Andrew Schroeder

Preface:

Al Green is keeping me company today. The snow is still being spit out of the sky causing the inside of my apartment to be lit like a dingy room in THX 1138. Its a little freaky and nostalgic at the same time.

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One day when I was walking downtown through the skyways, on the phone with Andrea, I ended up stuck in the Barnes and Noble bookstore off Nicollet Mall. In front of me was the sizable and generic art/design/architecture section. Instantly, I was drawn into a anthology of propaganda posters from the other side of the long-gone Iron Curtain.

The last decade has shown us what happens when the cohesive energies and authorities of one way of managing life/resources/though (state-planned economies/cultures) dissipates into the endless ocean of neo-liberal capitalism. Everything that was “other” becomes first subsumed as ktisch and then turned into commodity. Yippee.

The propaganda posters which were a graphic reality (albeit a flawed and repressive one) are now marketable as nostalgia items for the western consumer.

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New Project:

Through recycling and direct appropriation of these images, I intend to find a way to view this extinct graphic graphic reality outside of the nostalgic background noise that our current cultural economic system portrays it.

Is this even a possibility? To re-consume these images and output hand-made prints that occupy similar visual space?

One of the great memories I have from going to the University of Minnesota is the Carlson School of Management – where – tomorrow’s mindless Target marketing boys are bred and groomed. Replete with anonymous looking people in cornflower blue shirts, a stock ticker, and clocks displaying time throughout the world – this place is just one part of my little vision of hell.

(A fond memory: having an opening in the small gallery space in Carlson, but not being able to go… to my own opening… because I wasn’t dressed business casual. Luckily I sold several pieces). 

Recently, the School of Management expanded to include the ultra-corporate-chic looking Hanson Hall. Intended as a gateway and new “face” for the University in the Cedar-Riverside area, Hanson Hall maintains the “you can’t see what mischief we’re doing in here” big business architecture. As for being the new face to the U, unfortunately the building is situated so that we’re actually showing our ass to the folks in Cedar-Riverside.

But then again, who want’s to actually welcome the people you’re going to have slaving away for you when you climb into middle-management?  

Getting to the point.  Before Hanson Hall was decked out in reflective glass, the building’s unfinished, uninhabited guts were laid bare in a display of sheer and utter beauty. I had to crack out my 4X5 and, with my boyfriend at the time watching my back, take some photos.

Corporate Construction II, 2007

Corporate Construction III, 2007

From George Lucas' THX-1138

My colleague, fellow photographer, and thought monger, Colleen has opened up a great dialog about the 20 X 200 project that Jen Bekman has spawned. Here’s a link to the original post.  Be sure to check out Bekman’s rebuttal (especially for the last comment).

Now my Friday question:

Is the process of making art for immediate entry into the commercial marketplace (in this case the web) really making the world a better place?

Short Answer: In my opinion NO. The immediate translation of art into readily accessible, pull-out-your-VISA-card-honey commodity is frustratingly shallow.  I’m sure I’ll catch hell for that. Maybe Karl Lagerfeld said it best  in Lagerfeld Confidential:

(I’ll heavily paraphrase)

Artists used to offer something else. Now we only aim to ape and act like the bourgeoisie. Perhaps it should be our goal to offer something outside of the majorities acceptance for once.

Maybe I am simply too bitter of an old troll to really answer this question honestly and with grace. However, I will try my best.

Exposure is a wonderful thing (unless you are naked and it is winter in Minnesota, but that’s another story). However, is this why we are involved in making art? I can certainly answer no. While, I get extremely down from time to time because I am not exhibiting work as much as I want to, I have to remind myself that I am in the game to make work, gain clarity, and understand.

The purpose of the 20X200 project is to make art more affordable and accessible to a wider audience.

When fully deconstructed and shifted in perspective, is this a noble pursuit?  Is art supposed to be for everyone? Should we be whole-saling our ideas for the sake of being seen by as many people as possible?

Apparently, Amazon.com is an incredibly noble pursuit.  So is Wal-Mart.  So is anything that tries to make rarified resources availble to as may people as humanly possible. Hopefully soon there will be a 20X200 iPhone app that just automatically purchases whatever prints Jen Bekman likes (unfortunately there is a distinct lack of diversity).

I’m getting the willies.

Maybe we should all watch THX1138, just for the quote:

“Buy More. Buy more Now. And be happy.”

(that might have been a more fitting answer than all the drivel I’ve typed out above)

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Linkage:

• ウェルシュ・コーギー　Welsh Corgi
• Chicken and Dumplings (Dinner tonight)

Obsession:

Again my day-job as a media services coordinator makes me smile. Today I have the distinct pleasure of purchasing a wonderfully indestructible Pelican Case for a new HD DV camera. This stuff is crazy. I want to organize everything in my life with the pluck and tuck foam inside of the Pelican case.

