Bruce Davidson. New York City, 1959. Brooklyn Gang. Courtesy: Magnum Photos.

No one likes being called an amateur, a dilettante, a dabbler.

“Unprofessional” is an easy insult.

The professional always makes the right moves, knows the right thing to say, the right name to check. Controlled and measured, the professional never fucks the wrong person or drinks too much at the party. They never weep at the opening, never lay in bed for days too depressed, sick, broken to move. They say about the professional, “so easy to work with” or “so exacting but brilliant.” The professional takes advantage from every encounter, employs every new acquaintance as a contact, always hits the deadline. When asked about their work, they know what to say, a few lines of explanation sprinkled with enough filigreed intrigue to allude to abysses of research, the mysteries of making. They answer emails in minutes. Their PowerPoints are super crisp. Look at their website, so clean, so modern, so very pro.

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Rebecca Belmore. Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowen: Speaking to Their Mother, 1991; Presented by the Walter Phillips Gallery as part of the exhibition Bureau de Change, July 12–September 28, 2008. Banff National Park, Johnsons Lake, July 26th, 2008; Courtesy of the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre. Photo: Sarah Ciurysek.

Your voice matters.

A desperate holler, a drunken song to the moon, a cold and broken hallelujah. A prisoner’s prayer.

The words take shape, the vision becomes a picture, a sculpture, a photograph. This is yours. And it really matters.

Wrapped in the word author of course is authority, who gets it and who doesn’t? Many doubt they have a voice at all.

We live in a frightening time of political crisis. Maybe this truth always depends on where you’re standing. Where does art fit into this, if at all? I have often heard art disparaged as useless frippery, as a distractive entertainment, as a commodity for the rich, or as useful only when hitched to a distinct political doctrine. Art in service of the revolution. Many think art is totally useless, a few even hold up art’s uselessness is its most important trait. An art that advances human rights and an “art for art’s sake” are not mutually exclusive. John Berger wrote in The White Bird (1985): “Several years ago, when considering the historical face of art, I wrote that I judged a work according to whether or not it helped men in the modern world claim their social rights. I hold to that.” But he goes on: “Art’s other, transcendental, face raises the question of man’s ontological right.” Or in other words, our social right to existence, our right to make and explore meaning for ourselves, our right to a consciousness and a voice, no matter what we might say with it.

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Robert Heinecken. Recto/Verso #2, 1988. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Clark Winter Fund.

In a dentist’s office, underneath a shadow cast from a fluorescent light on a sickly pot of browning philodendrons atop a chipped coffee table, sit stacks of old magazines. Dog-eared and well-thumbed, rustling with their cheap paper, clad with gaudy covers begging questions and enticements for a passerby to peek into their pages. Time and Glamour, Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle, Golf Digest and Sports Illustrated, a smattering of titles beginning with “Popular.” Flipping through, the nervy bruxists and trenchmouthers fidget until summoned for their scrapings and cleanings, analgesics and block injections, skimming headlines about the White House and the Kennedys, 100 Great Recipes and 100 Gifts from $1.00 to $10.00, Trimmings to Make Parties Fun for Hostesses Too and When He Caught Me in Another Man’s Bedroom. Amidst all of these tidbits and news items, tawdry page-turners and housewifely time-savers, the publishers tuck in a healthy swath of advertisements, the difference between ad and article often fluid. But within these sundry, expected, and quotidian distractions from impending root canals, there appear other unsanctioned pictures.

Across from a duo of models tautly clothed in the latest Parisian fashions, a couple of quite naked ladies, tan lines ablaze, lean in for a carnal smooch. Overlaying the bottle blonde in the brown, boat-like sedan of the Pontiac ad beckons a big-chested lass in negative exposure, naked except for a pair of knee-high go-go boots. Does one imagine an aged dowager keeling over in disgusted shock, a pizza-faced teenage boy with maximalist orthodontia vibrantly sweating as he runs through various plans to casually pocket the magazine for closer, handier examinations? Does it startle, quicken pulses, titillate pink parts, provoke outrage? Does it do anything, or is it just passively accepted, not even seen, a picture received only subliminally by that patient idly flicking through? Sneaking doctored magazines into doctor’s offices and newsstands was only one of artist Robert Heinecken’s punkish tactics from the 1960s till his illness and death in 2007. This ex-marine fighter pilot and full-time prof enjoyed sticking his sticky fingers into the content and form of received culture, all those bombarding images selling us this and that, and usually sex (lust rarely being free for anyone in the Christian, patriarchal, and bourgeois circumstances of postwar America). He did this without using a camera but using the images themselves, beginning with a series of twenty-five photograms from 1964–68 titled Are You Rea after a chopped headline that numerous critics suggest could be “real” or “ready” and to the artist might have been a Duchampian pun on Man Ray. (Both Marcel and Man alongside László Moholy-Nagy were early inspirations.) In this attractive portfolio, reprinted from photographic paper into lithographs, the facing pages in a magazine superimpose their negative images, conflating the two in weird, often suggestive ways. Though his works could be occasionally ham-fisted or literal (one image he slipped into popular magazines was a particularly violent shot from 1971 of a grinning Cambodian soldier hoisting two decapitated heads), the artist mostly avoided letting his work fall into didactic investigations into media power by locating his inquiries in desire, his own desire. Even his breakdowns of news anchors and politicians sometimes have smeary Vaseline on the lens, diffusing and mixing in ways that feel lurid, though sometimes spooky. You can almost tell that the best works are the ones that got him off the most.

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