Robert Heinecken and the Art of Appropriation

Matthew Biro

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781452966717
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media

This is the first book-length study dedicated to the artist Robert Heinecken, whose innovative photographic practices sought to interrogate how mass media imagery facilitated the construction of individual and collective identities. Appropriating, rephotographing, and layering pictures culled from newspapers, advertisements, pornography, and television, Heinecken recombined and transformed the ubiquitous images of mass culture to encourage viewers to critically reflect on their sense of self. 

From the 1960s through the late 1990s, Heinecken’s controversial art continually challenged inherited ideas around consumerism, the facticity of reportage, and visual culture’s relationship to gender and identity politics. Embodying the evolution of contemporary art toward increasingly hybrid and conceptual approaches, his oeuvre includes examples of painting, sculpture, photomontage, performance, installation, time-based media, and artist’s books, all of which collectively exploit photography’s reproducibility to subvert society’s dominant ideologies and stereotypical modes of representation.

Author Matthew Biro presents an exhaustive look at Heinecken’s life and art, locating him within a lineage that encompasses the activities of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and the postmodern strategies of the Pictures Generation artists. Assessing his career within the specific political and historical contexts from which he gleaned his material, and illustrated throughout with vibrant full-color reproductions of his art, this in-depth examination demonstrates Robert Heinecken’s significance as a key figure of twentieth-century art and an incisive commentator on modern life in America. 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Art, Photography, and the Consumption of Identity
• Chapter 1. Artist and Educator: Criticizing the American Family Ideal through 35mm Photography
• Chapter 2. Documents of Manufactured Experience: Appropriation and the Photogram in the 1960s
• Chapter 3. The Photographic Object: Heinecken's Materialism
• Chapter 4. Magazine Work: American Disaster and Identity
• Chapter 5. Art, Pornography, Painting: Heinecken's Relationship to Feminism
• Chapter 6. The Polaroid Experience: Instantaneous Photography and the Performance of Identity
• Chapter 7. Surrealism on TV: Ronald Reagan and the Newscasters
• Chapter 8. Appropriation in the 1980s and 1990s: History and the Body at the End of the Analog Era
• Coda: Heinecken’s Significance
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author