Andrew Schroeder

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

Ouch!!!

Good Morning!

So, I’ve had an amazingly odd week so far… culminating in a head wound.

On Monday, I went to see the rather twisted-looking vampire movie “Let The Right One In” (trailer) with my friends Patty and Erica. About 20 minutes into the film I became overwhelmingly hot (not in the menopausal way) and had to leave the theater. I made it to the hallway… and… proceeded to faint twice and smack my head against the wall each time.

When I came to there was a man in a puffy vest with a beard standing over me with a soda in his hand. Thinking that I had suffered some sort of blood-sugar related issue, I made him give me his soda. Yes. I’m happy to say that even in moments of unconsciousness, I can still get boys to do what I want them to.

Anyway, I’m fine. Bruised and battered. And not the least bit less glamorous. Although, my boss, Nikki, did point out that my fainting was only slightly Lindsay Lohan-like. Had a flashed my panties a couple of times… then I’d be in the big leagues.

So, I’m trying to be fully thankful. Lets make a short list:

1. Andrea Jenkins… (and chimi-churro loco)
2. Cabinet Magazine – the newest issue about shame is sitting on my desk – waiting and wanting to be read.
3. Canon 50D Cameras – the school where I work just received 5 new ones and I am going to test one out.
4. Barack Obama – He’s shattered the racial barrier, he’s optimistic, he’s knowledgeable, he’s capable of turning the country around.
5. Lacoste – my fragrance for winter 2008.
6. Britta Water Filters – if you put cheap vodka through one you end up with good vodka. (via myth busters)
7. Bourgeois Comforts – I just bought my first 1080p HD TV and DVD player. I couldn’t be more excited to be at home one winter’s day watching a movie like a normal guy.
8. Thai Food – Particularly Chai’s Thai on Cedar Ave.
9. The Multiple Orgasm – Apparently this is just my new trick of the year. Always nice to know I can still pick up a new talent.
10. Rock Band for the Xbox – I crooned, played guitar badly, and drummed like a mad man.
11. Sake – Chilled, warmed, mixed with vodka – I can’t stop drinking it. (ok, not really – as that sounds like a cry for help)
12. My Colleagues – They are incredibly knowledgeable and at the moment missing in action!
13. Europe – I will be visiting in the spring.
14. Mexico City – I will be back in very near future.
15. Pugs
16. My Cube Shaped Pig
17. My Anachronistic Outlook
18. Botox – I’m getting older…
19. A Certain Woman that Drives a Gray Toyota Prius
20. Miso Soup
21. Jonathan Monk’s Art
22. Aeronaut Mik’s Staged Performances…
23. Photographic Bliss…

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

no man’s land

- – - – - – - – - -

I am starting a collaborative project with another artist and friend, Marc Wilhite, that deals with acts of translation. We have been emailing back and forth about the ways that a text moves from one language to another, takes on various agendas, and at the same time has to dwell temporarily in a no man’s land between languages/forms.

My research throughout graduate school has always delt with ideas of the no man’s land in one way or another. For example, I was/am interested in the aftermath of the attempts to realize a urban utopia in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. And also, the path that the tumbleweed has taken into the gallery is a passage through a forbidden zone of recontextualization.

Untitled - Cedar Riverside, Intaglio, 2005

Tumbleweed in transit

This whole process has started me thinking about the ways that conceptual boundaries can be delineated and the routes through these no-man’s lands can be mapped.  Which brings me to the resource that I found last night: Wordle.  Wordle allows you to make various simple-yet-satisfying word clouds from RSS feeds (such as my website).

I’m including two examples of how this site can be translated into cloud form.

Ghost

Density

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In other news, my quest to stop being comfortable and start doing things has come one step closer to manifestation. I am planning on taking off over Christmas for Mexico City and Jalisco state. I need it. Badly. At the moment I have a refidgerator filled with 4 X 5 film that needs to be shot in the very near future – what better way to dispatch it than by hopping on a bus and traveling around central Mexico?

anachronism

After Shower (not mine) Ephemerality

Just a few things to be exceptionally thankful for this (early) morning.

