The performative nature of Robert Heinecken’s exceptionally rare artist’s books is transgressive. Beginning in 1969, Heinecken collected and dismantled magazines, developing an important body of work that explored the mechanisms of appropriation. In a gesture of critical infiltration and détournement, he sometimes returned his altered magazines to newsstands, allowing them to circulate unsuspectedly and disrupt readers' expectations. Politically charged, his practice conceived of the artist’s book not as a static object but as a performative field.
Heinecken created MANSMAG: Homage to Werkman and Cavalcade by converting every page of the men's erotic magazine Cavalcade into a negative and then reassembling the pages in random order. Using a newly acquired small offset press, he produced 120 unique copies in his own studio, each distinguished by different rainbow-coloured inks that frequently rendered the images and text partially illegible.
The work pays tribute to the experimental printing techniques of the Dutch avant-garde artist Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, who established a clandestine printing house during the Nazi occupation and was executed by the Gestapo in the closing days of the Second World War. In doing so, Heinecken subtly revisits the unsettling conjunction of eroticism and violence, a recurring theme throughout his broader Periodicals series.