|
June 14, 2009
Robert Heinecken's Recto/Verso photograms were made without the use of camera or film. A single page from a mass-circulation magazine was placed in direct contact with color photographic paper and exposed to light. The resulting image superimposes the visual and verbal information from the front and back of the magazine page. No collage, manipulation, or other handwork was employed. In some cases, his approach is a simple juxtaposition of two advertisements; in others, a single picture is created from multiple images overlaid.
Robert Heinecken, from the series Recto-verso, Cibachromes, 1989.
His stance at that time could be termed "deconstructive subversion," for he would use advertising photographs for raw material which would be manipulated by various means to arrive at social commentary. Often he would choose images of behaviors that had roots in a collective fantasy that could be exploited to sell a product. He would seek an ironic response to the imprisoning nature of advertisements, especially those that focused on the sexual attraction between men and women.
 Much of Heinecken's work recontextualizes imagery he appropriates from the mass media. He uses photography against itself by inverting the medium, turning it inside out, to reveal just how it goes about its business of persuasion. In the decade of the 1980s, decadence and narcissism inhabit the same space as spirituality and family values.
By placing commercial images into aesthetic contexts, translating images from one medium or process into another, or by juxtaposing, layering, or sequencing images, Heineken exposes the covert, simplistic, and often demeaning messages that are grafted onto commercial and editorial graphics.
Provocation and desire, the mainstays of media's working vocabulary, are evident in this series of images as elements of a different text, one which instructs the viewer to read images more incisively.
Heinecken decided that in the wake of the media explosion that had come to characterize contemporary life, enough photographs already existed. Rather than make more, he would manipulate existing ones.
His art became an attempt to clarify, reveal and sometimes confound the subliminal social, political and artistic codes they contain. Heinecken was among the first to consider himself an artist who used photographs, not a photographer who made them.
|
Heinecken's work is postmodernist, since it was typically photography of other people's photographs as reproduced in magazines. Sometimes he didn't take a photograph at all; he just rearranged photographs he'd found in magazines. From 1969 until 1972, for instance, he would insert pages from the risque magazine Penthouse into copies of the news magazines Time or Life, and then he'd surreptitiously place his altered copies back on newsstands so that people purchasing them would find pornographic imagery where they expected serious reportage. This was, of course, his comment on the quality of the journalism in America.