California
Periodical #5, 1971. Offset lithography on found magazine 31.1 x 22.9 cm Philip F. Denny Collection, Chicago
Tuxedo Striptease, 1984. 10 internal dye diffusion transfer prints 61 x 50.8 cm each Private Collection
Robert Heinecken, 1980 Photographed by Harold Jones Reprinted by permission of the artist.
Are You Rea, 1968. Twenty-five gelatin silver prints Various dimensions Jeffrey Leifer Collection, San Francisco
Robert Heinecken, Lessons in posing subjects, matching facial expressions.
This article appeared in DAMN°44. Order your personal copy.
