Andrew Schroeder

It has been an insanely good evening and I’m going to do my damnedest to keep this short and sweet. After a few perfectly mixed cocktails at the Aster Cafe, I found myself wandering around Northeast Minneapolis. Instead of waiting for the bus, I continued to drift up Hennepin Avenue, circling aimlessly around, until I ended up back at the bus stop, staring into the eyes of an nun who was also enjoying the first real spring evening.

Anyway. The future. Yes! That’s what’s been on my mind. Specifically, what is the future of our cities going to look like if we keep pushing for New Urbanist developments? The condos that now line both banks of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis are a good example. While I applaud the renewed interest in the heart of the city, I’m skeptical of the end results. Getting to the point. Why is it that in order to make people come back to the diversity of the city, we have to completely replace it with generic condo buildings with eco-ironic use of sheet metal adornments?

I’d really like to start a movement. It isn’t New Urbanism, it is simply called Urbanism. It is not the homogenization and sterilization of our urban spaces, but instead is the fruits of their diversity. What makes urban spaces so desirable is not the safety of the familiar, but instead the unknowable complexities that arise when the rich and the poor and the whole mix of our species live next to each other.

(One may ask why the above photo is posted. It is a scan of a c-print from an archive of Japanese train photos I acquired. Someone had the interest, bordering on obsession, to return again and again to Tokyo and photograph, what must have been at the time, the futuristic-looking landscape. There is just something inherent in the city of Tokyo that invokes feelings of what is yet to come… This is just one of about 100 photos that show this constant revision of what “the future” looks like… What a fantastic way to spend one’s yearly vacations.)

Abandoned racetrack near Hudson, Wisconsin.

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

Michel Foucault
Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.

“Behind the incessant parade of bright images, a gaping blackness.”

Through out the course of my day, I look at hundreds (if not more) photographic images that fall into the genre we call “photography”. RSS feeds of photo blogs have become the easiest and, at the same time, most in unobtrusive method for consuming my daily dose. It isn’t so much the dosage that bothers me. I’m hung up on the concept of what exactly I’m eating up when I’m searching, shifting, and glancing at the endless buffet of fine-art photography that is presented to me…

There is a point where I have to just take my eyes out of focus and concentrate on the idea that the blurred image which emerges might be a better indicator of contemporary photography than anything curated, anything put together into a project…

Although the time for this image has passed, I still feel that it is appropriate. This was earlier this week. Yes, this much snow falls in the middle of April. One of the things that I’ve learned here in Minnesota is that we’re always just one tiny step away from slipping back into the misery of winter. You could be out in the middle of July, 90 degree F heat, sweating your ass off when suddenly it hits you… before you know it everything will be returned to the winter. It is a strange feeling. I’m not certain it serves any purpose. The optimist in me hopes it is reminder of how fleeting even the most basic things can be… I won’t bother with lingering pessimist.

111O Issue 1 - March 2011

Again, it is another beautiful/flat grey Minnesota morning. If you’ve had the pleasure of living here, today is one of those days where there is no indication of time’s passage and both sunrise and sunset are previously undiscovered shades of gray.

As part of my long slumber from writing, posting, and making, I’ve failed to mention one of the great projects that I was selected to participate in. I’m particularly honored to have a photograph published in the first issue of 111O. As in 111OH, the small, yet stunningly high quality journal takes one photograph, one story, and ten poems and places them together to create something wholly new and irresistible. In no way do I feel this way because one of my photographs was selected for the first issue. I am truly smitten with this project, where it currently is and am exceptionally excited to see where it is going.

Please take a moment to learn a bit more about the work and pick up a copy if you feel so inclined. I have a hunch you will be.

http://111oh.com/

Andreas Serrano, Piss Christ

Its been a while since I’ve posted to this little experiment of all things eclectic, so I’ll kick off my return with a bit of a rant. It is a new morning and I’m sitting here at work thinking about the Easter weekend that is fast approaching. I use the term Easter weekend rather loosely. As an Atheist, this is much more of a “go shopping so you look good when you meet your boyfriend’s parents on Sunday” weekend. Truly something that is much more important and tangible than 2000 year old best selling fiction. Anyway, I’m a touch behind the times and just realized that some Christian nut-job felt the need to attack one of my favorite pieces of contemporary art: Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ. Now, I get while simple-minded folk would consider this piece to be controversial – the almighty Jeezy Creezy dipped in blood and urine. Gotcha. It is a touch oozy and a bit… anatomical. But then again, isn’t the whole “body and blood” of communion? After all, there is the belief that the second one swallows the wine and unleavened bread it turns into blood and flesh. (Right now I’m drinking San Pellegrino and hoping the second I swallow it turns into a fine vodka)

If I pretend to give myself a partial lobotomy and think like a follower of organized religion, I can get all hot under the collar about this work. But then again, logic and open-mindedness (or simply mindedness) kicks in. Isn’t Piss Christ a rather encouraging metaphor of the sacred and the profane merging together? Isn’t it a not so subtle reminder that religions are human creations… that they are the things of piss and blood?

That said. I’m going to stick to my original conclusions after reading about the incident in France: the only way this piece could possibly be better would be if it were a picture of an actual Christian dipped in urine.

Street Advertising Takeover | Fubiz™.

Andy Warhol's Archive - via bad banana

What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to New Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you cant and you lose it, that’s fine, because its one less thing to think about, another load off your mind.

-Andy Warhol from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) 1975