New Art Examiner
February, 2000
Museum of Contemporary Art
, Chicago
Stolen, Captured: Robert Heinecken, Kenneth Josephson
by Claire Wolf Krantz
Some artists’ ideas and images become so completely integrated into contemporary art’s discourse that their place in history is overlooked by their heirs. The oeuvres of Robert Heinecken and Kenneth Josephson are prime examples: As conceptual photographers, these artists have extended the medium’s domain for the past 35 years, while altering its theoretical basis to such an extent that their once radical ideas and innovations now seem commonplace. Early on, both men challenged the idea that photography reveals truth, and questioned the notion that its status as art can be separated from its image-makinq properties in the world. Thus their career retrospectives are timely: Heinecken’s at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and Josephson’s at The Art Institute of Chicago. Both shows opened last September, offering a rare opportunity to better understand and compare the works of these two late-twentieth-century photographers.
Heinecken and Josephson resemble two parallel streams that flow side by side, sometimes touching, but essentially following their own separate paths. The two men are friends, now living a few blocks from each other in Chicago. In the 1950s, before graduate school, they held various types of jobs as well as serving in the military. They were then educated in the climate of late Modernism, in which painting, sculpture, and photography were still being defined in terms of their unique qualities. Both Josephson and Heinecken attained recognition as early as the mid-1960s for their radical departures from the limitations of the prevailing trends of Modernism. Later, their long careers as teachers provided them with a base from which to develop and disseminate their ideas.
Though the colleagues emerged as artists at roughly the same time, they pursued distinct directions in their work. While Heinecken questioned the necessity of using a camera in order to address questions specific to photography, Josephson worked to extend photography’s boundaries by pursuing the Modernist project of self referentiality, composing his images as foils to the medium. Josephson’s chiefly black-and-white prints support the idea that fine-art photographs need to be beautiful, classically conceived, and well designed. Using visual information from the world in the service of formal innovation, he asked questions peculiar to photography and its relationship to the camera lens. By interrogating the truthfulness of the camera’s record of time, space, and events within its frame, as well as pondering the position of the photographer within this inquiry, he philosophically examined and pushed the limits of photography’s theoretical foundation.
Heinecken, on the other hand, was never involved in photography’s historically based self-definitions because he was educated as a painter and printmaker. From the beginning he stood outside Modernism, examining his world and his place in it by manipulating already existing images. He was more interested in our image-saturated culture than in making his own originals, focusing on the pop culture of Southern California where he grew up, went to school (University of California at Los Angeles), and developed as an artist. Using vernacular sources, Heinecken called attention to our everyday reality, revealing ways in which we identify divisions of viewable acceptability (i.e. between images of pornography and advertising).
In contrast, Josephson is a Midwesterner, having spent most of his mature life in Chicago. His graduate studies at the Institute of Design in Chicago focused his attention on the history of photography, a Bauhaus design aesthetic, and an attitude of experimentation closely tied to a kind of scientific inquiry encouraged by the school’s founder, LaszIo Moholy-Nagy. Faculty member Harry Callahan was the most important influence in Josephson’s methodical approach to developing coherent bodies of work and in pursuit of an idea. Like Callahan’s, Josephson’s best work has a stark beauty and elegance. The younger artist learned from and developed the elder’s legendary control of multiple exposures to create Surrealist-like surprises. Callahan’s ability to combine the spontaneity of a snapshot with the classicism of a carefully composed picture also became central to Josephson’s oeuvre.
To describe a fundamental component in his vision, Josephson uses the term "presence" in two ways: the sense of the materiality conveyed by the representation of a particular object or form, exemplified in his long-term study of trees; and the literal presence of the photographer taking the picture. By putting aspects of himself in his pictures, he probes the photographer’s role in what is chosen, revealed, or hidden in the transient nature of photographic truth. In “Drottningholm, Sweden,” 1967, Josephson’s hand is pictured holding at arms’ length a postcard of the titled castle shot in summer, lined up within a view of the real thing, now in a barren winter scene. Further, in his famous "frame within a frame" pictures, Josephson placed one or several photographs from various sources within each of the final pictures. Thus he emphasized the subjectivity of photography, continually pointing out that there is a photographer positioned behind the lens choosing what to include within the frame of the picture and what to leave out. He photographed his son Matthew as a toddler holding his own upside-down photo as though it were a camera, his finger cocked in imitation of his famous father. In other works Josephson’s shadow is part of the scene. “Matthew, 1963” is a picture of his son as a tiny infant engulfed in the enormous, elongated shadow of his father, who is photographing him. Josephson also placed measuring sticks in the frame to mark his scenes, again assuring us of his presence. Although these pictures suggest that the rulers provide real measurements, they actually defeat the viewer’s understanding of the landscape’s size relative to that of the measuring stick.
In other works he addressed photo history directly, constructing photographs that referred to those of his celebrated predecessors. In his hilarious Thinking of E.W., Chicago, 1976, he conflated two of Edward Weston’s subjects, perfect female nudes and sensuous vegetables, to produce a frontal photograph of a man’s hairy torso, an eggplant held in place of his genitals.
