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simultaneously, creating unexpected juxtapositions that uncovered the subliminal workings of modern mass media.  The images of Are You Rea are not deliberate compositions, but revelations of real world proximities that are rarely if ever noticed.  The title "Are You Rea" came from a brassiere ad that originally sprawled across two magazine pages.  On the single page Heinecken picked for his work, the word "Real" or "Ready" was cut off, resulting in a suggestive wordplay that cleverly exposed media artifice and hype.

"Language is wonderful," Heinecken stated.  "You can take the same ten words which are a logical sentence of some kind that everybody understands, and you can reverse the order of the words.  You then have a different thing.  You still pronounce the words, but they don't make sense, because the structure has shifted.  Eventually that idea becomes poetry. ... It's just a flexible set of conditions with which you can do anything."  In 1969, he produced his perhaps most aggressive and disturbing work when he bought a stack of Time magazines at his local newsstand in Culver City.  He splashed the photograph of a smiling soldier with the decapitated heads of two Vietnamese children indiscriminately over fashion shots and editorials, then returned the magazines to the sales rack to be bought by unsuspecting consumers.  Such guerilla tactics and his subsequent work with pornographic imagery earned him a controversial reputation.  A provocateur in the best sense of the word, he managed the rare feat of offending both the reigning middle class and emerging feminist artists who were rapidly becoming a powerful influence in the visual arts.  As one of the de facto inventors of appropriation as a creative method, Heinecken was an important precursor to conceptional artists of the 1970s and 1980s, prefiguring the work of Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine by almost a decade.

Speaking in Tongues will pick up the artists' story in 1961, when Berman returns to Los Angeles after a four-year hiatus in the Bay area following the debacle of his 1957 Ferus Gallery show.  Heinecken has just completed his Masters of Fine Art at UCLA, making first professional steps as a preparator and designer at the UCLA (now Wight) Art Gallery and creating independent work.  Both live within blocks of each other in the Beverly Glen neighborhood of West Los Angeles and become casual friends even while traveling in different artistic circles.  The exhibition ends with Berman's untimely death in a car accident in February of 1976 near his house in Topanga Canyon.  That year Heinecken, too, found himself at a crossroads after finishing his Guggenheim funded Cliché Vary series, which he considered a culmination of his visual explorations of the past decade.  The end of his first marriage and a fire that destroys his Culver City Studio in the summer of 1976 were personal milestones that further suggest a natural closing point of this exhibition.

Through an interdisciplinary display of original art works and ephemera, Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken hopes to capture the spirit of irreverence and innovation that permeated this important era in Southern California art.  The show will consist of approximately 100 objects (including ephemera) displayed to maximum visual effect in a gallery of little over 3,000 square feet.  The exhibition will be open to the public between September 25 and November 13, 2011.  A fully illustrated catalog and a free brochure, as well as a series of public programs, are also planned.

THE CURATORS

Claudia Bohn-Spector, an independent writer and curator in Los Angeles, CA, received her Ph.D in art history from the University of Munich.  She has previously organized numerous photography exhibitions, most recently a critically acclaimed survey of Los Angeles photography at the Huntington Library, entitled This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs (with Jennifer A. Watts).  With Watts, she also organized Envisioning Eden: Water and the Selling of L.A. (1997) and The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West (2001), which received the top exhibition catalog award from the American Library Association in 2002.  At the Getty Research Institute, she helped direct the international research and exhibition project Imaging the City: The Formation and Display of Urban Identities in the Americas, and authored August Sander: Photographs from the J.