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January 31, 2009 Walker Entrance
I’ve been running around like crazy lately. The process of moving to a new apartment is… more stressful than I remember. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to update this blog as much as I would have liked.
Something good…
I’m beginning to shake off the frigid weight of winter and photograph again, with hopes of eventually building a portfolio of architectural photography.
While that is starting to simmer on the back burner, I am also beginning to expand on the dialog that was initiated with a post on Dec. 05. A post on Elysium, the blog of Colleen Mullins, caught the attention of another blogger… creating a trifecta of discussion about the role of the market in art production.
Check out the first question in the discussion here…
Stay tuned for updates…
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!
Ladies and gentlemen, it is Friday. I’m off to have happy hour with David before he departs for Bergen, Norway to become a famous photographer and eventually will be stalking my prey and having dinner with Courdis. Before departure, here are a few images that are keeping me sane on this dismal day.
-as
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.
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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
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.
I’m such a sap these days. But, that’s that.
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Apparently Not Loving My Polenta Fries
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And Photographs from Marco Zanta.
As I’m gazing out my window at the grey sky over the IDS building the dread of winter is starting to set in. Yes. It’s finally here – and – with it comes the nesting urge. It may be biological or it may be sociological, but my urge to make my living arrangements better is suddenly pronounced.
There is some part of me that still subscribes to the bourgeois fantasy of having a comfortable home with all the material trappings. I have to take this with a bit of inherent irony, because my apartment is located in a mid-60s, perfectly rectangular modernist block. To spruce it up a bit: its Midwestern platenbau – a true rarity in a city of bungalows and brownstones.
That said, I think I’m spending my weekend at IKEA, painting my walls the proper shade of avocado, and getting ready to be indoors for the next couple of months.
I’ll be posting photos of the transformation of my apartment from grungy artist hovel to less grungy artist hovel.
This post is going to be so brief its going to hurt. At the moment I have two very delicious looking bratwurst cooking in my kitchen. Yum. It brings out the Deutschlander in me. Today has been very strange. From waking up with the sun-shining to leaving work for happy hour after sunset, I feel like I’ve been dropped into a Robert Irwin installation.
Like I’m not quite here, or sure of what I’m experiencing. Everything is familiar and exceptionally foreign.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been really thrown out of sorts. That is obvious. And over… a fling? A guy I met? I’m not even sure how to categorize this, other than to say… its not worth the energy at this point.
This is the perspective I’ve gained from my first French lesson. From my drinks with my co-workers. And from my late night street-food binges in Brooklyn.
C’est la vie.
