TAKING A LONG, HARD LOOK.

Robert Heinecken, Photographist: A Thirty-Five-Year Retrospective

The Museum of Contemporary Art

Chicago, Illinois

October 1-November 28,1999

Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

Los Angeles, California

February 13-April 24, 2000

Robert Heinecken, Photographist: A Thirty-Five-Year Retrospective with essays by Irene Borger, Susie Cohen, A. D. Coleman, David Pagel and Lynne Warren Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art with the University of Chicago Press, 1999 150 pp./$29.95 (sb)

"Soulless freak," a woman grunted in a loud, guttural, defiant voice. The words still reverberate today in the same way they did last October when I stood in the cavernous recesses of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. The woman was referring to Robert Heinecken, and her words were in response to the exhibition "Robert Heinecken, Photographist: A Thirty-Five-Year Retrospective." It is hard to say which of the 167 works caused her to respond in such a manner. Maybe it was a cumulative effect. Heinecken and his work have always been a challenging combination and have often spurred angry debates about methodology, form and content. To some he can be a maddening contradiction. He is most serious when being funny. He is a photographer but rarely uses a camera. He comments on mass media by using mass media. Many have called him sexist yet he claims to have a profound love for women. The exhibition and accompanying catalog attempt to explore the complex and often belligerent nature of Heinecken's work and its resonating effect.

Still, I was startled by the woman's reaction. I have such a different attitude toward Heinecken's work and influence. As an MFA student in photography at Ohio University in the 1980s. I was intellectually and aesthetically charged by Heinecken's work--the possibilities it presented and the heated arguments it generated. In fact, the first of the now annual "Alternatives" exhibition at Ohio University was co-curated by Heinecken and Arnold Gassan in 1980. Those exhibitions always presented radical new works. This retrospective has the potential to finally underscore Heinecken's influence on the roots of conceptual photography.

The exhibition was clearly organized to high-light Heinecken's complex working method. He has often worked on several series simultaneously and investigated related topics throughout his career. The exhibition was comprised of four main sections: "photo-sculpture"; United States advertising-inspired works; broadcast media-inspired works; and altered magazines and artist books. Also featured in the exhibition was the installation "Waking Up in News America" (1986) and an entire room was devoted to the "He:/She:" series (1974-78). To MCA's credit, the museum was unflinching in its inclusion of some of Heinecken's most graphic and sexually explicit images. (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art included around 100 of the original 167 pieces.) According to MCA curator Lynne Warren, great pains were taken to reflect the nature of Heinecken's work without compromising content. For the most part the exhibition format was successful, although the quantity of images made it challenging to absorb the entirety of Heinec ken's work. The "Standing Cutouts" (1987-) placed throughout the exhibition were on the verge of being distracting since they were grouped sporadically in nearly every room. Perhaps the mind-numbing quantity of images is part of the point of Heinecken's critique of mass media.

The catalog for "Robert Heinecken: Photographist" contains five critical essays; 112 color plates; an exhibition checklist; a chronology; a list of public collections, solo exhibitions and group exhibitions; and a bibliography. Of course labeling Heinecken's work was no easy task since works from the same series have had slightly different titles and no comprehensive catalog of his work has been produced since 1980. According to Warren, Heinecken's records are well-kept but there are still some discrepancies between the work and the written records. (A corrected version of all the records and a comprehensive version of the bibliography will go to the Center for Creative Photography Archives in Tuscon, Arizona.) Even with the minor discrepancies with regard to titles and the bibliography, the catalog, with its excellent reproductions, is a good beginning for an overall appraisal of Heinecken's work. I only wish the reproductions were larger, especially for "TV Dinner/Shrimp" (1971) and the installation view o f "Inaugural Excerpt Videograms" (1981). Although Heinecken understandably wanted to highlight his recent reconstructed magazine work, "Pages from The Gap #4" (1999), devoting eight pages to that series seems a bit excessive. Almost all of the text that accompanies many of his images is also reproduced, but in some cases it is nearly unreadable as in "Lessons in Posing Subjects" (1981) and "Case Study in Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman" (1984).

A. D. Coleman's essay "'I Call It Teaching': Robert Heinecken's Analytical Facture" clearly places Heinecken in an ideological and historical framework with his 1960s contemporaries John Baldessari, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and other "protoconceptual" photographers of the period. He also suggests a comparison to writers William S. Burroughs, Paul Metcalf and Tom Phillips as well as composers of the French affichistes and Steve Riech who were all using "found" elements of the outside world in their work.

Heinecken has taught for more than 30 years, created the photography department at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1962, has given countless lectures, taught workshops across the country and helped found the Society for Photographic Education in 1964. "Analytical facture," Coleman explains, "involves matching the strategy of producing a work to a particular idea rather than making every idea conform to the Procrustean bed of a predetermined working method or a recurrent approach." This explanation of Heinecken's work helps readers understand why his students have developed their own personal style and have gone on to develop such successful careers as artists and educators. These students include Uta Barth, Ellen Birrell, Ellen Brooks, David Bunn, Jo Ann Callis, Darryl Curran, John Divola, Robert Flick, Graham Howe, James Hugunin, Virgil Marano, Patrick Nagatani, Sheila Pinkel and Ernest Scott. Coleman states, "In short, I would nominate [Heinecken] as a most unlikely bodhisattva of photograph y, who stepped back from the available nirvana of high-art celebrity in order to help others move to a higher plane of understanding in their chosen medium." Coleman also presented an original and rousing lecture at MCA that included slides of Coleman himself looking at the work in the exhibition punctuated by humorous yet insightful commentary.