Imagine an architecture of pluckable foam. What would this be like? A city that is constantly being reduced to fit our bodies and objects shapes perfectly? Would we value properties by how much they’ve been shaped? Or would a new property be the only way to get a perfect fit all over again?

Hmmm. Ramblings.

While searching for cases to order I came across this image. Apparently, Pelican expects people’s digital cameras to see some serious action.

Hardcore Photo Gear Protection Baby!

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Tokyo:

I have the extreme pleasure of having an amazing library down the hallway from me. Inside it are mountains of great photo books that are just lying there, begging me to love them. At the moment I have Takashi Homma’s Tokyo staring back at me.

While I may not be as skilled in analyzing and writing about photographs as Jörg Colberg at Conscientious or as intune with writing about photobooks as 5B4, I think I’m going to go ahead and dive in and make today’s blog post about this beautifully detailed photo book.

My first thoughts upon looking at Homma’s work: this work seems like a more elegant, refined, calm version of Wolfgang Tillmans’ photos.  Homma seems to embrace a fundamental freshness when looking at the world of suburban and urban Tokyo.  His photographs of children take this a step further: they are distant yet within close enough conceptual proximity to the subject to not feel invasive or dismissive.

Cover

Spread - Architecture in Tokyo

His photographs of architecture in suburban and urban Tokyo also follow this nuanced, distant yet still engaged approach. The work breaks free of the typological constraints that usually inhibit photographers that document similar spaces and forms repeatedly. Somehow, Homma is able to take the everyday architectural forms that he sees throughout Tokyo and show them in a greater, wider, contextual light.

McFlurry

Finally, his work begins to step closer to the acts of inhabitation that must be taking place within Tokyo. I’m especially drawn to photographs that depict the act of consumption (both on a literal, physical level and also on a conceptual and cultural level).

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Anyway, I feel refreshed today and find myelf going back through images I’ve taken in the last few years and appreciating them in new ways. Perhaps, afterall, I’m finally gaining a sense of awareness and appreciation for images by not making them at the moment.

Temporary Confluence, 2007

Riverside Minneapolis, 2008

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Eikongraphia has an amazing post in its archive about the connection between Architecture and Minimalism titled The Endgame of Minimalism.

I’ve always had a tense relationship with the reductions inherent in minimalism. Believe it or not, I find simplicity to be the most complicated and difficult concept in my life to grasp.  What power one must have to reduce reduce reduce… and inhabit (phsically or theoretically) the resulting simplification of space.

LINK: http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=1430

Badlands at the Soap Factory, 2008

(As for me, tonight I’d like to be out there again – in the Badlands – with the window down, driving away from everything through everything.)

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An incredibly fast blog post. 

I’m still recovering from going out last night and dancing with my friend Rosie. What a pleasure. To watch and be watched… to feel the panopticon of homosexual culture descend over oneself.  Bliss. 

I’m back to asking a question that was asked of me my first year in graduate school: If a magic genie gave you the option of being invisible, would you do it? Or – does being seen constitute existence?

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This question gets more and more difficult to answer. 

I ran into an old professor from my days at the U who, as I was bartending, made me feel like utter shit. Apparently, I’m not working enough on my own work (that silly full-time job to pay my bills keeps getting in the way).  I’m not writing enough.  Not attending the right residencies.  Not getting the right grants. 

If you are an artist – apparently – not being seen is equitable with not existing.

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Rebuttal: What a joyless and mechanical art world it would be if this rang true. What is the point of making only to show? What is the point of never coming out of production to take a fucking look around and see how you do?

That’s my defense for not having a full exhibition calendar, a residency, and a tenure track teaching job: I WANT TO KNOW WHAT I DO NOW MORE THAN EVER. In a way that is of value to me.

Not just to the panopticon.

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NYC 2008

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I remember the comforts of being an academic. Sometimes I miss it – the all encompassing construction, the goals, the competition. Just a structuring of value that seems so noble at first…

Maybe I should finally learn how to write – write well – and go back… for those next special letters and become Dr. Schroeder.

From the delightful Super Spatial – an advertisement for the Madrid metro system. This just makes me want to run away and actually live in an urban environment, instead of holding out and stockpiling dry goods here on the tundra.

http://www.superspatial.com/2008/03/012-surreal-madrid.html

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FGT_LEONG, Studio Wall

Almost Healed, Thanksgiving Day 2008

Good Evening World.

I’m almost recovered from my little make-out session with the wall of the Lagoon Cinema.  With any luck I’ll have some sort of terminal cancer that is causing me to black out a random. If this is the case, I’ll officially put PLAN B into effect: utilize every single scrap of credit I have to travel until I die. See the things that I’ve always wanted to see.

