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Heinecken (Robert) Materials, Getty Research Institute collection
Heinecken.Combined
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Table of contents
Contributing Institution: Special Collections
Title: Getty Research Institute collection of materials relating to Robert Heinecken's...wore khakis project
Creator: Heinecken, Robert, 1931-2006
Identifier/Call Number: Heinecken.Combined
Physical Description: 4.33 Linear Feet(4 boxes)
Date (inclusive): 1994-2000
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the links included in each series. Click here
for the
access policy .
Abstract: This finding aid describes four separate collections acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 1997 and related to Robert
Heineckens's project
...wore khakis, a five-year endeavor centered on the GAP's 1990s khaki pants advertising campaign.
Language of Material: Collection material is in English.
Open for use by qualified researchers.
Beth Ann Guynn processed the collection and wrote the finding aid in 2017.
The four series presented in this finding aid were acquired separately in 2017. See individual entries below for acqusition-specific
information.
Arranged in four series, each representing a separate acquisition: Series I. Revised Magazine: Gap/NY Headaches, (Accession
number 2017.M.30), between 1994 and 1999; Series II. Prototype for Robert Heinecken's ...
wore khakis (Accession ber 2017.M.31), 1998; Series III. Publisher's proof for Robert Heinecken's
...wore khakis (Accession number 2017.M.32), 1999; Series IV. Nazraeli press records related to Robert Heinecken's
...wore khakis (Accession number 2017.M.33), 1994-2000.
The artist and teacher, Robert Heinecken (1931–2006), was a pivotal figure in the postwar Los Angeles art scene. The son of
a Lutheran minister, he was born in Denver, Colorado, and raised in Riverside, California. He interrupted his studies at UCLA
to spend the three years from 1953 to 1957 as a Marine fighter pilot, after which he returned to the university, graduating
with an M. A. in art in 1960 with a specialization in printmaking, which he had already started to combine with other media
such as sculpture and photography. Heinecken stayed at UCLA for the next thirty years, teaching in the art department and
founding its photography program in 1963. He was a founding member of the Society of Photographic Education (1964), and chaired
this organization of college teachers in 1970 and 1971. In his teaching, as with his own work, Heinecken championed wide-ranging
media and stylistic experimentation. Many of his students – among them Uta Barth, Jo Ann Callis, Eileen Cowan, Darryl Curran,
John Dovola, Robert Flick, Patrick Nagatani, and Sheila Pinkel – established themselves as important artists and instructors
in the Los Angeles art scene and beyond.
Despite being intimately identified with photography as both an artist and a teacher, Heinecken was less frequently a user
of the camera than a user of its products. A self-described "para-photographer," he felt that his recontextualization of existing
images put his work "beside" or "beyond" traditional photographic practices. Through collage and assemblage, photograms, darkroom
experimentation, and re-photography and manipulation, Heinecken repurposed imagery gleaned from popular culture sources including
advertisments, newspapers, magazines, pornography, and television to create new, deeply-layered works with complex, and often
witty, levels of meaning.
In a real sense, the phenomenon of cultural iconography is the overarching theme of Heinecken's work. He used "found images"
to delve into and dissect popular culture and the societal norms ever-present in the entangled themes of advertising and commercialism;
sex, sexualization and the nature of desire; the body and gender; cultural icons; and the media and the permeation of television
into American society. In
Are You Rea (1964-1968), Heinecken created 25 photograms from magazines such as
LifeLife,
Time and
Woman's Day by photographing the pages on a light table so that both sides of a page combine to create a new, single image. He later
incorporated
Are You Rea into his portfolio
Recto/Verso (1989) of 12 photograms each accompanied by a text by a different writer.
The relationship between the original and the copy is, naturally, an underlying preoccupation that runs throughout Heinecken's
work, as is the relationship of his artistic production to the aesthetics of "conventional" photography. Heinecken's hybridization
of photographs with other print processes was a direct challenge to the hegemony of American fine art photographers.
Kodak Saftey Film/Taos Church(1972), presents a view of the adobe church, now surrounded with the detritus of modern-day culture, that was famously photographed
by Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, and painted by Georgia O'Keefe and John Marin. Here, the finished work, manifested as a photographic
negative, simultaneously addresses the notion of photography as subject, questions the parameters of photography, challenges
the American artist canon, and exposes the modernist cultural icon these artists created.
In the 1970s Heinecken turned to new photographic processes such as instant photography, and used Polaroid's new SX-70 camera
to create works such as
He/She (1975-1980) and
Lessons in Posing Subjects (1981-1982). In the 1980s he produced what he called "videograms" by placing photographic (i.e. light sensitive) paper directly
onto a television screen to capture screen shots of key broadcast television moments such as President Ronald Reagan's first
inauguration.
