GREGOR STEMMRICH, "PRINT_VIDEO" IN "DIPLOME (DIPLOMAS)", ACADEMY OF VISUAL ARTS LEIPZIG, 2003 (CAT.)
Gregor Stemmrich, "Print_Video" in "diplome (diplomas)", Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, 2003 (Cat.) (Extended Version)The works of Linda Weiss could be situated between “pure” photography and installation art, i.e. combining the aesthetic space of the photographic image with the actual space of its surroundings to create effects of penetration, superposition or fusion. Linda Weiss works with large photographs or digital prints that are calculated to achieve their best effect within the spatial context. The pictures are applied to the walls directly, so they are represented within a certain space. The situation thus created is real as well as imaginary, actual as well as virtual, past as well as present. It results in a poetic over-determination.
Linda Weiss prefers sites or sceneries which might better be called “non-sites“ or “non-sceneries“. They are usually landscapes or urban landscapes that appear strangely ‘placeless’: they could have been taken anywhere. She does not want to convey locality but the photographic characterization of ‘placelessness’, which is omnipresent and has its own typical structure but is hardly ever noticed in its indetermination.
On closer observation, the photographs do not appear static but latently ‘cinematized’ in the sense that they, in part consciously, resemble cinematic clichés. They seem to be charged with memories and a certain time awareness when you look at them. As a result, they give the impression of being constructed and subtly poetic at the same time. It is poetically condensed ‘attendance’ which acknowledges worth in empty motives that they are usually denied. They are not snapshots or images that have a clear focus of interest but are images of “nothing special“ that place the viewer in front of the picture as a situation. This situation, however, is “cinematized“ in a certain way; it is obviously related to existing clichés in commercial as well as avant-garde films, rejecting the misconception that an unbiased encounter with such sites and sceneries might be possible.
A narration is implied by the way the situations are filmed creating “fictitious moments“. While the films of the Nouvelle Vague aspired to be artistic, Linda Weiss‘ photographs and digital prints aim to be cinematic. One could call them “afterimages“ since every picture reminds one of others - visual impressions of one‘s everyday surroundings as well as constructed cinematic images that have given such impressions their aesthetic form.
While her camera eye freezes everyday scenes and situations into still images, her video works can be seen as transporting her photographic work into space and time. What seems subtly staged in photography becomes a non-contemplative temporal stream of video imaging.
One could apply the term Film-Photo to the photos and digital prints of Linda Weiss. It refers to a peculiar threshold situation, a crossing of sorts, showing inherent reciprocal resistance. The picture is not a simple ‘film still‘, representing the virtual reality of cinema itself by photographical means but a pointer to a virtual film. Cinematic virtual reality becomes itself virtual and enters a peculiar relationship between the experience of cinema and the experience of reality. Linda Weiss’ artistic forms of expression are more in the way of performance where the seeming insignificance of the “performance“ itself and thereby the ambiguity of artificiality and banality virtualizes the performance.