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No Blueprinttext by Robert Goethals, photography by Robert Heinecken

Robert Heinecken PP-Surrealism D JGS

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Son of a Lutheran minister, Robert Heinecken spent his giddy, Golden

State adolescence in Riverside, just a rip and run east of Los Angeles, a

city that beats wizard Shezams cave as a magical place promising

anybody can be a star and nothing is too stupid to be marketed.

Physically diminutive, Heinecken booked a double-Y stint in the Marines,

before returning afterwards to U.C.L.A., to dweeb out a Bachelors and

Masters while staying out all hours of the night.

Robert Heinecken Studies, 1970 #36

In 60, the photography worlds original badass began teaching in

the schools art department (a gig lasting three decades) and will

forever be remembered as an indefatigably curious, fiercely original

synthesizer of style who vaulted campus art jocks into a higher

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order of privilege. Vision was bolder than just seeing and being

shown and any brainiac roaming the Murphy Sculpture Garden will tell

you straight-up Robert Heinecken was a true-to-life Edward Teach

whose glittering gaze ran through our cold, pimpdaddy world like a

diamond-sharp cutlass.

Robert Heinecken. PP, Woman in Car #60. JGS

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From the get-go, Heinecken gave a rats ass about photography as a

means of replicating all the lovely crap you see all around you.

Instead of valuing photographs as autonomous works, Heinecken

gave his fellow contemporary art photographers, (like Mr. Picture

Postcard, Ansel Adams), all the reverence of vomited green-pea

soup. Soulful reproductions of pretty parks and pretty people got

you bounced from class.

Robert Heinecken. PP, Overlapped Faces D. JGS

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Lots of art school charm boys and pedagogical talk show hosts

overdefine visual literacy, but Robert Heinecken enlarged your

creative aptitude for visual messages with wild integrations of

lithography, etching, photo-collage, and 3-D installations. While

photography infiltrated all his work and the dude later became

identified as a photographer, the kicker is Heinecken rarely used a

camera. Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the

known world, Heinecken once stated, instead of vital objects which

create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference

between taking a picture and making a photograph.

Robert Heinecken Studies, 1970 #48 JGS

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Just as Robert Heinecken incited near-riots in the haute-monde of

Art History Departments coast-to-coast, about methodology, form,

and content, he was also a seer who hipped us to the fact were a

lot less involved in shaping our world than we think. Like Robert

Rauchenberg and Andy Warhol, who celebrated Dadaism and rolled

with the emergence of Pop Art in the 60s, Heinecken began

appropriating and cannibalizing printed images from the whirligig ofsocial and commercial landscapes to cooly question the nature of

our own perceptions.

Robert Heinecken PP-Two Women C JGS

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The man wanted you to think about pictures and consider just how

empty they are. How all these banging chicks, black smoking jackets,

and piston-driven underwear shaking your swelling head are

manufactured by a powerful, specialized clique of capaz who own

your sorry, distracted, and marginalized ass. Heinecken wanted you

to comprehend photography rather than use it. Like a guerilla in

enemy territory, his mission was to reveal how a photographs

representational power can misinform you rather than inform you,

manipulate rather than enlighten. Deeply suspicious of the invisible

presence of dark forces attempting to short-circuit our wee brains,

Robert Heinecken instead made us more fully conscious by delivering

us to loftier realms of thinking and feeling.

~ Robert Goethals, October, 2010