In Memoriam: Robert Heinecken

I remember the first time I laid eyes on Robert Heinecken. It was at an opening at the now long-departed N.A.M.E. Gallery, on Hubbard Street when Hubbard Street was the center of the alternative art scene in Chicago. I don't remember the show, but I remember the diminutive figure standing with his hands slid into his neatly pressed jean front pockets, his characteristic standing pose, western boots on his feet, his hair tied back into a long queue, his eyes glancing restlessly about. He struck me as formidable; he seemed not at ease but totally confident of himself all at the same time. I didn't approach or speak, even tho' I had every reason to, having studied photography at SAIC with several of his colleagues, including Joyce Neimanas, with whom he was in a long-distance relationship at that time.  

It took me years and years to realize not Robert Heinecken's importance as a contemporary art figure — that I knew — but that I must do a major exhibition of his work. I had mounted Kenneth Josephson's first Chicago retrospective at MCA in the early '80s; it was glaringly obvious Robert Heinecken was another figure in our midst who needed wider art world attention. Every artist I spoke to seemed to know of his work; photographers would become downright rhapsodic about Robert and his contributions, He seemed to me a more interesting figure than John Baldessari, a California colleague, who had come to major art world prominence after his major retrospective in the late 1980s. And he hadn’t had a major traveling retrospective since the late 1970s.

I think it might have been at another N.A.M.E. opening that I nervously approached Robert and introduced myself and stated my piece. Artists may think it strange that a curator would be nervous to ask an artist if he would be interested in a museum exhibition of any sort, but when one deals with artists the caliber of a Heinecken, any curator should rightfully shake in his boots, fearing rejection. The reasons for the rejection could be many: someone else has beaten you to the punch; your institution isn’t prestigious enough; you aren’t prestigious enough, and so on. Robert held his cards close to his vest. He seemed interested, but perhaps not. What I didn’t realize at the time was the way Robert reacted to my surely blundering manner of asking him if he’d be interested in a retrospective at the MCA was the way he reacted to everything: with quiet, careful deliberation.



As things seem to happen with me, when I started working on Robert’s retrospective, he was still a resident of Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Bucktown, a scant six blocks from my residence in Wicker Park. I took this as a sign that it was meant to be. I wouldn’t have to leave my young son for prolonged trips to Los Angeles; I could walk over to Robert’s studio on Wabansia and Wood easily whenever I wanted to. The retrospective took years to mount, and was only possible because of the support of the MCA’s then-director, Kevin Consey, as the then-chief curator had dismissed the idea of a show of Robert’s work as completely untenable, the reason being he “had never heard of Heinecken.” My argument of “well this is exactly why we need to mount the show; here’s an artist many haven’t heard of who is extremely important and influential.” Sometimes logic doesn’t suffice, as I have too often learned.



Robert was extraordinarily intelligent, extraordinary curious, and extraordinarily sensitive. I learned at some point he was interested in having me do his exhibition because I was a woman, and that my support of his work, often dismissed as misogynist, was important to him. I had always thought Robert’s so-called misogynist work was actually quite the opposite, that it laid bare cultural tendencies to reduce women to objects at the same time as it skewered prevailing feminist ideas that women could be equal to men only by ignoring the fact of the real differences between the sexes; my favorite work by Robert is “He/She,” Polaroid and text pieces that record conversations between men and women. My favorite of these is: He: I can actually smell those women who want me./She: What did I smell like?/He: Its not an individual smell./She: Bastard.

Even as I worked with Robert closely over the course of five and more years, he always held his cards close to his vest. He wanted you to look and decide for yourself. He was not interested in imposing his ideas, he was interested in pointing out patterns, tying together seemingly disparate things, delving deeply into things that seemed all surface: TV, fashion, pornography, snapshots. Each of his many technical innovations could provide an entire career for a lesser artist: the videogram; using printed pages as negatives; photo-sculpture, and so on.

Robert was having short-term memory problems even in the mid-1990s when I worked with him. It was difficult, and I couldn’t imagine what Joy Neimanas was going through. But one evening, while we were flying back to Chicago after a trip to New York, Robert quietly opened up about his past as a fighter pilot. He had crashed his plane during a training run and walked away; a trainee had died. He described the experience in measured, quiet tones, occasionally punctuated by his deep, explosive chuckling. I was riveted. I thought of Joseph Beuys’s fighter crash legend and compared the two. Beuys had spun a myth about his experience. Robert kept his close to his vest, a personal experience that had shaped him but that he would never use to aggrandize his persona as an artist. That was the essence of Robert, as a man and as an artist. I shall miss him very, very much.

Lynne