Robert Heinecken: Magazines

December 16, 2006 – March 11, 2007

For over four decades, the late Robert Heinecken was a trenchant observer of social and sexual politics. Although he rarely used the camera himself, he made innovative use of photography by combining found photojournalistic and advertising images into new works.

In the 1960s, he put this strategy to provocative use with a series of reconfigured magazines laden with highly charged content, which he then sometimes put surreptitiously back into circulation. For example, in his series Periodical #5, made at the height of the Vietnam War, Heinecken took magazines such as Glamour and overprinted the images of fashion models with horrific images of young Vietnamese soldiers, much to the surprise of newsstand consumers who had purchased his disruptive juxtapositions of pop culture and politics.

This exhibition gathered a rich selection of these and other magazine-based works, including works from the Smart Museum's collection and the artist's archive.