We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past
And in the caverns of tomorrow
With just our flashlights and our love
We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

From Bright Eyes, “At the Bottom of Everything”

———-

When is it time to leave a place that you have been inhabiting? Is there a quantifiable amount of time? Months? Years? Or is there just a matter of looking for certain signs that tell you it is time to pry the door open and leave?

I have been in Minneapolis for 3 years. And I am very comfortable here. I make enough money. I have friends I love and who love me in return. I have an apartment. A car. Warmth.

But all of this comfort has come at a price: artistic dullness, the sacrifice of experience, the worshiping of the material. 

I learned today that it is time for me to start looking for a new life. And to remember that it is making art, learning about art, being critical of art that make my life worth living through. That is the place where the inherent abilities of my person have value, purpose, direction – not in the day to day avoidance of pain.

Wish me luck on this.

Utopia

———-

It is early in the morning and I’m still spellbound by the grey light that is sifting in through my office window like ashy enriched flour.  Beauty has been on my mind all night. Mainly, what is the relationship between beauty/aesthetic feelings and ethics in my personal life?  My professional/artist life?

Two viewpoints:

1. Bourriard – the social interaction of human beings is, in itself, an act of sheer and utter aesthetic beauty. By bringing people together, creating a situation where knowledge/emotion/anything is exchanged we are creating something beautiful: a relational aesthetic.  (I’m being incredibly brief here, because I should be working on something office related, but I digress…)
2. Virillio - The focus of art has shifted to the breaking of taboos (for whatever reason). In this slanted view, we are constantly moving toward the aesthetitization of anything that we previously considered un-aesthetic. To an extreme, one could argue that the most vile actions could be made into art – for example, murder for aesthetic reasons.
3. Both viewpoints involve the packaging of social interactions as aesthetic performances.

Back to the post.

In my personal life, I am somehow  a hedonist.  I’d go so far as to say that I’ve reduced (or elevated, perhaps) the greatest social pleasure in life (sex) to a purely aesthetic level. I’m not in it for love. I’m not makin’ babies (obviously). I just want purely aesthetic biological pleasure. Tradition dictates that this is a completely unethical situation.

But can I get away with it by saying that I’ve transported the aesthetic feelings (usually reserved for art-making) in the exceptionally personal social-aesthetic realm of my sex life? Am I a slut for art’s-sake?

In my professional life, I’m completely and totally geared toward the conceptual. My work has little to do with aesthetics in the traditional sense – and – I have never been able make a convincing argument that a beautiful idea is an aesthetic endeavor.

So, what I’m left with is the moral paradox of trying to live a life that embodies the aesthetic desires I have – and – making art that is informed by ascetic conceptual discipline.

Ouchy.

———-

Another view on aesthetic feelings/ethics:

This American Life has an amazing podcast on the role of testosterone in the creation of desire.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=220

As I’m gazing out my window at the grey sky over the IDS building the dread of winter is starting to set in.  Yes. It’s finally here – and – with it comes the nesting urge.  It may be biological or it may be sociological, but my urge to make my living arrangements better is suddenly pronounced.

There is some part of me that still subscribes to the bourgeois fantasy of having a comfortable home with all the material trappings.  I have to take this with a bit of inherent irony, because my apartment is located in a mid-60s, perfectly rectangular modernist block.  To spruce it up a bit:  its Midwestern platenbau – a true rarity in a city of bungalows and brownstones.

That said, I think I’m spending my weekend at IKEA, painting my walls the proper shade of avocado, and getting ready to be indoors for the next couple of months.

I’ll be posting photos of the transformation of my apartment from grungy artist hovel to less grungy artist hovel.

…because I voted.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!

My political acts should NEVER be tied to a corporation’s branding strategy.