ART REVIEWS : Heinecken’s Hit-and-Run Irreverence

A security cop clutching an armload of liquor bottles stands just inside the door of the Fahey/Klein Gallery, greeting visitors to Robert Heinecken’s rambunctious exhibition of manipulated photographic reproductions. In the main gallery, 10 more life-size, free-standing advertising display figures lack the initial shock value of the fraudulent officer, but are missing none of the in-your-face irreverence that has characterized Heinecken’s art for the last 25 years.

Among his seamlessly collaged characters, who turn the mindlessness induced by advertising against itself, is a grinning bimbo clinging to President Bush, who stands on a burning American flag with fly wide open and pockets stuffed with Saudi Arabian currency. Another woman advertising a rum drink smiles fetchingly as she raises her middle finger, exposing ominously elaborate tattoos on her biceps. And an oversized dildo springs from the crotch of a benign-looking fellow advertising Instamatic cameras.

Heinecken’s brightly colored, two-dimensional mannequins don’t intend to sustain long-term scrutiny or analysis. Their territory is the immediate, hit-and-run attention exploited by billboards, commercials and glossy magazine advertisements.

By messing with the manipulation intrinsic to this sophisticated (and expensive) industry, the veteran L.A. media saboteur registers his disdain for consumerism’s capacity to control the desires of its subjects. He offers no moralistic solution to its ability to hold most of us in its addictive grip, just a sickening demonstration of the numbing ugliness underlying its superficial allure.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, through July 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.