Andrew Schroeder

Take a litle walk to the edge of town
Go across the tracks
Where the viaduct looms,
Like a bird of doom
As it shifts and cracks
Where secrets lie in the border fires,
In the humming wires
Hey man, you know
You’re never coming back
Past the square, past the bridge,
Past the mills, past the stacks
(more…)

Waiting is the period we endure until the expected happens. We wait for all sorts of things: the bus, dinner, colleagues who are late for a meeting, the rain to stop, etc. Waiting is built into our social lives. And our waiting behavior is influenced by a fair number of variables. There isn’t a prescribed method for waiting, and yet waiting in certain contexts tends toward a similar pattern of group impatience leading to aggressive strategies that are meant to better position the waiting individual for the event.

Via The New Shelton wet/dry

Actually, when the hate mail came in we took a perverse pleasure in trying to find the worst. I found it funny because I had never been as passionate about anything as some of these people were about their puppet show hosts. In fact, when we changed the color of the jumpsuit, we’d get death threats. On the internet, that’s entirely commonplace, but back then, remember, people were taking pen in hand, purchasing stationary and stamps for those death threats! That’s commitment.

-Mike Nelson VIA

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.

“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…