Director, Glenn Lowry: The slide projectors in Surrealism on TV are filled with images photographed from television. The 'surrealism' of the title alludes to the strange combinations created by the rotating slides. Curator Eva Respini.
Curator, Eva Respini: Each one of the slide projectors are projecting images at a different speed. In fact, it's like a slot machine: you very rarely get the same three images lined up. This work is very much about chance operations, what happens to come up; but it's also very much about the technology of Heinecken's time period, which is slides. It was the way in which one could easily and cheaply project images.
I think to a certain extent it mirrors how he himself interacted with TV. He was known to be a ace channel-flipper. For a period in his life Heinecken became very obsessed with female newscasters, and he made a number of bodies of work around this theme. In Surrealism on TV you see the female newscasters as a main element. Among them are Barbara Walters, Jane Pauley, and Faith Daniels. He was very interested in the rise of the female newscaster in the mid-80s and was also interested in the 'types' of female newscasters, investigating how these women looked, how they portrayed themselves, how the media cast them, as a way to comment on media culture.