Andrew Schroeder

I want 1... or 10

I’ll be blunt, I really love to buy things. All sorts of things. At the moment, I am obsessed with ceramic planters, books, clothing, cameras, and goats. Yes. Goats. (If I had the money and the gumption, I would be living in my 450 square foot apartment with 5-10 small goats. I will quote Curtis: “They’re more energetic than dogs and they eat your trash.” There is also the pellet to pellet equation: pellet food goes in and… well pellets come out. Truly a beautiful organic system, if I do say so myself.)

Back on topic. The last week or so, I have been mulling over how I could pare down my possessions. I plan on moving in a year (hopefully back to graduate school for a more fruitful degree). Also, is it really healthy for me to be surrounded by about 400 books I will never read again? How many black v-neck sweaters is enough? (apparently 3, BTW)

For the most part, I have been able to enforce this concept in my kitchen. Does one really need an $80 garlic press? Or perhaps, 5 different vessels to make coffee?

Little by little, I am going to attempt to get rid of the massive archive of exceptionally great things I’ve collected, hunted down, amassed, purchased, and shoplifted. (Yes, I get my kicks, just like everyone else)

Stay tuned for a whole-sale clearance of goodies: art supplies I’ll never use again, books, furniture, and other media of an obsessive consumer in a healthy capitalist economy. I would like to see all of these things get a good home!

So, please… help me to make room for my goat-herding… and buy a drafting table… or maybe some pretty sweet mahogany chairs?

I am a simple person and I hope my each of my little posts from the edge of simplicity reflect this.

My experiences of the city are taken in mostly while walking to and from work each morning and afternoon. At 5:30 AM, the city of Minneapolis is absolutely silent. Only crazy people like me who work nonsensical hours are out and about, plugging our way through a city that looks like it has survived a zombie attack. Because I do this meditation twice daily, minute details of the cityscape creep into my consciousness. If the world around me is too hectic, or if I have just finished up a long day at the office, I can walk home… look at my feet and just… come into focus.

This week however, I have been introduced to an obnoxious intrusion into my bit of mental space. Apparently, Boost! Mobile has started to use the sidewalks of my neighborhood as advertising spaces. Large black squares with orange type and images of cell phones have been stuck to the sidewalks.

Is it possible that the only bit of reprieve from advertisements has been sold off? Is this legal? I am curious if the city has actually sold rights for the space of the sidewalk… and if Boost is just one of many advertisers that will be claiming the very ground I walk on as space to sell me something.

A Concrete Modern Gem in Whittier

It has been a magical day, I won’t lie about it. However, here is a lesson everyone should learn: DO NOT eat protein salad from Kowalski’s deli before going to bed. You will sleep for about 2 hours and then… POOF! Awake! Here I am at 2:00 AM sitting around writing blog posts and reflecting on my day.

Asahi Shimbun

I managed to score some pretty amazing items today from a garage sale in North MPLS. My most prized find: an unused 70′s Swedish mountain-scape mural. You know… those paste-on wall paper things that had terrible color balance… chances are one of your grandparents had one in their dining room. Or, if you were lucky like I was, your 8th grad science teacher had one in the lab. I think ours was of the surface of the moon.

More Furniture... We're All Becoming Nomads These Days

Speaking of the surface of the moon, the milky light that settled over Minneapolis today was like being on another planet. I wandered around town with Curtis today. Whittier has finally started to hit it’s tipping point with object saturation… all of the things that are going to be covered by the first snowfall are being pushed to the streets in anticipation. Treasures waiting to be made treasures.

More Empty Utopian Architecture, Montreal, 2009

To be brutally honest, there hasn’t been much color in my life recently. Visually, my attention has been focused on making black and white images for the past couple of weeks and have just not been “thinking in color”. Philosophically, I find myself being drawn into the idea of “gray” – a middle tone that seems appropriate for a world that is neither black and white, right or wrong… (more…)

From time to time I have nothing really great to write about. Ok most of the time… so I’ll draw inward and recount some little tidbit of my day.

After several Sapporos and a delicious veggie feast, I fell asleep on my sofa last night around 10:00 PM. Apparently I am becoming a Golden Girl after all. I wasn’t anticipating going to bed that early until I was at least 75. But, oh well.

Every now and then it seems like I dream with my eyes open. I can accurately see and understand the room surrounding me, but I am very much unconscious. While I can take note that I left the lamp on, have dirty clothes on my floor, and my foot is almost in my veggie Tikka Masala, I cannot move. That is what happened last night.

