The Photo, Redeveloped

Robert Heinecken founded the photography department at UCLA in 1966, but he has rarely used a camera. He employed the postmodern methods of appropriation and deconstruction decades before such terms were used to describe contemporary art. He used photographs to make sculpture, culled magazines for advertising images to use in his art, and combined Polaroids with his handwritten texts. As such, he is a “photographist,” a term coined by art critic Arthur C. Danto to describe one who is concerned with “photography in art.”

Heinecken’s unconventional techniques have had a decisive influence on contemporary photography, yet he has remained something of a cult figure, albeit one whose reputation is on a rapid rise. He is receiving fresh recognition due to an exhibition of about 170 works organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, “Robert Heinecken, Photographist: A 35-Year Retrospective.” Today, a reduced version of the show, approximately 90 pieces, opens at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

How does Heinecken, now 68, feel about the retrospective? “I deserve it and am glad to see it finally,” he says delightedly.

Curator Lynne Warren of the Chicago museum, who organized the exhibition, calls Heinecken “one of the earliest Conceptual photographers,” and her show underscores the respect museums now accord the discipline. What the work makes clear, she says, is Heinecken’s role in breaking down the wall between the worlds of contemporary art and fine art photography.

What it doesn’t show is much in the way of uniformity. Heinecken, readily identifiable at three decades of L.A. art openings for his signature ponytail, dark glasses, jeans and cowboy boots, is a determined individualist. Speaking on the phone from his Chicago home, where he has lived since his 1991 retirement from UCLA, he says, “I never settled into a single idea. The way I see it, artists should do a variety of different things.”

In the exhibition catalog, photography critic A.D. Coleman explains that “Heinecken’s work has no unifying ‘look,’ no dominant style, no trademark constant that carries over from project to project. . . . Heinecken gravitates toward the guerrilla strategy of remaining inconspicuous and unidentifiable.”

For example, his show includes relief prints of the tin trays of consumed TV dinners, and countless images of female nudes, including one with real lingerie draped over photographic hangers. Susan Sontag is portrayed using hundreds of black-and-white snapshots, and there are several standing three-dimensional figures of TV personalities and politicians.

A few themes emerge, however. Heinecken regularly confronts the limits of taste by incorporating elements of hard-core pornography (the museum has posted a parental advisory at the show’s entrance). “People call something pornographic when they mean erotic,” he says. “I think it’s an accurate depiction of a state of mind about sexuality.”

And he has had a long fascination with mass media, cannibalizing the content and style of news and fashion magazines, advertisements and television.

Still, when you step back and take in the whole retrospective, its variety stands out. As Heinecken happily says: “It looks like a top-notch group show.”

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From his outlaw stance and pursuit of taboo topics, one might assume Heinecken had a repressed childhood. He was, after all, the only child of an itinerant Lutheran minister. The artist, who spent his early childhood in Denver, says his upbringing wasn’t so much strict as it was deprived, as his parents struggled through the Depression. “Those were really hard times,” he recalls. “It was awful for everybody.”

His father moved the family to L.A. in 1942 and, four years later, to Riverside. As a teenager, Heinecken rejected his father’s beliefs. “Once I was old enough to realize that the church was as screwed up as anything else, I had a classic rebellion,” he says. “The straight and narrow weren’t very conducive for me.”

He attended junior college in Riverside, where he studied art, then transferred to UCLA in 1951. But college parties seemed to be more compelling than the classes, and he dropped out. Faced with being drafted for service in the Korean War, Heinecken was accepted into the highly competitive flight school of the Marine Corps. The discipline, he says, turned his life around. Four years of active duty as a pilot, including a near-death experience in a crash, toughened him. “I got a lot of self-confidence out of being in those situations with jet fighters,” he says.

Discharged as a captain, he married in 1955, started a family and went to work as a flight instructor. But in 1957 he returned to UCLA to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine art, funded by the GI Bill.

One influential teacher, the late John Paul Jones, encouraged his efforts in printmaking and helped him get a teaching position. Starting in 1960, the year he received his master’s degree, Heinecken worked for UCLA. Job security enabled him to pursue his art without much concern about the marketplace.

“I made a living teaching and used the time intelligently to make work,” he says. “If I had to sell pictures to make a living, I’d have to decide why people are going to buy them. That means, once something is working for you, you have to stay with it.”

He did, however, take his role as an educator quite seriously. In 1962, as an assistant professor, he initiated the fine-art photography curriculum at UCLA. “At that time, most photography programs were devoted to documentary or graphic design work. Ours was one of the first to award a master’s of fine art degree.”

Two years later, he joined with established photographers and educators such as Van Deren Coke, Minor White and Beaumont Newhall to form the influential Society for Photographic Education. And through the 1970s, Heinecken moved up the ranks at UCLA, gaining full professor status in 1974.

