Heinecken’s Big Picture Show

In 1978 Robert Heinecken made two large portraits of Susan Sontag, the New York intellectual whose new book “On Photography” was causing a stir in literary and artistic circles. The pair of black-and-white portraits hangs near the entrance to the 35-year retrospective of Heinecken’s work, now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and they throw down an inescapable gauntlet.

One portrait is a montage made from black-and-white snapshots of the text pages in Sontag’s book, which had won the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Like Ben Day dots in a Lichtenstein comic strip painting, the individual snapshot exposures run the full gamut from pitch black to bright white, while the small images are stapled together to create appropriate tones on the gray scale. The author’s smiling face emerges from the montage as a blunt, somewhat jagged mosaic, which is best seen from several feet away. Up close the image breaks up into blocks of type, whose text may or may not be legible.

The second portrait is also a montage, but rather than snapshots of text it is a compendium of mostly unremarkable images taken from the everyday world. Pictures of friends, family, palm trees, a motorcycle, a television screen, magazine pages, windows, a sewer grate, street signs and much more jostle across the surface, each more or less equivalent in importance to the rest. In a couple places a Heineken beer ad turns up, wryly filling in for the artist’s signature.

Like the first portrait, the second reads clearly from several feet away, coalescing into Sontag’s smiling face. But as a likeness of a flesh-and-blood person it’s fuller, richer and more nuanced. Plus, you can draw up close to peruse the dense array of small snapshots. Like a Rauschenberg silk-screen painting, the scores of assembled photographs comprise a simple inventory of lived experiences.

In sum, Heinecken’s “picture portrait” is far more seductive, engaging and diversified than the “word portrait,” which is curious but limited. The artist’s witty rejoinder to Sontag’s “On Photography” suggests that pictures, used well, can be more critically revealing when it comes to analyzing photographs. Art itself could most productively address “the problems, aesthetic and moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographs” in the modern world, as the author had written of her goal in the preface to her book.

Using photographs to reveal how photographs function in the world has been Heinecken’s agenda as an artist for nearly four decades. Most of the 87 works in the show, which is about half the size it was at its debut in October at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, do not feature photographs made by the artist. Instead he scavenged, working mostly with photographs found in mass-media magazines or, later, snapped almost at random from TV.

Heinecken brought to bear the burgeoning L.A. phenomenon of assemblage, pioneered by artists such as Edward Kienholz and Wallace Berman, on the “problems” of omnipresent photography. In fact, in certain respects his work is usefully thought of as something of a cross between Kienholz and Berman. The political shrewdness of Kienholz’s bleak sculptures and the prayer of redemption through sexual frankness in Berman’s Xerox-style collages often merge. Heinecken recycled salvage picked from the modern image dump to show us ourselves anew.

Frequently it’s not a pretty sight. A content warning is even posted at the gallery entrance, since crudely envisioned sex and violence--those twin staples of American mass culture--are inevitable in Heinecken’s art.

A New Fusion of Images

One of Heinecken’s most remarkable inventions was simply to overlay the photographic images already found on two sides of the same magazine page. Images and fragments of text that were never meant to be seen together are inseparably fused. The carefully orchestrated linear narrative that comes from leafing through a magazine is interrupted--and promptly collapses.

Ghostly images of guns, politicians, fashion models, children, religious icons and text merge together, floating in and out of one another. The technique is wildly promiscuous, the feeling inescapably voyeuristic. Mainstream magazines, meant for consumer seduction, become at once beautiful and hellish.

Photographic transparency is the enemy to be conquered in Heinecken’s work. The sense that a camera picture in a magazine, newspaper or on TV contains the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth within its enclosed frame gets thoroughly demolished.

He began the assault around 1964 by making two-dimensional images into three-dimensional objects. A sliced-up picture of a nude, classical symbol of Western art, was reassembled as a cube that stands on point, and the ritual sacrifice in the sexual education of a young girl was likened to a crucifixion by juxtaposing photographs in a cruciform frame.

Elsewhere, photographic transparencies were enlarged and mounted several inches away from the wall, so that light could pass through and materiality could be enhanced yet evanescent. More recently Heinecken’s work has returned to three-dimensional sources, in technically remarkable reliefs based on forms found in erotic art from India and Southeast Asia.

Many of these devices are clumsy, though. The repeated use of sculpture rather than painting as a model is hard to fathom. Perhaps it stems from a desire to circumvent the old argument between painting and photography, which began at photography’s birth.

His Work Defies Labels

Heinecken has struggled with the problem of photographic transparency in other ways. Among the least compelling are those that abandon art for anthropology, cataloging TV images with extensive printed text in show-and-tell presentations that can be visually numbing. Their pedagogical edge might not be surprising for an artist who also taught throughout his career, but it diminishes your own freewheeling involvement with the work.

Heinecken’s at his best when he’s most simple--allowing an image to bleed through the back of a magazine page and merge with the front to make unexpected meldings of what’s already there, or pairing Polaroid snapshots with narrative dialogue to tell poignant tales of spiritual disengagement and personal loss. These works reward close scrutiny.

The difficulty in describing Heinecken is telling. He has called himself a “paraphotographer,” one who doesn’t so much make photographs as work alongside photography’s existing ebb and flow in the larger society. The retrospective bills him as a “photographist,” a hybrid of photographer and artist.

Awkward but apt, both terms seem suitable. Heinecken is among the first artists to have abandoned the Modernist search for essential photographic truth. His work helped pry open a new territory that has been central to art since the 1980s, and the show visiting LACMA concisely shows how.

*

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through April 24. Closed Wednesday.