Lynne Warren's essay, "Revised for Your Consideration: The Art of Robert Heinecken," attempts to explain why Heinecken is not more well-known. She was quoted in a press release as saying, "Robert Heinecken is an innovator who clearly needs to be see by a wider audience for his contribution to both contemporary photography and to contemporary art." Her essay references Heinecken's early adherence to Dadaism and the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and then provides a chronology of his work. She explains how his work is informed by his desire to understand and know photography and not just to use it. His work takes on the properties of printmaking through use of editions, patterning and layering; and sculpture through the use of three-dimensional, high relief and installation formats. He cannot be categorized by only one medium and has broken the boundaries of all media in the process. Photography infiltrates all media today thanks, in part, to Heinecken.

Warren also briefly refutes the interpretation of Heinecken's work as sexist. She astutely notes that although he is "clearly obsessed with sex ... Heinecken does not use pornography merely to titillate .... Instead, he uses such imagery to comment on our consumerist, image-driven culture." This point could have been strengthened with references to other artists who use highly charged, sexually explicit imagery, such as Larry Clark, Charles Gatewood, Jacqueline Livingston and Hannah Wilke. Many artists of the 1970s, '80s and '90s have made it their business to deconstruct prevalent social mores and the mass media in general in order to critique societal hypocrisies with regard to gender and sexuality. Warren points out that Heinecken's approach was ground-breaking and took place before words like "deconstruction" and "cultural critique" even existed. There is no doubt that this line of discussion could represent an essay in and of itself as Heinecken's stance is complex. Warren notes, "The more radical femin ists have written that the male gaze is exploitative in all of its forms. In the process, they become another of the contemporary cultural forces of which Heinecken is so suspicious: those who seek to impose their wills on others, including pornographers, advertising executives, and the government."

Susie Cohen's essay "Robert Heinecken: Alchemy of Form" explores Heinecken's working method and his search for insight "into photographic structure and social behavior." She discusses his mastery at recombining images that point to the often startling truth about the darker side of personal beliefs and relationships. Cohen states, "For Heinecken, even seemingly insignificant matters are invested with potential."

The energy and spirit of Heinecken's work are most successfully conveyed by David Pagel. In his essay "Pictures Turned Inside Out: Robert Heinecken's Homemade Magazines," Pagel likens Heinecken's magazine work to guerrilla warfare, as in the refigured Time magazines of 1969. Pagel states that through "absurd juxtapositions and haunting parallels," Heinecken presents "diabolical misprints" and "mongrel publications" that change "media-saturated reality into a slyly subversive demonstration." One of the most haunting images in this piece contains a magazine advertisement for a woman's long vest over which Heinecken printed (using offset lithography) a photograph of a soldier holding two decapitated heads of unknown Vietnamese children. The effect is that of seeing through to another page of the magazine. In other altered magazine pages Heinecken uses direct collaging techniques by cutting and pasting. Pagel also points out that in this work the viewer is implicated as "all of us are a lot more involved in shap ing the world we live in than we usually assume." In this light, Heinecken's work seems to assert that the audience needs to pay even more attention when the subject is the media. Although Pagel's essay is short, it is packed with energetic and hard-hitting insight.

A 1979 essay reprinted from Exposure' "Relations: Some Work by Robert Heinecken" by Irene Borger, offers some insight into Heinecken's "He:/She:" is a series and the time in which it was created. [1] "He:/She:" is a series of Polaroid images of men and women juxtaposed with text. In "He: You look pensive" (1975-78) four Polaroids are seen side by side. In the first Image, a man and woman lie on a bed; in the second, an erect penis pokes out of a man's skimpy, white underwear; in the third, a man's hand holds a pink plastic gun in a white holster; in the fourth, the bed is empty. The images are accompanied by a short portion of a fictitious conversation between a man and a woman: "He: You look pensive. She: I'm wondering if all of this is related to the male menopause. He: Perhaps it's more like a late puberty. She: Both have the same transparency." Borger proposes that the banter in Heinecken's text often recalls that between actors George Burns and his wife, Grade Allen, or Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont, yet is filled with "opposition, masking, and boundaries." She states, "Heinecken's minefield of a life has become the wellspring and subject in this body of work. Fictional construction invariably accompanies the process of observing and recording actual events from one's own life, if the work is to move beyond therapy into the public realm of art. A persona is often created, either in first or third person, because the character is not identical with the author; it is literally a creation."

My thoughts go back to the woman in the gallery. How could a man who spent a lifetime teaching, trying to understand relationships and his own personal idiosyncracies, critiquing the hypocrisies inherent in society and producing an enormous body of work be a "soulless freak?" Heinecken is not a soulless freak. He points out soullessness and the freakish. It is easy to dismiss both and Heinecken's work precisely addresses this problem within our society. We often don't want to confront what we fear or take the time to understand something beyond a surface appraisal. For the last 20 years the art world has been seemingly content with a distant knowledge of Heinecken's work and influence. This is now in the past. Certainly the sheer quantity of people who came to the exhibition and the lectures provided by Coleman, Heinecken, Joyce Neimanas, Anne Wilkes Tucker and Warren are evidence of growing interest. To quote Heinecken from Coleman's essay, "that's what I call teaching."

K. JOHNSON BOWLES is an artist and writer. She is the executive director of the Longwood Center of Visual Art at Longwood College, Farmville, VA.

NOTES

(1.) Irene Borger, "Relations: Some Work by Robert Heinecken," in Exposure, Volume 17, no. 2 (Summer 1979).