Robert Heinecken, 74; Pioneered Use of Commercial Photographs to Create Art
deb...@comcast.net
Art
By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2006
Robert Heinecken, an artist who was instrumental in changing the way
photographs are considered in the American cultural landscape, died
Friday at a nursing home in Albuquerque, N.M. He was 74.
Heinecken, who had relocated to New Mexico after living and working
principally in Los Angeles for more than 50 years, had suffered from
the effects of Alzheimer's disease since 1994, according to his wife,
Joyce Neimanas.
In the 1960s, Heinecken began to develop an approach to photographs
that was distinctive in the history of the medium. He sometimes
described himself as a para-photographer, because his work stood
"beside" or "beyond" traditional ideas associated with photography.
Essentially, the artist decided that in the wake of the media explosion
that had come to characterize contemporary life, enough photographs
already existed. Rather than make more, he would manipulate existing
ones. His art became an attempt to clarify, reveal and sometimes
confound the subliminal social, political and artistic codes they
contain.
Heinecken was among the first to consider himself an artist who used
photographs, not a photographer who made them. Today that approach is
common. But in the late 1960s, when Heinecken published an influential
portfolio of 25 prints titled "Are You Rea," the radical nature of the
experiment was largely unprecedented.
"Are You Rea," featured in a major traveling retrospective of
Heinecken's work that was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
in 2000, was made after lengthy analysis of hundreds of commercially
published news, fashion, lifestyle and other magazines. Heinecken found
that, when magazine pages were placed on a light table, the images on
both sides of the sheet visually merged in unexpected ways.
Sometimes the resulting montages, although not planned by the layouts'
designers, were pictorially and conceptually stimulating. In one, the
text of a cigarette ad declaring "More than a million people like what
Lark does" was overlaid on an iconic, Christlike figure draped with
beads and of indeterminate sex. In another, a monstrously deformed
portrait emerged from the fusion of a patterned dress over a grinning
face adjacent to the text "Lynda Bird Johnson's Hollywood Beauty
Treatment."
The title "Are You Rea" came from a brassiere advertisement that
originally spread across two magazine pages. On the single page
Heinecken chose to work with, the word "Real" or "Really" was
truncated. The resulting wordplay has multiple layers.
"Rea" is an anagram of the first word in the title, and only "You"
separates the two words from each other. "Are" is a plural form of "to
be," the verb that establishes a person's vital identity. Heinecken's
portfolio of layered prints proposes that, in the modern flood of
commercial imagery, any notion that you are human inevitably gets
scrambled. His art is partly an attempt to cut the Gordian knot of mass
media.
"Rea" can also be pronounced "ray." The black-and-white images of
Heinecken's innovative series pay homage to photographer Man Ray, the
Surrealist artist who was among the innovators of an early technique
for printing photographs made without a camera. Ray instead placed
objects directly on a negative and exposed it to light.
Similarly, Heinecken treated the two sides of a magazine page as if it
were a found negative, which he then exposed directly onto an offset
printing plate. The result was a layered black-and-white image, in
which the original areas of dark and light were reversed. The
portfolio, in addition to acknowledging the artistic legacy of Man Ray,
had the appearance and function of a social X-ray.
Robert Friedli Heinecken was born in Denver on Dec. 29, 1931, the son
of a Lutheran minister. The family moved to Southern California in
1942, and he was raised in Riverside.
In 1951 Heinecken entered UCLA, but he did not graduate until 1959. He
enlisted as a Naval Aviation Cadet in 1953 and the next year was
commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Discharged four years later, he returned to college but remained in the
USMC Active Reserve until 1966. By then, a growing interest in
developing his art, coupled with opposition to the war in Vietnam, made
military duty untenable for him.
Married in 1955 to Janet M. Storey (they separated in 1975 and divorced
in 1980), Heinecken finished graduate school at UCLA in 1960 and
immediately took a position on the art department faculty. He taught at
UCLA for the next 31 years, accepting an emeritus position in 1991.
Among the notable students he mentored in the photography program that
he started at the school were John Divola, Judith Golden, Jo Ann Callis
and Patrick Nagatani.
At a 1964 meeting at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., Heinecken
met an influential group of photographers, critics and historians.
Among them were Van Deren Coke, Minor White and Beaumont Newhall. The
group established the Society for Photographic Education, which became
an important forum for changing the way photography was taught in
American art schools and university programs. Before the SPE, whose
board of directors eventually elected Heinecken as chairman, commercial
rather than artistic applications of photographic practice commonly
dominated curricula. By the time it disbanded in 1973, photography was
a familiar pursuit in the nation's art schools.
In 1976 Heinecken met artist Joyce Neimanas, an instructor at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whom he would later marry. Over
the next 16 years, they fashioned a domestic arrangement whereby one or
the other would take a leave of absence from his or her job to live and
work in the partner's city for a year or two. In 1996, Heinecken moved
to Chicago.
Throughout his career, Heinecken continued to work with found images,
including undeveloped rolls of pornographic film salvaged from the many
commercial graphic houses in Los Angeles, usually in an effort to
articulate the social and sexual mores of the time. "Some of my
enthusiasm for the [found] photograph," he once said, "was based on the
fact that there was some residual illusion of reality in it always, no
matter what I did to it."
This approach to photographs, along with Heinecken's frequent effort to
coax poetic meanings from juxtaposition and layering of images, owed
something to his friendship with the influential and charismatic Los
Angeles assemblage artist, poet and small-press publisher Wallace
Berman. He met Berman in 1962, just as Heinecken was launching the
photography program at UCLA.
Heinecken also experimented with the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera
system and made several series by photographing newscasters and
political figures off his television screen. Perhaps his most
aggressive yet personal body of work was made in 1969, when he bought a
stack of Time magazines at his local newsstand in Culver City, altered
them and then surreptitiously returned them to the sales rack, there to
be purchased by unsuspecting consumers.
The pages of Heinecken's guerrilla "special edition" included
superimposed lithographic prints of a recently published photograph
showing a smiling soldier holding the decapitated heads of two
anonymous Vietnamese youths. The shocking image was repeated
indiscriminately over fashion advertisements and editorial news copy
throughout the magazines. Between 1969 and 1994, he made 37 editions of
variously collaged and overprinted magazines.
Heinecken's work is in the collections of numerous art museums around
the world, and examples are included in the large survey exhibition
"Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Artistic Capital," currently at the
Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. His archives are held at the Center
for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
In addition to Neimanas, he is survived by Geoffrey Heinecken, Kathe
Hull and Karol Mora, his children from his first marriage; and by three
grandchildren. The Robert Heinecken Memorial Fund has been established
at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.