The big Pacific Standard Time shows at big museums (that have big PR departments) are receiving most of the attention, but there are a bunch of superb smaller shows too. Among the best is “Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976″ at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. The exhibition, curated by Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon, presents how the two artists, both of whom were interested in appropriating images from mass media, talked through their art.

Heinecken’s work is especially fascinating. He mined film, magazines, pornography and more for images and sequences which he then deconstructed. His best pieces — and there are plenty of ‘best of’ examples here — reveal what we consume as part of our media diet. For Heinecken there was little difference between an advertisement and editorial copy or photographs. As we might say today, for Heinecken it was all content. Many of the juxtapositions he points out reveal how numbly we consume media and the extent to which things that we should find somewhat questionable — particularly advertising images and the male-dictated relationship between gender and sex — is cleverly slipped into our subconscious by slick media professionals. If you like “Mad Men,” you’ll love Robert Heinecken. It’s hard to imagine John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Christian Marclay or Douglas Gordon without him.

One of Heinecken’s best works here is Different Strokes (1970/97), which appropriates images from pornography. Bohn-Spector details the piece in her catalogue essay:

“Different Strokes… was his largest work to date [it's about 42-by-63 inches] and directly engages concepts of cinematic time. ‘So the first panel would be, let’s say, made from a super imposition of A and B,’ Heincken explained. ‘The next one, which would be adjacent to it, would be B and C, and C and D, and so on, so that if you look at the structure of the picture it’s really narrative from left to right… it’s definitely a picture that leans on a film premise in that way.’”

Previously: De Wain Valentine’s Diamond Column (1978).