You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'Everyday life' tag.
Vacationing in Golden Valley This Year!
Zen Habits has a great article about being pigeonholed. I feel like the art world demands that artists brand themselves through their work… this little article has a great take on how to recognize when you’re being pushed to be one way or another based on surrounding circumstances.
I’d also like to add that the Minnesota Martini at the Longfellow Grill is amazing.
Proof my phone's camera sucks!
Cheers to all and to all a good (but cold) night!
I’ve taken a hiatus to tend to the burning feeling that seems to be eminating from my lungs. Ouch. In the mean time, here a just a few images of the week that was.
Hiver 2009
Sunlight
Homemade
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
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.
*****
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.
*****
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
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).
*****
- 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.
*****
Another take on reading from Paris is Burning.
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.
*****
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.
Longfellow, 12-14-2008
*****
Living in Minnesota for the last three years has been a period of intense upheaval sprinkled with moments of lucid stability. This morning was one of those moments. I decided to go for a walk, before the blizzard sets in and take some photographs of this place that I actually have started calling home.
Did I end up here by choice? Is this as good as it gets? Can this locality actually be MY locality? And, if so, how? How am I to inhabit this place? Materially? (Through owning property, things, images?) Socially? (Through interaction with other inhabitants.) Spiritually? (Through ritual, religion, beliefs of this place).
Or is there a course of action that will take me away from here and somehow make me a better person? Is that other person the one I should be striving to be?
Good questions for an afternoon of being stuck in my house.
Longfellow, 12-14-2008
Longfellow, 12-14-2008
*****
In keeping with the “EMO, I reveal too much” facade I’ve had going for quite some time, I thought I’d post one of my daily images. So, basically: I try to summarize each of my days with a photograph/text/drawing… something to make it seem like I’m still an artist and not an “artist type”. They’re always lo-fi and harking back to my days as a printmaker.
(although a good halftone still turns me on)
Here’s today:
pinkwinter
I Voted.
- It is November. Yet still 70 Degrees F.
- Like many other Americans, I voted this morning. (Hopefully, like many many many other Americans) It was an amazing experience and, to be honest, I think my hands shook the entire time that I filled in my chosen ovals.
- Also like way way too many Americans, I checked my Facebook profile page this morning. All of my friends, except for one, had some sort of pro-Obama message. There was only one person, someone I knew, barely in high school, when I was living in the tiny town of Kearney, Nebraska.
- I am reading a really great book: The Big Sort: Why The Clustering of Like-minded America is Tearing Us Apart. The authors present the argument that the economic mobility of the last 30 years has allowed us to sort ourselves into homogenized communities of like-minded individuals. The evidence they present is really gripping: comparisons of landslide counties in elections since 1976. Back then, there were very few landslide Republican or Democratic counties. Today: the exact opposite.
What does this even remotely have to do with me?
When I was standing in line today, I looked around and became convinced that I am a product of the Big Sort’s invisible ordering. I live well inside the city, yet everyone around me is very similar. Caucasians mostly. Similarly dressed. With a similar sense of wealth. It was bizarre.
Does this mean that I am at a disadvantage? Am I missing the wealth of diversity that is present in truly urban environments?
Or does the security and similarity of my current surroundings indicate that I simply chose to ensure… my comfort?