When Josephson began his career, the field of photography was still concerned with validating itself as art, having created its own specific language and traditions. Battle lines were drawn between abstraction and references to the real, as well as the kinds of cameras and types of images that were acceptable (i.e. the perfect exposures and prints of an Edward Weston versus the street photography of a Gary Winograd). Josephson’s mentors at the Institute of Design had explored abstraction, inventive use of light, multiple imagery, and the like, and had encouraged similar experiments in their students. Josephson’s terse pictures serve and enhance these goals. However, he began breaking rules by questioning photographic parameters even as he worked within them, incorporating humor and irony – through unexpected juxtapositions and odd subjects – into questions about the nature of photography and how the character of the camera’s lens shapes what we accept as reality.
Throughout his career, Josephson has continued to make pictures that emphasize the abstract issues of his early training. In his "Books" series, he focused on the formal abstractions created by some complicated folds in thick telephone books. Other, seemingly straightforward photos of street scenes and landscapes in India, Europe, and the United States capture the momentary play of light on moving subjects, becoming abstract designs. His most recent pictures of trees, bushes, and fields form patterns of light and dark, sometimes covered with translucent protective materials, or lines traced by objects located outside the frame. They suggest that Josephson no longer needs to place odd objects into his scenes in order to mark the place or insinuate his own presence. Now his eye does it all through its practiced framing and keen sense of balanced composition. Formally enriched by a lifetime of inventing photographic devices to emphasize the photographer’s participation in creating the stage for his pictures, presently he projects a confident sense of himself in his choices of singular form and odd juxtapositions as they cohere into stunning abstractions.
Although similarly obsessed with photographic images, Robert Heinecken has veered away from the individual’s creative use of the camera and toward examining the way all images operate on their beholders in the social world. His use of non-camera techniques and appropriations of photographs from non-fine-art sources examine our culture’s use of images and how these images are inextricable from the way we view and shape our reality.
His early influences were the Dadaists, in particular John Heartfleld’s combination of innovative style (photomontage) with political content. Equally pertinent are the Dadaist’s antiauthoritarian attitudes, interest in chance, and use of vernacular images in the service of addressing social and political issues. But unlike the Dadaist desire to use photographs to communicate information and ideas, Heinecken’s main interest is in exploring the way photographs are used to persuade. He suggests that the pictures that saturate our society influence our self-definitions of sexuality, value, and gender roles by implying that what is pictured is what is deemed valuable.
Further, in his various portrayals of the nude body, he reveals the fundamentally erotic nature of both the art-historical female nude and the female as elemental nature. In one group of modified magazines, Heinecken added pages from pornographic publications to news or fashion magazines and distributed them in public places such as doctors’ offices and on newsstands. In other magazine pieces, he cut through layers of pages to expose one set of photographic images to another such as celebrities and Gap ads. The juxtapositions compare culturally acceptable yet questionable images – ads for guns, cigarettes, alcohol, or lingerie – to culturally unacceptable pornographic images. Thus, the sequencing of the images in real time (via turning the pages) affects our understanding of them and calls attention to the linear juxtapositions in magazines that shape our view of our environment.
Written language is also an important component of Heinecken’s work. The images and texts are equal in weight: neither explains the other; they sometimes add to and sometimes undermine the implied meanings of the photographs. The S.S. Copyright Project "On Photography," 1978, consists of two large portraits of Susan Sontag, collaged from small bits of paper in gradations of light and dark, recalling Chuck Close’s gridded portraits. The collage elements in the left-hand panel are snippets of texts from Sontag’s book On Photography, while the right-hand image is made of an assortment of tiny photographs. By referring to Sontag’s well-known book, which champions artworks that are easily explained through lanquage, Heinecken questions our society’s propensity to favor such artwork. Moreover, by comparing textual snippets to pictures, Heinecken forces a comparison between text arid image-based information, suggesting they are different but equal. Additionally, because the gradations of gray in each unit can only be perceived as Sontag’s face from a distance, while text and the details of images must be read up close, this work demonstrates that the viewer’s location in relationship to the work affects the comprehension of it.
Male-female relationships, erotic yet ambivalent, permeate much of Heinecken’s work as subject matter. “He:/She:” is an assortment of snapshots juxtaposed with hilarious hand-lettered texts, written by Heinecken, which represent dialogues between "He" (Heinecken) and "She" (a series of women/lovers). For instance, in one of a 1975-78 series of SX-70 Polaroids and text on board, four snapshots of a man and woman making love, an erect penis, a gun shaped toothbrush in a holster, and a beach blanket are captioned with the following:
He: You look pensive.
She: I’m wondering if all of this is related to the male menopause.
He: Perhaps it’s more like a late puberty.
She: Both have the same transparency.
