Robert Heinecken: ...wore khakis, Limited Edition
HEINECKEN, Robert, PAGEL, David

Publisher: Los Angeles, California: Robert Heinecken (self-published), and Nazraeli Press, Portland, Oregon, 1999

Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: New/No dust jacket as issued

First edition, first printing. Limited edition of 20 individually hand-made copies, numbered and signed in black ink on the title page by Heinecken, and stamped "FIRST PROOF" in black ink on the title page. Hardcover. White archival matt boards with title printed in black on matt white paper pasted to the front and back boards; white spiral binding; contained in a fine khaki cloth-covered clamshell box with the title stamped in black on the front and back. Includes an essay by David Pagel and a bibliography of works. Unpaginated (60 pp.), with 56 black and white printer's proofs (black and white "plates"), each meticulously hand-cut by the artist revealing multiple layers of selected sections of Gap ads in subsequent sheets. The resulting numerous "collages" that result, in some cases 4 or 5 pages deep, are nothing short of brilliant. The book is 10-1/2 x 8-5/8 inches; the clamshell box measures 11-5/8 x 9-1/4 inches. Out of print. One of the most rare, and very best, artist's books ever produced!

This extraordinary artist's book is a meticulously constructed succession of altered GAP clothing print advertisements from the 1990s that featured vintage, mostly 1940s-50s photographs of celebrities wearing khaki pants. One of Heinecken's most brilliant working methods--cutting out images from mass-media publications in order to reveal the complex layering and disintegration of meaning that occurs when the reader turns each page and can literally see beyond the surface--returns here in what amounts to a virtuoso artistic performance. As critic David Pagel writes in his essay The Gaps in the Ads: Robert Heinecken's Sabotaged GAP Ads, "Armed with only an X-Acto knife and stacks of GAP ads torn from everyday magazines, Heinecken hunkered down in a cramped little studio over a two-car garage in the Hollywood Hills and single-handedly turned a multi-million dollar advertising campaign on its ear...

Using nothing but his wits and a blade he got the GAP ads to tell stories that were radically different from the ones they were supposed to tell. Working with what was available to any citizen with open eyes and a sharp mind, Heinecken twisted the corporate images so that they'd send mixed messages and implicate viewers by getting us actively involved in ways that were neither intended by the originals nor anticipated by us...

Heinecken [creates] a sequence of images in which one celebrity always intrudes into another's ad. On each subsequent page, the previous page's intruder is likewise intruded upon by another celebrity...

In Heinecken's hands, barbed, do-it-yourself humor displaces the bland, homogenized illusions served up by the advertising industry. It's frankly hilarious to see Steve McQueen looking us in the eye and holding up his hand as if to say, 'Don't pay attention to Sammy Davis Jr. dancing behind me, I've got something really important to tell you.' [The book's final plate], the picture of Heinecken wearing his United States Marine Corps fighter pilot khaki flight suit, quietly links the GAP advertising campaign to military campaigns...

Combining advertising's seductive attractions with an unsettling edginess that's all the more potent because you don't know what it's selling, Heinecken's GAP project embodies the confidence that ordinary ads can be used against their own purposes--for ends that are liberating precisely because they are neither prescribed no clearly defines, but disruptive, optimistic, and unanticipated."

See for Heinecken in Retrospect ...