ROBERT HEINECKEN American, b. 1931 Different

Exhibition
Robert Heinecken, Photographist,The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, October 2-November 28, 1999 and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 13 to April 24, 2000.

Literature
Museum of Contemporary Art, Robert Heinecken, Photographist, 1999, n.p.

"Superimpositional, negative (reversed) and combinational methods seem to me to be innate to the photographic process. The fact that light initially causes density and, hence, a reversed image seems relevant. The fact that the emulsion is on a transparent base seems important. The fact that emulsion can be applied to almost any surface is a gift."
Robert Heinecken, Untitled 7/8, 1974

Robert Heinecken belongs to a generation of artists who defied conventional photographic thinking, accepting as a given that the process of picture making itself demanded that alchemy should reign and standardization be abolished. Heinecken, along with Bea Nettles, Betty Hahn and others were deeply involved in "alternative" processes. From their point of view however, it was the rest of the world that had chosen the alternative.

Different Strokes… Is a work that cannot exist in any other medium. Comprised of several images sandwiched, reversed, flipped and repeated, it is an orchestration of pornographic imagery, enhanced with chalk and made nearly life-size. For an artist known for his photographic work, it might come as a surprise that Heinecken did not use a camera until he started making Polaroids with an SX-70 in the late 1970s.

Heinecken began appropriating imagery in the 1960s from men's magazines, mail order pornographic films (undeveloped, to avoid Federal interstate anti-obscenity laws) and from television. Different Strokes…, with its serial imagery, allows Heinecken to parody the very source of his imagery, pornographic films with the flimsiest narrative.

Please see lot 275 for a study utilizing the same combination of negatives.