Andrew Schroeder

From The Gateway Reconstruction Project

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how one can actually inhabit a place. With the economy sliding into oblivion and funding in the art-world drying up, I realized that I am going to be in Minneapolis for a couple more years. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing… but… the entire time I was in graduate school, the general pressure was to move (to NYC or Europe) and live the life of an artist-in-residence/panhandler. Not exactly the ideal situation for someone who likes to work on perfecting his banana-bread recipe late at night, in the confines of his small, but rather delightful apartment.

Anyway. Back to the point.

One of the ways that I believe humans inhabit a place is through research into its history. My personal obsession right now is wandering around the Gateway District in downtown MPLS and wondering how amazing it could have been… had they not built a modernist dystopia on top of it. This website has a great overview and tons of photographs that depict the Gateway in its heyday… very impressive.

Arthur Danto...

One of the better things to come out of building up a new website is the forced evacuation of all of my archived images, sketchbooks, and writings about art making.

From time to time I’ll be posting new blasts from my artistic past under the Writing parent page…

Today’s goodie comes from my days at the U of M… we hosted Arthur Danto as a visiting artist/critic and had the distinct pleasure of hearing him lecture about aesthetics.

Here are my notes/musings/thoughts about his presentation.

@ Head to Toe

I’m waiting at the moment for Curtis to finish getting his haircut… Long and short of things:

-The new website is up and running. I still have a bunch of work to hammer out with Mike Guille, my webmaster/web-leatherdaddy… including changing the color scheme of this theme.

-It is finally warm enough for me to start traveling with a camera on me at all times. Joy. Expect new work in the very near future.

Ride the SLUT

Seattle is encouraging you to ride the SLUT! I love that Americans are finally getting into mass-transit in all the right ways.

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}

A List:

Good Things (+)

5D Mark II, 24mm Tilt-Shift Test Image

-The Adaptation of Dante’s Inferno I bought yesterday.
-The sweet plastic smell of my MacBook.
-Knowing I don’t have to work Monday.
 

Not So Good Things (-)

-Getting on the bus and promptly having a bloody nose.
-Finding out exactly how much getting my BFA and MFA cost me. 
-Corporate Art.
-The Grey Dinginess that is Minneapolis in February. 

All in all… that was the last 12 hours summarized in +/-

*****

I’m going to blather on and on today. I started this post, stopped it, started it again, and am now finally finishing it while I dread looking up my checking account balance. That’s the life of a multi-tasker. 

I’ve been thinking too much about the role of the market and salable visual appeasement in art production. This little bit of mental annoyance has led me back to a basic questioning of my stance on idealism and materialism. 

When it comes to both art/life, I’m an idealist. Despite being enmeshed in a thoroughly material culture, I maintain that meaning and value lie somewhere outside of, or underneath material reality. Plato’s notions being conscious, or being able to sense, indicates that there is a higher reality – replete with greater meaning.

Perhaps there is some small part of me that wholly subscribes to this idea. And… perhaps its the role of the artist to indicate other forms of meaning that could be underlying material reality. 

However, there is a very large part of me that is yearning to just give in and subscribe to a fundamentally materialist view of the art world. I’d like to think that it is governed by laws… that there is a rhyme and reason to the production and selling of art objects. To be honest, it might be refreshing to see art as just another realm of objects to be bought and sold… traded off and refurbished when the time is right. To know that if something is marketable it is therefore good, could be the revelation I’ve been waiting for.

Desktop at work... organized in a way that even scares me.

And Desktop at home... ridiculously organized...

At the moment I’m feeling a bit like a self-diagnosed autistic person. I’m obsessed with ordering and arranging everything around me in precise and perfect grids. Scary. Very Scary.

For those that are also grid obsessed: http://www.thegridsystem.org/

It finally sunk in today that I’m moving out of my cube apartment. In retrospect, it is amazing how living in a place that is distinctly modern and stripped of ornamentation shapes your thinking. I’m going to do the healthy thing and document all of the stages of moving.

Kale and Rice in the Cube

I’m taking a break from packing to digest my oat pancakes… I’m amazed at how many great books and magazines I’ve acquired recently. Here are a few highlights that I definitely recommend you add to your library.

Joachim Schmid, Photoworks 1982-2007

Julia Christiansen, Big Box Reuse

Seed Magazine, January 2009