Robert Heinecken Libri

A photographic innovator and conceptual artist, Robert Heinecken played an important role in the development of contemporary art practice. That role is critically assessed in this exhibition catalog, which accompanies a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. This volume, the first comprehensive book on Heinecken since 1980, illustrates all the major work in his thirty-year career, and features essays by leading photography critic and historian A.D. Coleman and exhibition curator Lynne Warren.

Robert Heinecken (1931-2006) seldom used a camera. A self-described "para-photographer," he repurposed found imagery to explore the underpinnings of daily life. He cut into periodicals--snipping heads from lithe bodies and slicing rouged lips from smiling cheeks--and reorganized these fragments into collaged wholes that reveal the greed, hypocrisy and misogyny behind traditional depictions of America. This book presents Heinecken's Periodicals (1969-72) and Revised Magazines (1989-94) as 25 facsimiles. Originally conceived as insertions into everyday life, these collage-publications were taken from newsstands, altered and then returned to be purchased by unsuspecting consumers. By pasting a Vietnam War image into fashion magazines or a dominatrix into Time, Heinecken created serials that are disturbing yet familiar; known cultural referents now oppose their presumed functions.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title, this book presents the series Lessons in Posing Subjects which Robert Heinecken created in 1981-1982 and reproduced here in its entirety for the first time. Playing with the reality effect inherent to instant photographs, Heinecken re-contextualizes in this series images found in mail order catalogues, which he juxtaposes with ironic texts. At once seductive and full of humour, his 'lessons' are no less provocative, bearing witness to the commitment of this controversial artist, who considered his approach a form of 'guerrilla' artistic practice.0Exhibition: Wiels, Brussels, Belgium (16.05-17.08.2014)