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As the year winds down, I find myself in need of both personal and artistic… renewal. It is that time of the year again, when fat people like myself make random resolutions they have no ambition to keep. I’ll dispense saying things like “I’ll stop sleeping around” and “I won’t eat meat wrapped in meat”… instead I give you:
A few simple plans that should be occupying my time in 2009
- Moving. A new apartment a new neighborhood. Loring Park or Stevens Square are both calling my name.
- Simplify. I am going to try to get rid of 75% of my stuff. That sounds crazy, I know, but I have a hunch that I need exceptionally little. Maybe even nothing. Wouldn’t that be strange?
- Minimalize. Zenhabits is an incredibly inspiring blog that I recommend to anyone that is considering improving their life. The post on “Pushing Your Life’s Reset Button” has me going.
- Sell. I have so much stuff that could benefit somone else right now. Does anyone need rollers for printmaking? Charbonnell inks? How about a Toyota Tacoma that is in perfect shape? A drafting table? Just let me know.
- Save. I spend money on crap, just like every other American. I’m going to actually stop. Who knew that was possible?
- Make. Art. Enough. I need to.
- Dwell. Stay home. I want to make my life a priority… within my life.
That’s it.
I’m beginning a new digital project for y’all. Its called Sympathetic Objects. Basically, I’m interested in the objects that are passing through life with me. I’ve started a new collection for this project – everything that came into being May 1982.
Object #1:
(A bit of a given… but…)
National Geographic Magazine from May 1982
Object #001
Goodbye beard… you were less than righteous.
- Barbarossa aftermath
- hello rib cage… my old friend
this may be all the use my loyal epson sees this year
At some point in the recent past I became what many Americans consider an “adult”. Maybe it is my age. Maybe it is the geographic gorging of my under eye region. But, I have officially reached the phase of my life where all of my peers are doing things like buying houses, sprouting children, or buying Prada handbags.
I’m doing none of these things and really have no ambition to.
However, by some stroke of this thing called “responsibility” I’ve decided that its high time to do things like paying off my credit card debt from my MFA thesis show. If I start now, and use all my extra cash, I can save $3,000 and be out of debt in 12 months.
What does this really mean?
- I cannot travel for one year. (Goodbye Mexico City, Montreal, Brussels, and elsewhere)
- I cannot fully produce images for one year. (I can take photographs but cannot print, frame, and exhibit)
Two incredibly important things for me to be giving up for New Years.
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In doing this, however, I feel there is some hope of liberation. In a time of instant turn-around with digital imaging techniques and also an excess cache of film, I’ve been able to point at will and make photographs with little concern for the resources going into them.
I intend to continue to make photographs, but they will remain latent, unprocessed and unprinted, until December of 2009.
Will this liberate me? Make me take the image making process as something more precious, rare, and important? Will I get to know a new appreciation for the images I see when in 2009 I take the mountain of 4X5 film in for processing?
I cannot guess what an image that has been latent for 12 months will mean to me.
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Two things come to mind:
- I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s “Time Capusules”. Warhol would take various items and simply archive them in brown paper boxes, in a warehouse, until he felt the need to revisit them. Here is Andy at his finest:
“What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey.”
A. Warhol, THE philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again, London, 1975.
- Robert Capa’s lost negatives of the Spanish Civil War – long thought to be lost… http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/arts/design/27kenn.html
Cedar Riverside, 2008
The structures that I am photographing reside in the collective public consciousness of our built environment. Ironically, these modernist structures, which emerge from a movement that eschewed monument and past for nature and future, carry cultural memory incredibly well. Traces of failed utopian idealism are still found on display in the architectural relics of this period that linger in our urban fabric.With this series of photographs, it is my intention to explore the ways that historical ideas can collapse when intersected with the practices and needs of everyday life.
From my Bass Pig friend in Los Angeles:
It’s been a couple of days since I’ve made a post of any consequence. I have had a number of not so pleasant things on my plate and am now just starting to lean back in and write about ideas. I’m finally getting around to changing my web-presence, portfolio site, and print identity. Whew.
Rest assured that the new http://andrewschroeder.net will be twice as wonderful as the first (which should not be hard, considering how weak my portfolio site is at the moment).
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- Experimental Jetset from AMS, I’ve carried this object with me for two years now.
On to today’s post.
Directly to my left is a copy of Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. Manguel covers all the little technologies and techniques we’ve developed over the centuries that make reading a beautiful, nuanced, and fulfilling thing. Imagine life without the technology of reading silently…
In many ways an anthology of the practice of reading, the book has made me think of the ways that I attempt to expand, contract, and shut-out the world via reading.
For example, perhaps my favorite passage thus far (read while freezing my ass off on the #24), is his description of the ways that we’ve come to accept the book as a type of outsourced memory. Historically, readers were taught not to mar books/scrolls/scripts with their doodles and notes as a way of marking what they found important. Instead, those who read were encouraged to meditate on the shape, form, and spatial location of words on a page and then be able to recall information from that geographic knowledge.
Its all very beautiful, if impractical. Perhaps we’re being pushed back to this system with all of the “thought-mapping” and word-webbing software that is available. I’m trying to imagine my library at home as a spatial construction. Instead of all of my notes in sketchbooks, databases, and blogs – what if I could actually recall the geography, the physical place, of my acquired knowledge?
In a way this physical location of memories/ideas/knowlege still lingers on in my life: whenever anyone borrows a book from me, I feel a little physical loss… almost as though the weight of that knowlege is being removed from me.
Fun thoughts for a Tuesday…. imagine a world where human beings only have physical memories… where we have to possess the object in order to remember the actions associated with it.
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Another take on reading from Paris is Burning.
From Well Medicated...
We all know the joys of being well medicated. Now, apparently there is a great design blog out there that goes by the same name. I highly encourage you to check it out.
Dig it.
My co-worker, friend, and new found confidant, Mike had his 27th birthday at Gastof’s. Delicious. Especially the crowd that was already there gettin’ freaky. Including this wonderful, stringy haired beast in a silver suit. God bless em. God bless the midwest.
And Mike breakin’ it down Bavarian beer-hall style.
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What are you doing to me?!?!?!
I also discovered the painful beauty of snuff. Tobacco: up the nose. Apparently some fucked up Germans like this. Few things in life make me make this face. Apparently snuff is one of them.
