Robert Heinecken; NY Times obituary (artist)
Hyfler/Rosner
very striking.
NY Times
Andy Grundberg
May 22, 2006
Robert Heinecken, Artist Who Juxtaposed Photographs, Is Dead
at 74
Robert Heinecken, an artist and teacher whose eclectic and
challenging work radically expanded the range of
possibilities for photography as art, died on Friday at a
nursing home in Albuquerque. He was 74.
The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Joyce Neimanas, who
added that he had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for
several years.
Starting in the early 1960's, Mr. Heinecken used an array of
unconventional processes and an irreverent attitude toward
the photographic original to influence the course of the art
form. Surprisingly, for someone who came to be identified as
a photographer, Mr. Heinecken seldom used a camera; he did
not really take pictures himself until he started making
Polaroid photographs of magazine pages in the late 1970's.
Instead of treating photographs as the autonomous creations
of their makers, as did Ansel Adams and other postwar
tastemakers, he viewed them as forms of cultural iconography
that reflected the commercialism and venality of
contemporary life. In this sense, he was a forerunner of
appropriationist artists of the 1980's like Barbara Kruger,
Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, who borrowed and
recontextualized existing photographic images culled from
printed reproductions.
Mr. Heinecken's most influential body of work was his
1966-67 series "Are You Rea," consisting of images that
superimposed advertising and feature photographs found in
large-circulation magazines, often to sarcastic effect. To
combine the images, he treated each page like a photographic
negative, shining a light through to expose both sides at
once.
For his source material, Mr. Heinecken also turned to
pornographic magazines, mail-order negatives of nude "art
studies," product packaging and television commercials. He
subjected these "found images" to a variety of
transformations involving methods and materials like
lithography, etching, cameraless direct-exposure photograms
and photo emulsion applied to canvas. He was capable of a
wide range of aesthetic effects, from the delicately
beautiful to the deliberately jarring.
In several series, including his "Cliché Vary" in 1974, the
artist reproduced and reprocessed photographs of naked women
in suggestive poses. This work, coinciding with the rise of
the feminist movement, came to be viewed by many as
repellent rather than as a commentary on male notions of
eroticism.
Less controversial were his "Videograms" in the early
1980's. He coined the term for a series of color photographs
he took directly from a television broadcast without a
camera, by fastening a piece of light-sensitive paper
directly on the screen. Made during the first inauguration
of President Ronald Reagan, they poke fun at both the
political process and the media.
Mr. Heinecken's hybrid integration of photographs with other
mediums was a rebuke to the aesthetics of conventional
photography adhered to by the major art photographers of the
day. But it had much in common with the approach of Robert
Rauschenberg, the unclassifiable artist whose graphic work
of the late 1950's and early 60's freely mingled paint,
sculpture, printmaking and photography. Like Mr.
Rauschenberg, Mr. Heinecken doted on random effects and
chance juxtapositions, joining a lineage in the arts that
went from John Cage back to European Surrealism and Dadaism.
Robert Heinecken was born in Denver in 1931, the son of a
Lutheran minister, and grew up in Riverside, Calif. After
graduating from high school, he attended the University of
California at Los Angeles but left to join the Marines,
serving as a fighter pilot from 1953 to 1957. After leaving
the military he returned to U.C.L.A., where he received
bachelor's and master's degrees in art. As a graduate
student, he specialized in printmaking but, influenced by
the historical example of Marcel Duchamp and by a
contemporary Los Angeles art scene in rebellion against
abstract painting, he began to combine lithography, etching,
sculpture and photograms in unusual ways.
After receiving his master's degree in 1960, Mr. Heinecken
was hired by the U.C.L.A. art department, where he taught
for the next 31 years. In 1963, he founded the department's
photography program, at the time one of the few places to
study photography as an art. In 1964 he helped found the
Society for Photographic Education, an organization of
college-level teachers. He was its chairman in 1970 and
1971.
As a teacher, Mr. Heinecken encouraged experimentation and
stylistic freedom but offered no stylistic blueprint. Among
his better-known students are Jo Ann Callis, John Divola and
Patrick Nagatani. In 1991 he retired from U.C.L.A. and in
1996 he moved to Chicago, where Ms. Neimanas taught
photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
They moved to Albuquerque two years ago.
Perhaps because he was identified closely with photography,
Mr. Heinecken never achieved the vast public recognition
accorded Mr. Rauschenberg, and he did not gain an
international reputation quite like those of John Baldessari
or Ed Ruscha, fellow California artists with an interest in
the photograph as a cultural object. But in the last 10
years, his career was the subject of two retrospective
exhibitions, mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Chicago in 1999 and the Center for Creative Photography at
the University of Arizona in 2003. The Center for Creative
Photography now holds his archives.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children
from his first marriage, to Janet M. Storey: Geoffrey
Heinecken of Ukiah, Calif., Kathe Hull of Denver; and Karol
Mora of Los Angeles; and by three grandchildren.
The idea of photography as a documentary medium did not
interest Mr. Heinecken in the least. He once said: "Many
pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world
instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of
their own. There is a vast difference between taking a
picture and making a photograph."