Andrew Schroeder

When I came across this image in the news this morning, I couldn’t resist. It appears that everyone’s favorite source for marriage and morality advice, Newt Gingrich, has officially announced his bid for the presidency of the fine crap-hold known as America. Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m a liberal (AKA in the USA: a gay-communist-anti christ-abortion/death squad leader) but now I’m having second thoughts. LOOK AT THOSE CHINS! Yes, plural: C-H-I-N-S. Seriously! Look at all the gloriously lustrous, bulbous bags of fat under that man’s mandible. Just think of the sweat that accumulates there on a warm Washington DC day. I’m ready to see some gravy dribbling down this man’s grossly over-indulged chins as he takes us back in the 19th century. God bless the USA!

TCHIKITAHMAN: “Just got done with a fitting for a job…now I’m off to the la gun club for some gun powder relaxation!” 4/29/11 via HTC Peep

I couldn’t have said it better. And I, for one, was absolutely crushed that he wasn’t at the concert at First Ave in Minneapolis…

I was headed into work this morning when I noticed yet another giant white truck selling food items in downtown Minneapolis. In the past, I’ve made the decision to judge every city I travel to/live in by the quality of its street food. For example, New York introduced me to the beauty of spicy squid on a stick. In Mexico City I had the distinct pleasure of having a five-course meal of nothing but delicious nibbles found on the street. Montreal and Sofia, Bulgaria both rocked the bagel-like items. Istanbul made me squeal with an amazing grilled mackerel sandwich on the Galata bridge. Street food truly is an indicator of the health of a city, its people’s participation in the public sphere, and a commitment to the exchange of energy and life which can only happen in public.

Back to Minneapolis. If I am to apply my criteria for evaluating street food, Minneapolis gets little more than a D-. The effort is there, but the joy, the spontaneity…. the people…. are no where to be found. Instead, I am greeted by the rather gruesome display of a giant, flaccid turkey drumstick roasting in the morning haze inside a pristine white snatcher van.  Yippee.

Sometimes I wonder why I even both to write, think, or photograph anything. I do a great deal of rehashing ideas and thinking out loud via my site/blog. However, somehow, it ends up being worth it. For example, it is almost humorous the way that things can come back around; full circle. This time 3 years ago I was pouring over Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias“. And, again on this wet April morning, I’m scouring through the same text looking with a fresh set of eyes at what I missed. For those new to the term I love to use so often, Foucault describes a heterotopia by saying, “There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places — places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites…all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”

My relationship with this particular bit of writing (from a Foucault lecture given in 1967) is an intimate one. In the last week, I’ve gone back and forth from reading this bit of Foucault to watching Michael Haneke’s “Caché” at least a dozen times, each time feeling the two are linked. Its going to be a bit of a stretch to relate these two together, but I’ll do my damnedest. The connection is something that I always come back to: both works discuss the relationships where private and public spill into each other.

In “Caché” the racial tensions that remain inherent in post-colonial French society demonstrate this “non-site” of neither public nor private. Over all, the film suggests it is one thing to support and favor a multicultural social fabric, but it is another thing to actually bring the otherness of an immigrant family into one’s own home. In the film, an unknown person sends to a wealthy Parisian family video footage observations of their home. In this regard, the film touches on the first heterotopia described by Foucalt: the mirror. He writes, “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”

Foucault hints at other such sites that enmesh themselves into our lives such as heterotopias of crisis and deviation. He describes these sites as places where, “those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.” To return to Haneke’s “Caché,” as the film progresses, the main character Georges (Daniel Auteuil) pursues the sender of the videos into such a place. In this instance, it one of the many large late-modernist housing projects surrounding the city. Inside, immigrants, the poor, and others considered to be “others” are conveniently vertically stacked, isolated, and concealed.

Now to draw back to me and my work. (After all, I am the reason for the season… its true! My birthday is Sunday, May 01… also known as International Workers of the World day.) Foucault’s third principle of the heterotopia is perhaps most pressing on my mind this morning. Put simply, “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” This is the thread that I’ve been yearning to examine and express with photography. In past work, I’ve failed to express this incompatibility that can occur within places of “non-site” even though it has been staring me in the face since the completion of my MFA exhibition. I’m going to expand more on this in subsequent posts on photos already gathering dust and also those that are still latent.

1990s Chevrolet Caprice Wagon

I know that this post could very easily be construed as being childish or immature. Trust me, I am both of those things. However, I think there is a deeper undercurrent to what I did at the Mall of America overflow parking lot yesterday afternoon.

Lets preface this a bit. You know, build up a framework before I delve in. I believe that everyone has certain design fetishes. Aesthetic aspects of physical products that appeal to us on a level we can’t quite explain. In turn, we’re drawn to those products and buy them. Really we buy the hell out of them to be more precise. Case in point, the new iPad or Macbook Air.

Now, in order to keep the universe from collapsing into oblivion, there has to be a counter balance to objects that are so compelling we cannot resist. There have to be objects out there that are so repulsive that the very sight of them triggers an innate hatred in the reptilian part of our brains.

For me, one of those objects is the mid-1990s Chevrolet Caprice station wagon. Perhaps it is the nature of the vehicle’s name… don’t we want vehicles that stand for reliability and not impulsive changes? However, I cannot pinpoint my hatred. I see them less and less these days, but… they’re out there. Like a fleet of marauding slug-shaped cars, they haunt me when I drive.

As luck and fate would have it, when I pulled into the Mall of America overflow parking lot, directly ahead of me was a real doozy of a Caprice wagon. Dark brown. DUNG brown even. I had to act to let this other driver know the torture which is seeing them on the road.

And so I did. I left a note. Childish you say? Yes, of course. But something had to be done.

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.

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.

In Neutraface - The Ultimate Yuppie House Number

An amazing post from the rather amazing Andy Sturdevant.

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