In this section of the show, because the dialogues are clever slices of real-life tensions that exist between men and women, I found myself laughing out loud – in an art exhibit – and I found other people laughing with me. These works dryly indicate various differences in the underlying assumptions and desires that people bring to relationships.
The manipulative aspects of television newscasts and the situation of female newscasters is the subject of other works, In a 1984 book and subsequent installation,”Case Study in Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman” Heinecken pretends to help the "CBS Morning News” choose a female co-anchor for newscasters Bill Kurtis and Steve Baskerville. On the supposition that the applicant’s intelligence or experience is less important to the choice than the woman’s appearance in relationship to the men, he overlapped potential applicants’ faces with those of Kurtis and Baskerviile to determine the most aesthetic visual mix. When on target, the resulting composite images ironically claim to offer subliminal information to improve the networks’ ratings.
In this work, Heinecken’s techniques predate the use of computers to merge faces, although he has never used a computer himself. Produced long before the wide-spread availability of the new technology, these and other layered images resemble contemporary digitally produced pictures and are sometimes mistaken for them. Furthermore, works such as his “On Photography” diptych, probably derived from the dot-matrix units of offset printmaking, anticipate the pixels of digital graphics.
In the 1990s, Heinecken created large relief collages based on an image of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and recreation. Shiva is commonly represented as a multi-armed dancing figure and is also worshipped in the symbolic form of an erect phallus. His Shivas are composed of and surrounded by popular and traditional images from many cultures and time periods, in a symbolic globalizing of politics, religion, sex, and fame. The Shiva images symbolize the eroticism and fecundity underlying much of his work. Particularly in Heinecken’s over-determined use of media images associated with sexuality, Shiva’s powers of deconstruction and reconstruction serve as a metaphor for how artwork functions as a tool to illuminate and reconfigure social aspects of our culture.
In a series of life-size stand-ups of famous people or archetypes (mermaid, cop, mad scientist), Heinecken levels all of the perceived diversity in the banal American media. In contradistinction to this generalization, he fabricated a particularized double self-portrait that reveals more details than a standard image. Pictured from the front in his military uniform, he looks like an aging, tired, stooped fighter pilot. Seen from the back, he wears everyday jeans, sports his usual gray ponytail, and carries, of all things, a camera. This self-portrait is a clever spoof on the persona of the artist as hero, on portraits as a traditional art form, and on the art world’s attitude toward aging artists. (This is my favorite piece in the show.)
Whereas Kenneth Josephson proclaims his physical presence in his works, Heinecken includes his psyche in his pictures by placing his own personal concerns such as sexuality, aging, and interpersonal relationships into larger psychological and sociological perspectives. Using his private fantasies as source material, he connects them to what exists in our culture: He illuminates and analyzes the way people actually are, rather than projecting illusions of what we may wish them to be.
Because of his interest in pornography, some feminists have vociferously complained that Heinecken exploits women’s bodies for his own gain. I believe that it is crucial to pay attention to the artist’s intent and point of view when judging the work. Many other artists claim that the social issues they address exist "out there," not in their own actions or art works. Seeking to point out problems, not to understand them, they place themselves above, or outside of, the social ills that plaque our society. On the other hand, Heinecken strives to unearth the depth and complexity of male desire and the influence of popular culture on this desire. His presentation of himself and his artwork as being part of the social problem, rather than as a simple hermetic projection of personal fantasy, is crucial to understanding the work. His sexually explicit images are an integral part of an oeuvre in which pornography contextualizes media images to illuminate the fantasies that underlie our culture. These fantasies are not one-sided: women are implicated in these issues as well. The fact that many women derive pleasure from exposing their bodies to the male gaze is subtly addressed in some of Heinecken’s images, i.e. those of orgasmic women posing as Mother Earth. The erotic male/female dance step is also found in “He:/She:” in which an important component is the alternating voices in the text, recording both the female and male points of view.
Clearly, the innovations of Josephson, Heinecken, and their contemporaries are now a part of mainstream thought. However, as in science, it often becomes difficult to talk about the influence of significant innovators since the fate of their contribution is to become part of the common language, thus losing their status as original referent. Josephson’s series of pictures and installations that explore placing a photograph within a photograph has been commonly repeated in every kind of media. A number of artists began using the technique of overlapping and combining vernacular images and texts into their works. At the same time that Heinecken began exploring the use of appropriated photographs from the media to critique society, other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg were incorporating them into paintings and assemblages for different purposes. Photographic materials are used as formal devices to extend the boundaries of fine art, but are unimportant as photographic images per se and mostly irrelevant as cultural critique. Many contemporary artists now use these devices – which both Heinecken and Josephson pioneered in the 1960s – either for the purpose of formal exploration or as cultural critique.
Heinecken and Josephson continue to produce significant work and to influence young artists. Best known within the field of photography, they have raised important questions about the nature of images and the implication of a camera as a recording device. Their wit is an important ingredient in a broad range of works that is also significant because of the artists’ intelligence and inventiveness, their technical virtuosity and aesthetic resolution.