Object Lesson: Robert Heinecken’s filtered television at the Hammer

It’s not the sort of thing you generally see in a museum: a comfortable easy chair, a working TV set turned to an afternoon talk show on which “Keeping Up With the Kardashians� mom Kris Jenner is making salsa and talking about her boob jobs.

But this unlikely arrangement is, in fact, a work of art, on view as part of the Hammer Museum’s Robert Heinecken retrospective, “Object Matter.� The longtime L.A. artist, who passed away in 2006, was known for his pioneering use of found photographs in sculptural assemblages and vast wall installations. He was also known for undertaking guerrilla actions, such as surreptitiously printing images into new editions of Time magazine and then returning the copies to the newsstand. (San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art has an example.)

Leslie Cozzi, a curatorial associate at the Hammer Museum who worked on the Heinecken show, says the ways in which the artist was working with pictures in the 1960s was quite radical.

“He turns away from a more documentary, realist and journalistic approach to photography,� she explains. “He’s got a much more technical, experimental approach, and it anticipated a lot of things that have happened since.�

“TV/Time Environment,� the installation featuring the easy chair and the television was made for an exhibition at the Downey Museum of Art in 1970. It consisted of items you might find in any American family room: an easy chair, a side table and a television turned to run-of-the-mill broadcast programming, such as news, sports or dishy talk shows. Layered over the television screen, however, is a transparency of a female torso -- which means anything you see on Heinecken’s TV is through a woman’s body.

Since it first appeared in Downey more than 40 years ago, “TV/Time Environment� has been reinstalled, in various guises, at other institutions, including the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1972 (later absorbed by the Norton Simon), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Heinecken’s “Object Matter� retrospective first opened in March.

I first saw the installation this spring at MoMA, where I spent a good 30 minutes watching a golf game through the woman’s figure. And then I spent another 30 to 40 minutes with it at the Hammer this month, where I caught the first half hour of “Dr. Oz.�

It is a strange and beguiling work, whose meaning seems to shift with every on-air utterance. An ad broadcasting subscriptions for Time Warner cable feels lurid, with dollar signs cast over the woman’s figure. But a moment later, when a public service announcement for breast cancer comes on the screen, the image of the ghostly female figure becomes melancholic, with faces of smiling cancer survivors visible through her hourglass shape.

When I saw “TV/Time� at MoMA, with the golf game on the screen, the work felt like a cheeky man toy. (All it needed was a beer.) The brilliant emerald of the greens turned the woman’s body into a color-field painting. And the announcer’s murmuring golf voice made it feel like surreal pillow talk.

At the Hammer, where I saw Kris Jenner’s appearance on “Dr. Oz,� the piece took on another world of meanings. Jenner was discussing body image, her breast surgeries and how important it is to have thick skin in Hollywood, all made more poignant by the transparency of the female nude, which served as a reminder of the physical rigors women face in just about every profession. After the interview, Jenner made chicken soup and fresh salsa as Oz looked on, and the whole set-up became absurd. The talk was of tomatoes and chiles, with the frame of the woman’s body occasionally occupied by the good doctor’s blocky head.

What could the artist have intended by placing a woman’s body over a TV set? That’s difficult to say, says Cozzi, of the Hammer. She says that Heinecken was the sort of artist who liked to keep his work ambiguous enough to leave things open to interpretation.

“To me, it’s a suggestion that everything is filtered through sex and desire,� she says. “Contemporary media is structured as a visual game of things you are supposed to want somehow. He knew that wasn’t the case just for advertising. He knew it was the case for news and sitcoms, too. He realized how pervasive that was and I think that’s what this gets at. But it has a sense of humor, too. In a lot of his work, there’s a really strong sense of humor.�

Regardless of intent, this is one of those pieces that creates a shift. Go home and watch your own TV for a while after seeing this piece and you’ll feel like you’ve been let in on television’s dirty secrets.

“Robert Heinecken: Object Matter,� is on view at the Hammer Museum through Jan. 18. 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, hammer.ucla.edu.

Twitter: @cmonstah