Museum of Contemporary Photography
Robert Heinecken.
Museum of Contemporary PhotographyColumbia College Chicago General Information: 312.663.5554 Karen Irvine Curator |
found at artdaily.org Friday, January 19, 2007
CHICAGO, IL.- The Museum of Contemporary Photography opens a solo
exhibition by Robert Heinecken. Perhaps best known for his assemblages of found
images from torn magazine pages and for photographs containing familiar media
iconography, Heinecken continually redefined the role of the photographer and
perceptions of photography as an art medium. Heinecken died on May 19, 2006. In
honor of his crucial contributions, the Museum of Contemporary Photography will
mount an exhibition of selected projects: magazine alterations, a satire on
fashion photography, and rarely seen Polaroid photograms using perishable food.
Trained in design, drawing, and printmaking, Heinecken’s signature work
incorporates public images (from magazines, newspapers, and television) and his
own darkroom activity , which changes the interpretation of the original images.
Though Heinecken is rarely behind the lens of a camera, his process is
faithfully photographic. He is often discussed less in terms of photography and
more in terms of conceptual art. To put a name to Heinecken’s unique
combination of interests and technique, he was dubbed a “photographist” by
philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto, who described the responsibility of
the modern artist as “creating art that functions in part as a philosophical
reflection of its own nature.”
Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing to the late 1990s, Robert Heinecken
produced a series of projects that involved manipulating and recombining media
imagery in order to understand how this imagery, chiefly photographic, works on
and through our imaginations. From the mid-60s he worked solidly within a
practice we now identify as post-modernist: appropriation, deconstruction,
relinquishment of authorial control, and subverting traditional art exhibition
and distribution practices. He was to a large degree inventing this practice
before it was named. Because of his persona and history, it took the art world a
while to understand that he was profoundly intellectual. He was first and
foremost interested in co-opting the strategies of a system designed to dumb us
down—advertising and news media—in order to make ideas visible that could
smarten us up, exemplifying intellectual courage and the ability to run headlong
into enemy territory.
Robert Heinecken was born in Denver, Colorado on October 29, 1931. He began his
education at Riverside Junior College in Riverside, California (1949-1951), was
a fighter pilot in the U.S. Marine Corp from 1953-1957, and went on to study art
at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a BA (1959) and then an MA
(1960). In 1964 he founded the graduate program for photography at UCLA, and
retired from the institution in 1991. He was a member of the Board of Trustees
of The Friends of Photography and a chairman of the Society for Photographic
Education. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), a National Endowment for
the Arts Individual Artists Grant (1977, 1981, 1986), and Polaroid Corporation
grants to use 20-24 and 40-80 cameras (1984, 1985, 1988). Since 1964, Heinecken
has had over sixty one-person shows internationally including: the Center for
Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, and a 35-year retrospective
exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1998. His work is in
the collections of such institutions as the George Eastman House and Mills
College Art Gallery.
About the Chicago Photography Museum
The Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection focuses on American and U.S. resident photography since 1936. More than 7,000 photographs and photographically related objects reflect the craft’s diverse capacities for artistic expression, documentation, and communication. They include gelatin-silver prints, color work, digital pieces, photograms, and a host of alternative processes. Likewise, a spectrum of three-dimensional objects informed by and incorporating photography are also represented in the collection, from lightboxes to sculpture. The work of international artists and sample works from the nineteenth century complement and complete the collection.