WEISS: IMAGES OF THE ‘80s

If exhibitions of contemporary art photography seem scarce these days, one of the reasons may be that most synthetic photography worth its silver salts is being rapidly assimilated into the mainstream. As more artists make use of photosensitive materials and media imagery in their work, distinctions between artists who use photography and photographers who make art become irrelevant.

The current fare at the Burnett Miller Gallery, a La Brea Avenue showcase that rarely exhibits photography, offers evidence of this. On view is the work of Jeff Weiss, a Bronx-born, chain-smoking New Yorker with an elfin grin, who has spent the last two years in Los Angeles teaching photography at UCLA and making dramatic wall-size Cibachrome constructions. His recent work--filled with TV-generated imagery, cultural icons and multilayered symbolic content--is on exhibit through Oct. 18.

“I’ve always been less interested in making photographs than in making unique art objects,” Weiss admitted. “In fact I feel like my process--and maybe the product--is much more akin to the making of a painting or a sculpture.”

All of Weiss’ work is one-of-a-kind. Each piece juxtaposes images photographed from the television screen with negative prints and straight photographs, shiny with altered color. Heavy architectural frames resemble altarpieces, triptychs or crosses. Greatly enlarged images are physically segmented into large grids and break into a dizzying geometry of scan lines when viewed at close range. Weiss makes everything by hand, from the separation negatives to the construction of each frame. In many cases, he is not only the designer, photographer and darkroom technician, but model as well.

In “Spin Again,” his largest piece at more than 6 feet high and 17 feet long, a black-and-white life-size negative image of a man and woman dancing (or struggling) stands between two greatly enlarged and segmented TV images--one of a distant tornado and the other the huge head of a screaming, bandaged child. If it’s unclear whether the couple is engaged in a passionate tango or their last fight, that’s exactly what the artist intended. “It actually took three days to get it to be ambiguous enough so no one could tell what (the gesture) was.”

Weiss’ TV imagery comes from a personal file of tapes he records in his studio on an ongoing basis. His television set is perpetually tuned in and whenever he sees an interesting image--the explosion of a rocket, a lightning bolt, a fire--he pushes the button on his VCR remote control switch and the image is recorded for future use. Later, a small piece of the picture may be photographed and enlarged to take its place in one of his constructions along with photographs of skeletons he made at an Indian burial ground, cultural icons (like the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima), or photo-maps of the cosmos, often mounted to a cut-out silhouette of a man.

His star-filled figures represent “the natural part of human beings. . . . All the atoms in our bodies came from stars,” he said. Skeletons and stars--death and the universe--are “major facts” for Weiss, facts that he uses to put the problems of everyday existence into broader perspective.

“If there’s a (general) theme,” said Weiss, “I guess it would be what it’s like to be alive in the ‘80s . . . and I think there’s some sort of parallel between what goes on in the world--what one sees on the TV news every night--and what my life and a lot of other people’s lives are like on a personal basis.”

Not that life for this artist has been ordinary. Before coming to Los Angeles, Weiss taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before that, “I lived on top of a mountain for 12 years in a cabin with practically nothing . . . and basically spent those years making pictures out the window,” he said.

From the isolation of his Vermont cabin, Weiss moved to a studio in Chicago where his only window was a television screen. There he began to think about the difference between natural and synthetic landscapes. “Part of being alive at this time,” he said, “is dealing with the struggle between the synthetic world and natural world.”

Although his work is filled with explosions, skeletons and acres of stars, Weiss considers his symbology to be more spiritual than apocalyptic. “I think there is something there to be terrified of,” he acknowledged, “but part of it is that so much is just unknown and you are constantly in struggle with forces that seem to be out of our control, whether they are or not.”

Photographic images remain important in his work “simply because there’s still a certain kind of believability to a photograph . . . and I think it’s one of the reasons that I use them. But I would question the veracity of any photograph,” he said, glancing around the gallery. “They’re made-up stories. They’re fictions. I’m not sure there is anything besides fiction.”