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Jessica.

A good friend and colleague from my days in the great state of Nebraska was in Minneapolis. After consuming way too much wine last night and smoking way too many cigarettes, I woke up to some really beautiful ephemerality on my coffee table. 

Talking to Jessica reminds me what a different person I ended up being.  And also, somehow, I’ve maintained a basic part of my identity that is the same.  Situated in the past, but not in the dangers of nostalgia, talking to Jessica has put me back on my timeline.

For that I am grateful.

Emphemera 1

Empemera 2

Sofia Airport (On the Hunt for my Stolen Identity)

In keeping with my new fascination with acts of translation, I want to visit two older projects and talk about identity.

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Part One: Inspiring/Thinking/Reading

I have recently become addicted to the podcast Philosophy Bites. In particular, the interview with Christopher Shields about personal identity is beyond satisfying and thought-provoking. (http://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/philosophy_bites/2008/11/christopher-shi.html)

In the interview, Shields outlines what makes a person the same person day to day, over time. He gracefully dissects the history of the concept of personal identity from the Ancient Greeks, to Locke, to the contemporary implications of what it means to be the same person when we wake up every morning.

Shields begins with the dichotomy of religious/personal identity (how we see ourselves as responsible, moral beings over time) and judicial identity (the physical, corporeal equation of one person = one body). The judicial context is, seemingly, the base level for our concepts of identity over time. I am one person because I am one physical quantity of matter everyday.

However, this easily breaks down with the idea that our bodies are constantly changing. How are we to say that I am the same thing when I am constantly physically changing over time? (Keep in mind, every 7 years you have a completely new set of skin cells covering you!)

There has to be another factor; a psychological dimension intrinsic to our definition of identity. Enter Locke, his ideas of psychological beings, and his example of the prince and the peasant. Imagine a prince and a peasant both wake up one morning in there respective houses/palaces and go to the mirror in their bathrooms. The prince sees the face of the peasant and the peasant sees the face of the prince. According to Locke, they have rather obviously swapped bodies – because – the prince remembers being a prince and the peasant being a peasant.

In this way the body = self equation is decoupled. Now, self = psychological subject of “I”. Or, more indirectly: human beings receive the predicate of being responsible, or doing, or suffering, interacting with other psychological subjects. Responsibility to one’s self as a subject equates with continuing sense of self over time.

Memory then becomes the key to identity. I am myself because I remember doing things as myself.

But there is a problem with this emphasis on the responsible psychological subject constituting the basis of identity: What if you commit a crime and do not remember it? What if your psychological self is transplanted into another body? Cloned?

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Stolen Identity Project at Georgia State

Part Two: Practicing Ideas

Both of these projects ended up being about trying to translate my experiences as a conscious subject that is multifaceted, psychologically diverse and always seeing that my definition is shifting.

Project One: Stolen Identity Project.

Here’s the official blurb:

In early December 2005, individuals stole my identity using the Internet in the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia. Sensitive information regarding my checking account was stolen, allowing these individuals to travel throughout the region, withdrawing funds from ATMs and utilizing a forged VISA card while posing as me. During the months of May and June 2006 I traveled to sites within the countries of Macedonia and Bulgaria where usage of my bank account occurred. I documented through photography the places and transactions that resulted from my stolen identity. By doing so, I hoped to reunite my conceptual, digital self with my actual, physical identity.

My travels to Bulgaria definitely fall within the conversation of what constitutes an individual in contemporary society. Am I a person simply because I have a VISA number? Am I person because I buy things?

According to technology that shapes and influences our lives – the answer is yes. When we are part of the system (even if it is simply by accident) we are considered an individual. Maybe this neo-liberal capitalist/consumer subject is now the equivalent of Locke’s psychological being?

I hate to think that.

Plovdiv, Bulgaria (On the Hunt for my Stolen Identity)

Project Two: First Things

My first year of graduate school I started making projects that played with the habitual parts of my identity. These are the things that I could control and shape, but were somehow always on the periphery of my consciousness.

For example, in the First Things project I trained myself to instinctually wake up and take a photograph in the direction I was looking upon regaining consciousness. I’ve always felt that there are a few moments at the beginning of the day when I haven’t yet tapped into my history, my memories, and the other things that make me who I am in the Locke/memory/psychological way of seeing identity.

For 27 days I was able to make myself take photographs without thinking. Hoping that somewhere in there I would be able to glimpse my “basic being”.

Unfortunately the images from the project have been lost.

But I do have the last image I took.  On the beach. In Galveston, TX when I felt like I nolonger needed to try to photograph that part of myself.

Galveston, A moment after the First Things Project