No Blueprint

text by Robert Goethals, photography by Robert Heinecken

Robert Heinecken PP-Surrealism D JGS

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

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

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

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

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 of social and commercial landscapes to cooly question the nature of our own perceptions.

Robert Heinecken PP-Two Women C JGS

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