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.
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.
