Andrew Schroeder

I’m almost finished moving… after bribing all of my friends with promises of pizza, beer, and women/men of loose morals, I was able to drag all of my insanely heavy objects across MPLS to my new home. To summarize: I love living in Whittier. It is the perfect neighborhood for a lover of both urbanity and steamed dumplings. However, more on that in another post.

Today I would like to address something that I found while moving.

Back in 2006, when I was working on the Stolen Identity Project in Bulgaria, I was given a couple of old photo-lithographs. I didn’t really give much thought to them as they were presented to me by some British folks that were renovating their new home near Veliko Turnovo. I almost immediately rolled up the two prints and placed them into a large Ouzo bottle case that I picked up in Greece. A few wine/beer/vodka filled days later, I learned more of the photographs I was given.  In conversation with the Brits, I discovered that the photographs were peeled off of the garden wall and front gate and wall of their new home immediately before they demolished the old masonry.

It turns out the images they gave me were actually Necrologues — images of the dead who inhabited either that house or the area nearby. Apparently in Bulgarian culture, the public announcement of a death takes the form of physically placing a small poster, photograph, or drawing of the deceased in the public sphere. Even during Communist rule, these images were posted. Bridges, park benches, walls of private homes, trees, fountains, the outer gates of luxury hotels — all of these structures that delineate public and private space in its crudest terms are receptacles for the personal statements and independent voices expressed about lost loved ones.

I was amazed to witness the indirect transcendence of property laws. Generally, no one made an attempt to remove the signs… they existed until they disintergrated…

{PICS TO FOLLOW SOON}

Friend and former professor, Jenny Schmid, has turned me on to the work of Jakub Nepraš.

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?