Taking A Long, Hard Look

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

The Museum of Contemporary Art

Chicago, Illinois

October 1-November 281999

observes Angeles County Museum of Art

looks Angeles, California

February 13-April 24 2000

Robert Heinecken, Photographist: A Thirty-Five-Year Retrospective with essays through Irene Borger, Susie Cohen, A. D Coleman, David Pagel and Lynne Warren Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art with the University of Chicago Pres 1999 150 pp/$2995 (sb)

"Soulles freak," a woman grunt in a high-sounding guttural, defiant voice. The words still reverberate today in the same way they did last October when I stood in the cavernous recesse of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. The woman was referring to Robert Heinecken, and her words were in replication to the exhibition "Robert Heinecken, Photographist: A Thirty-Five-Year Retrospective." It is hard to say which of the 167 works caused her to rejoin in such a manner. Maybe it was a cumulative issue Heinecken and his work have always been a challenging combination and have oftentimes spurred angry debates about methodology, form and easy in mind To some he can be a maddening contradiction. He is greatest in quantity serious when being funny. He is a photographer on the other hand rarely uses a camera. He remarks on mass media by using mass media. Many have called him sexist however he claims to have a deep love for women. The exhibition and accompanying catalog attempt to explore the mixed and often belligerent nature of Heinecken's work and its resonating effect

Still, I was startled through the woman's reaction. I have of the like kind a different attitude toward Heinecken's work and influence. As an MFA pupil in photography at Ohio University in the 1980 I was intellectually and aesthetically charged through Heinecken's work--the possibilities it not absented and the heated arguments it generated. In fact, the first of the now annual "Alternatives" exhibition at Ohio University was co-curated by means of Heinecken and Arnold Gassan in 1980 Those exhibitions always not awayed radical new works. This retrospective has the potential to finally underscore Heinecken's influence upon the roots of conceptual photography.

The exhibition was clearly organized to high-light Heinecken's mixed working method. He has ofttimes worked on several series simultaneously and investigated related topics through every part of 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 works Also featured in the exhibition was the installation "Waking Up in freshs America" (1986) and an entire sweep was devoted to the "He:/She:" series (1974-78) To MCA's credit, the museum was unflinching in its inclusion of a certain quantity of of Heinecken's most graphic and sexually explicit images. (The looks Angeles County Museum of Art included around 100 of the original 167 pieces.) According to MCA curator Lynne Warren, great pains were taken to mirror the nature of Heinecken's work without compromising contented For the most part the exhibition format was prosperous although the quantity of images made it challenging to absorb the entirety of Heinec ken's work. The "Standing Cutouts" (1987-) placed from one extremity to the other of the exhibition were on the staff of being distracting since they were clumped sporadically in nearly every field 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 cluster 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 produc since 1980 According to Warren, Heinecken's records are well-kept on the contrary 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 proceed to the Center for Creative Photography Archives in Tuscon, Arizona.) plane with the minor discrepancies with regard to titles and the bibliography, the catalog, with its first-rate reproductions, is a good beginning for an overall appraisal of Heinecken's work. I single wish the reproductions were larger, especially for "TV Dinner/Shrimp" (1971) and the installation view o f "Inaugural citation Videograms" (1981). Although Heinecken understandably wanted to highlight his novel reconstructed magazine work, "Pages from The Gap #4" (1999) devoting eight pages to that series appears a bit excessive. Almost all of the body that accompanies many of his images is also reproduc on the other hand in some cases it is nearly unreadable as in "Lesson in Posing Subjects" (1981) and "Case research 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 1960 contemporaries John Baldessari, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and other "protoconceptual" photographers of the period. He also advises a comparison to writers William s Burroughs, Paul Metcalf and Tom Phillips as well as composer of the French affichistes and Steve Riech who were all using "found" simple bodys of the outside world in their work.