Description
The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media This is the first book-length study dedicated to the artist Robert Heinecken, whose innovative photographic practices sought to interrogate how mass media imagery facilitated the construction of individual and collective identities. Appropriating, rephotographing, and layering pictures culled from newspapers, advertisements, pornography, and television, Heinecken recombined and transformed the ubiquitous images of mass culture to encourage viewers to critically reflect on their sense of self. From the 1960s through the late 1990s, Heinecken's controversial art continually challenged inherited ideas around consumerism, the facticity of reportage, and visual culture's relationship to gender and identity politics. Embodying the evolution of contemporary art toward increasingly hybrid and conceptual approaches, his oeuvre includes examples of painting, sculpture, photomontage, p