As I was laying there, dreaming away in a glassy-eyed coma, I could feel myself adding and subtracting rooms to my apartment at will. It was like being inside of a Gegor Schneider installation – rooms open onto duplicated rooms; a wall may appear to be normal thickness, when in reality it is so deep that it makes the next space chokingly small. In the dream I had, rooms were arranged similarly, but had completely different functions – my desk drawers were filled with water for bathing and my sofa was a covered in terry cloth turning it into a huge towel.

I felt like I was living out Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space… that I was able to override the practical abstractions that made my apartment the way it is and actually make it work according to the experiences I have there…

Happy Wednesday.

I’m taking a note from the EuroNews “No Comment” section and just posting some images today. After a rather confusing weekend, I am back to my daily grind. Here is just a small sampling of images captured this weekend as I wandered around the Mid-West… trying to get to know things a bit better.

Tumbleweed Project Map

I was dating someone in graduate school when I was first introduced to the maxim “If you’re bored that means you’re boring.” Like a perfectly formed Zen Koan it has stuck with me and been my mantra through many days of idleness. If you cannot already tell, I am anxious to get to work on grant applications, residency packets, and editing images… yet here I am, at my day-job.

Aside from finally getting a few images scanned (and testing out the Imacon for problems), I came across a great program any sketchbook obsessed person should have. It’s called MindNode and is an incredibly simple, elegant, and free way to create thought/concept maps. Creating flowcharts in MS Word made me want to shoot myself… and using Omni Graffle or Outliner was too… early 2000. MindNode is delicious and elegant… almost better than creating a concept map on paper.

Phantom Public

Is Public Space Still Public Without Users?

(1) Lets face it, everyone becomes disillusioned with their life at some point. Disappointment with one’s situation and status is inevitable in the same way that costs will always rise and the last good day-old pastry will be sold by your barista before you can make it to the coffee shop. (I have nothing but love for my boys at Dunn Brothers, but the scone I am eating right now is not very tasty)

At the moment I find myself desperately searching for possible social interactions… but am finding only a great deal of empty space. Perhaps it is the city I live in. Maybe it is our age of digital interaction, but I find it overwhelmingly difficult to create new connections.

Does anyone else have this ailment? Has it always been this difficult to establish new lines of communication with the people surrounding me?

Should Public Space Be Hidden Away?

(2) For Walter Lippman the idea of “public” was the ultimate fiction. Human beings are embedded with the false knowledge that we can come together to form a cosmopolitan, diverse, and knowable body of individuals that can determine its own course of action.  He posits that “public” is a fantasy meant to make us believe that we are cells in an greater organism and, as such, we can determine the “will of the people”.

Lippman divides all members of a society into two types of people: agents and bystanders. Agents act freely, make “executive decisions on the basis of their own opinions. Bystanders are not agents of freewill. They are the background spectators to life’s events.

For Lippman, the “public” is the bystander – “a deaf spectator in the back row”.

There Is Always Evidence...

(3) Who are we?

Lippman admits that the border between agent and bystander is permeable. We move across it daily. The agents of one action are the bystanders of another and so on and so forth…

He posits that individuals are usually just spectators in life because of their perpetual self-interest and focus on private affairs.

I agree with this statement. How can there really be private life if there is no public life? I can spend the entire day in “public space” and never even grunt in communication with another individual. Eye contact seems to be a rarity when spectators are spectator to other spectators.

(4) Who am I?
By taking photographs of the absence of spaces for real public interaction, am I a bystander?  An agent? For these photographs to matter, do I have to alter the vacuums and deserted plazas? Does making a visual notation of the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life’s objects indicate that there might be a larger, unknowable, body of individuals out there?

I’ve been a busy beaver the last few days… preparing my CV and resume for the rigorous path of applying for grants, residencies, and additional opportunities. I’ve made it this far and could definitely use some feedback…

Work/ Professional Experience Resume

Artist Resume

…and I laugh with it.

Completely Unsolicited

I’ve been slipping up a great deal lately. Snapping at people. Generally being an asshole and feeling rather down about being an asshole. Somehow, I would like to think that the humorous forces of the universe sensed this and sent me this. But, more than likely it is just a crazy Christian cult trying to recruit me. Either way. It gave me a great reason to laugh today in the middle of all the darkness…

Cheers and more serious work soon.