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In the handmade prototype for his artists book, ...wore khakis, Robert
Heinecken dissects, with the deft precision of his X-acto knife, the narrative proffered
in the GAP's 1990s advertising campaign featuring vintage photographs of celebrities
wearing khaki pants and bearing the slogan "[famous name] wore khakis." By cutting
through 28 of the advertisements and binding them together to reveal numerous layers of
famous people wearing khakis, Heinecken twists the ad campaign's implied intimacy
between celebrity and consumer: the viewer no longer simply shares a connective moment
with, for example, a seated and cross-legged Allen Ginsberg, since Ginsberg's torso has
been spliced away to create the appearance that Jack Kerouac, whose image is on the
following page, is sitting in his lap. But flip back a page, and Kerouac now seems
almost to be crouching beside the piano at which a laughing Bobby Short sits. Within
these layered relationships, the viewer is left to reconsider one's real and suggested
connections to both the individual celebrities depicted, and to a vast, uniformly
khaki-clad population. In the final illustration, Heineken himself stands uncut next to
an airplane in his khaki Marine fighter pilot jumpsuit, at once including himself in
this population, while simultaneously reminding the viewer of the military origins of
khakis.
Although all or part of a celebrity's name remains in the images, in a final humorous
twist Heinecken mixes up the names of the celebrities appearing in the original ads to
create "new" celebrities, whose names he writes on the blank pages opposite their
likenesses. Thus, the portrait of Pablo Picasso seated in his studio, where the cutout
makes him appear to be holding a small standing Amelia Earhart in his hands, is paired
with the text: Andy McQueen wore khakis. Follwing this fashion, in the final image
Heineken has tentitively renamed himself Raoul Heinecken and penciled in below his name:
(or Helmut?).
Following the final cutout (Miles Davis) three pages of printed text serve as place
markers for David Pagel's essay "The Gaps in the Ads: Robert Heinecken's Sabotaged GAP
Ads" and Heinecken's bibliography.
The prototype has white covers with a black spiral binding. Pasted lettering on front
cover reads: khakis. Pasted lettering on back cover reads: ...wore. A small yellow
sticky note taped to the front cover reads: Prototype / wire - O / should be / white?
The cutouts are pasted on black, gray or white art papers. The title is taken from the
title page.
Arrangement
In original order.
Acquisition information
Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon.
Preferred Citation
Prototype for Robert Heinecken's ...wore khakis, 1998, The Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2017.M.31.
