UC Riverside

Robert Heinecken's early works represent an artist in the liminal space between well-known and well-worn modern art practices and the beginnings of a burgeoning postmodern art movement. Heinecken's own practice, emanating from his photography laboratory at UCLA, acted as a clarion call for a new generation of artists to repudiate outmoded photographic practices based on Group f/64 aesthetics and Clement Greenberg's notion of medium specificity. Thus Heinecken was in the vanguard of the movement now known as postmodernism. Unfortunately, Heinecken has not been given due consideration in art historical scholarship for his influential corpus of concept-driven work. Only in recent years--due in part to the Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative, which established Los Angeles as a central source of postwar artistic innovation--has scholarship critically approached Heinecken's oeuvre. I suggest that a more thorough understanding of Heinecken's objectives would reveal the debt that postmodern art practices owe to him.

My thesis, "Robert Heinecken's TV/Time Environment," investigates Heinecken's engagement with emergent aesthetic and theoretical concerns of the 1960s and 1970s. I employ Heinecken's TV/Time Environment, (1970), as a case study because it is an installation which exemplifies the aesthetic and theoretical objectives of Heinecken's early work. With TV/Time Environment, Heinecken fully realized a critique the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of mass media imagery. I argue that Heinecken's innovative installation piece acted as a nodal point for three critical frameworks--semiotic theory, surrealist art practices, and media criticism--all of which informed TV/Time Environment, and which were subsequently redeveloped in the post-photographic work of other artists that appeared in Heinecken's wake. My analysis of TV/Time Environment reinforces the installation's impact in both the 1970s and the present. My thesis is not a comparative project, but an examination of the effect of modernist theories upon a critical early postmodern work.