Andrew Schroeder

When I first began graduate school, exposure to what most of us call Conceptual Art (with a capital C) was a refreshing, lime-in-the-fish-for-freshness type of experience. I needed that exposure. I was stagnating and focused on the relationships between aesthetics and anti-aesthetics in the drawings I was making at the time. Let me come right out and say it, I was educated as a formalist.

Put simply, throughout grad school, I strived to supplant formalist production with conceptual cleverness. At the time, my thinking was rewarded over doing. Two years after finishing my MFA at the U of M and I’m reconsidering my position and wishing I could have made myself stick it out, formalist tendencies and all.

You see, there is a slight problem with rewarding thought over action, concept over production: if all you do is think, you never make anything. I have thought up amazing new projects in the last two years, only to have them whittled away by a new self-criticism, a new line of questioning: “is what I’m doing conceptually bankrupt?” Never mind if it is a visually compelling form of visual art, if there’s no research paper worthy topic behind it, I’ve learned it is a dead-end, not worth doing.

As valuable as introspection is, this is a sure-fire way to misery. Endless focus on being a clever, contemporary, conceptual artist leads to what my mother would call “Shit or get off the pot syndrome.”

So, I’m here, creatively constipated (for lack of a better term), wondering if I’ll ever make anything again. God knows I’ve already thought it.

A group of passengers with lifejackets aboard ‘Kungsholm’, undergoing life boat drill

I feel exactly like this. Hands tied, close to what I want, but unable to actually get there.

From:
National Maritime Museum’s Flickr

I’ll be honest. The adjustment from my trip back into everyday life has been an absolute bitch. Perhaps it is the weather or the consistent and undying jet-lag, but I am less than thrilled to be in Minneapolis.

Spending Halloween in a proper fashion: eating tons of Reese’s cups and also checking out semi-lost cemeteries around the twin cities. Two of my favorite photos so far.

(Beresford, South Dakota)

“The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it.”

- R. Fairley

via: Minimal

A couple of weeks ago, I was very fortunate enough to commission an amazing desk from my friend Christopher dela Pole. I had been looking for new desk for over a year. Every single time I found a new desk, something would be wrong… either it was too complicated, or overly designed, or simply too expensive. Finally, a year later, I am fortunate enough to have the “Michael” desk sitting in my home studio. Thank you Christopher! I hope that you make many more…