The mid-’70s were a literally explosive time in his life. He and his first wife separated, and shortly thereafter he met his current wife, photographer Joyce Neimanas. (“That was that,” as Heinecken puts it.) Then in 1976, a freak gas explosion on Venice Boulevard blew up his Culver City studio/home. At first, it was thought he and Neimanas must be dead. In fact, they had spent the night house-sitting for a friend. And Heinecken’s luck held out: Though much was lost, most of his work was in storage.

In 1978, Heinecken took a leave of absence from UCLA and moved to Chicago, where Neimanas taught at the Art Institute. It was the beginning of a regimen they would continue for the next 18 years, an alternating pattern that allowed one of them to pursue creative work full time while the other taught. Meanwhile, UCLA appointed him vice chairman of the department of art in 1979. He also served on the artists advisory board on the formation of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

His decision to retire in 1991, he says, was partly about settling down in one place with the woman he loves. He sounds cheerful enough about Chicago as a hometown, citing its good museums and relatively minor traffic jams. But he’s pleased that his retrospective is coming to L.A.

“A lot of my friends are there,” he says.

In his work, Heinecken has sought to liberate photography from its role as a “window on the world” or as a mirror of an inner state--formal restrictions often observed when he was starting out. Perhaps he could see the possibilities more clearly, having been trained as an artist rather than as a photographer. He cites the anarchic and often politically oriented art of the Dadaists, such as Marcel Duchamp and John Heartfield, as antecedents. And it was his combination of printmaking processes--etching and lithography--with photography that helped break down the wall between the media.

Heinecken’s “manipulative photography” took shape, literally, in the ‘60s as black-and-white images of nude women made into cube-shaped sculptures and puzzles. His series of photograms, “Are You Rea,” was made by exposing light through a single magazine page onto photosensitive paper to produce negative reproductions of superimposed news figures, fashion models and advertising copy. Two years later, Heinecken came up with his pinups, women in lingerie ads montaged with photographs of the escalating war in Vietnam.

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The war imagery would dominate his work for a while. Although Heinecken had remained in the Marine Corps Reserves, he resigned in protest over what he calls a “bad war.” In 1969, he altered hundreds of copies of Time and other magazines, overprinting pages of advertising or editorial material with the image of a smiling Vietnamese soldier carrying the decapitated heads of two Vietnamese children. Then, anonymously, he put the magazines back on store racks or in doctors’ offices, where unwitting readers would discover them.

In the mid-’70s, in the wake of the breakup of his first marriage and the studio explosion, he began taking Polaroid SX-70 snaps of men, women and various props for the influential series “He:/She:,” which later was published as an artist’s book. The mundane pictures were captioned with handwritten dialogue between the characters He and She. Although Heinecken says that much of the text was drawn from Japanese Noh plays, it is hard not to read into the strained remarks the aftereffects of the separation from his wife. Under two Polaroids--breasts in a brassiere, and a full martini glass--he wrote, “She: ‘What kind of marriage do you have?’ He: ‘Well, I’m afraid that I’ve fallen way behind on the payments for it.’ ”

Long influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s statement that the medium is the message, during the 1980s Heinecken turned his attention solidly toward TV, completing a cycle called “Waking Up in News America” that culminates in a hellish installation of a mannequin and furniture in a room entirely covered with photos of TV news announcers. He juxtaposed images of blond anchorwomen to compare the similarity of their hairstyles just as, a few years earlier, he documented with photos and text the types of poses used by models in clothing catalogs.

In 1989, Heinecken started making ambitious collages of the Hindu god Shiva, some standing 8 feet tall, composed of crumbled magazine photos. Despite being made out of ads for cigarettes, rum, tanning oil and tropical vacations, in their bright hues and chaotic energy, the finished works emulate the complicated postures of Indian paintings of the multi-limbed deity. Heinecken feels a strong connection to the work, recalling that his paternal grandmother was a Hindu who married his grandfather while he was working as a Lutheran missionary in India.

It also ties into the artist’s long-standing concern with sexual issues. “The love of sex, the poetry of sex, is so much tied into the Hindu religion. I think you can find sexuality in everything, if you look closely enough, and I think it’s there in all my work.”

Since his retirement, Heinecken has slowed his artistic production, but he hasn’t lost his sting. He has begun a series using the cut-out life-size photographic figures standing in convenience and video stores to sell products. He alters them and groups them in unlikely combinations--George Bush poses with a provocative model, or Elvira with a couple holding some porn tapes and a mermaid.

Like his earliest work, Heinecken’s current pieces are freshly conceived. He insists that he cannot create work based on narrow stylistic connections evolving logically over the years. “That is what many artists do, but it is not my temperament,” he says. “I would never be able to start up again and make that same picture. Everything I start up is a real challenge. I have no idea how it will result or if it will result. It’s never dull.” *

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“Robert Heinecken, Photographist: A Thirty-Five Year Retrospective,” today-April 24, L.A. County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. $1-$7. (323) 857-6000.