| | | | Robert Heinecken: Object MatterEdited by Eva Respini. Text by Jennifer Jae Gutierrez.
 Robert Heinecken was a pioneer in the postwar Los Angeles art scene who described himself as a para-photographer because his work stood "beside" or "beyond" traditional ideas of the medium. Published in conjunction with the first museum exhibition of the artist’s work since his death in 2006, this publication covers four decades of his remarkable and unique practice, from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, with special emphasis on his early experiments with technique and materiality. Culling images from newspapers, magazine advertisements and television, Heinecken recontextualized them through collage and assemblage, double-sided photograms, photolithography and re-photography. Although he was rarely behind the lens of a camera, his photo-based works question the nature of photography and radically redefine the perception of it as an artistic medium. As the most comprehensive survey of Heinecken’s oeuvre, this book sets his work in the context of twentieth-century history of photographic experimentation and conceptual art. An illustrated essay by conservator Jennifer Jae Gutierrez about the artist’s experimental techniques, which ranged from photograms to photolithography to collage, contributes to the sparse scholarship on Heinecken’s working methods.
Robert Heinecken was born in 1931 in Denver, Colorado and in 1942 his family relocated to Riverside, California. After serving in the US Marine Corp, he earned a BA in 1959 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continued his studies, specializing in printmaking and graduating with an MFA in 1960. He founded the graduate program for photography at UCLA in 1964, where he taught until 1991. Heinecken died at age 74 in 2006 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Eva Respini is the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Prior to that she was Curator at The Museum of Modern Art. Jennifer Jae Gutierrez is the Arthur J. Bell Senior Photograph Conservator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Periodical #5" (1971) is reproduced from Robert Heinecken: Object Matter.PRAISE AND REVIEWSVogue Nick Remsen He ecstatically reimagined everything from Chanel advertisements to Time covers to Vogue images by the likes of Irving Penn and Wayne Maser. V Magazine The hypersensitive, hyperaware imagery couldn't be more pertinent to today's conversations about culled images and fear of overstimulation. Art in America Arthur Ou Robert Heinecken was an artist who put the medium of photography through the wringer. Photograph Magazine Vince Aletti Heinecken...radically altered our ideas of what a photograph can look like. American Photo Debbie Grossman This book salutes a self-described "paraphotographer" who experimented with found imagery-via such processes as gelatin-silver prints, collage, and photo-sculpture-and explored topics including mass media's visual impact and the depicition of the female form. Time Out New York Howard Halle Collage and rephotography were tools of choice of Heinecken (1931-2006), one of the first photographers to deconstruct the medium. His imagery was equally eclectic, relying on a grab bag of borrowings from newspapers, magazines, pornography to weigh in on the atomizing effect of mass media. |
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| | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/10/2014 In her essay for Robert Heinecken: Object Matter, published to accompany the exhibition opening this week at The Museum of Modern Art, curator Eva Respini writes, "Robert Heinecken (1931–2006) is a difficult artist to categorize, and a man who thrived on contradiction, in both his work and his life. He was a photographer who rarely picked up a camera; a teacher well versed in photography's history who rebelled against the medium's conventions; a trained fighter pilot who cultivated a radical artistic persona, complete with ponytail and beard; a charismatic figure respected by the women who knew him, whose use of pornographic material, however, drew fierce feminist critique; a profoundly American artist with a strong allegiance to the European avant-garde. America and its obsessions with sex, consumerism, violence, war, TV, and cheap copies are at the forefront of his art. Heinecken's work is often messy, sometimes shocking, other times analytic, but always provocative—his examination of the particularly American terrain of sex and violence was unapologetic. He was a cross-disciplinary pioneer who used diverse techniques and materials to make his work. His free use of found images and inquiry into the nature of representation anticipated the current use of photographs as tools to investigate our culture's self-definition in a world overflowing with images and copies of images. Heinecken's photo-based works destabilize the very definition of photography, and essentially redefine its perception as an artistic medium. 'The photograph,' he argued, 'is not a picture of, but an object about something.'" Cybill Shepherd/Phone Sex (1992) is reproduced from Object Matter. continue to blog | FORTHCOMING AND RECENT PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS |  | FRAENKEL GALLERYISBN: 9781881337232
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