Heinecken had three children with his first wife, Janet M. Storey. They figured in such works of his as
Visual Poem/About the Sexual Education of a Young Girl (1965) and
Kodak Safety Film/Christmas Mistake (1971). His second wife, Joyce Neimanas taught at UCLA and then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Heinecken
retired from UCLA and joined Neimanas in Chicago in 1996. In 2004 the couple moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where after
long suffering with Alzheimer's disease, Heinecken succumbed to pneumonia in 2006. During his lifetime his career was the
subject of two retrospectives: one at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1998), and the other at the Center for Creative
Photography in Tucson (2003). A posthumous retrospective held at MOMA (2014) traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles the
following year. Heinecken's archive is held at the Center for Creative Photography.
Sources consulted:
"Robert Heinecken: Paraphotographer," Arthur Ou speaks with Eva Respini,
Aperture, March 15, 2014, http://aperture.org/blog/robert-heinecken-paraphotographer.
Gundberg, Andy, "Robert Heinecken, Artist Who Juxtaposed Photographs, Is Dead at 74,"
The New York Times, May 22, 2006, page B6, NY edition.
The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Communications, "The Museum of Modern Art Presents a Retrospective of Robert Heinecken
in
Robert Heinecken: Object Matter," press release, 2014?, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_386896.pdf.
Scope and Contents of Collection
This finding aid provides a single access point for four separate collections related to Robert Heinecken's
...wore khakis project, a five-year endeavor centered on the GAP's 1990s khaki pants advertising campaign. Heinecken dissects, with
the deft precision of his X-acto knife, the narrative proffered in the advertisements, which feature vintage photographs of
celebrities wearing khaki pants, and bear the slogan "[famous name] wore khakis." By cutting through 28 of the advertisements
and binding them together to reveal numerous layers of famous people wearing khakis, Heinecken twists the ad campaign's implied
intimacy between celebrity and consumer. By these actions the viewer no longer simply shares a one-on-one connective moment
with a single personality, but rather is confronted with multiple personalities whose body parts have been recombined to create
new hybrid individuals, much as in the way the pages in children's flip-flap books can be endlessly rearranged to create figures
with amusingly mismatched heads, torsos and feet. It is within these layered relationships created by Heinecken's manipulations
that the viewer is ultimately left to reconsider one's real and suggested connections to both the individual celebrities depicted,
and to a vast, uniformly khaki-clad population.
Each of the first three acquisitions in the collection comprises as single, discrete iteration of Heinecken's
…wore khakis: Series I (accession number 2017.M.30),
GAP/NY Headaches, is a revised magazine that represents the first stage of the project; Series II (accession number 2017.M.31), contains the
prototype for Heinecken's final publication
…wore khakis; and the publisher's proof is found in Series III (accession number 2017.M.32). Finally, Series IV (accession number 2017.M.33)
comprises Nazraeli press records related to
…wore khakis, including correspondence between publisher Chris Pichler and Robert Heinecken; original materials relating to the various
components of the project; documentation of the project; and related ephemera, as well as legal correspondence related to
the GAP's objection to Heinecken's use of their advertising campaign.
The repository holds two collections related to Robert Heineken's portfolio
Recto/Verso.
Robert Heinecken production materials for
Recto/Verso, 1986-1990, accession no. 2017.M.41, includes the maquette for the portfolio, along with papers related to the design and
printing of the project.
Recto/Verso : A Portfolio of Twelve Photograms, 1989, accession no. 2012.M.38, comprises an editioned copy of the portfolio.
Robert Heinecken's archive is held at the Center for Creative Photography.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Artists' books -- United States -- 20th century
Photomechanical prints -- United States -- 20th century
Altered books -- United States -- 20th century
Photographs, Original
Celebrities -- Portraits
khaki
Advertising campaigns -- United States
Advertising -- Clothing and dress
New York (New York, N.Y.)
Inkjet prints -- United States -- 20th century
Printers' proofs -- United States -- 20th century
Black-and-white slides -- United States -- 20th century
Cartoons (humorous images) -- United States -- 20th century
Color slides -- United States -- 20th century
Diffusion transfer prints -- United States -- 20th century
Gelatin silver prints -- United States -- 20th century
Xyrographic copies -- United States -- 20th century
Correspondence -- United States -- 20th century
Picasso, Pablo, 1881-1973 -- Portraits
Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969 -- Portraits
Lombard, Carole, 1908-1942 -- Portraits
Bogart, Humphrey, 1899-1957 -- Portraits
Earhart, Amelia, 1897-1937 -- Portraits
GAP, Inc
Davis, Miles -- Portraits
Pagel, David
Clinton, Bill, 1946- -- Caricatures and cartoons
Heinecken, Robert, 1931-2006 -- Correspondence
Pichler, Chris -- Correspondence
Nazraeli Press
Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-1997 -- Portraits