Michael Ashkin - There will be two of you

“Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement”

Michel Foucault

Between the middle ages and the present day, the philosopher Michel Foucault suggests, a change has taken place in the way that we understand and embody space. Instead of the once hierarchical mediaeval notion of space, (where some spaces were more important than others) we are now living in a world where space has infinitely opened up. In this opened up space there is a connected network of sites, (schools, hospitals, graveyards, fairgrounds…) each with their own structures, ideas, and meanings.

An extension of greed, an extension of waste, an extension of globalism. An extension of capitalism, wealth, poverty, class. An extension of wasteland, an extension of concrete, an extension of cars and lorries and rubber and steel. An extension of slick black oil, of plastic signs, (1.45 regular unleaded, 1.55 mid-grade unleaded, 1.63 super premium, ALL TAXES INCLUDED) an extension of tree roots and clumps of weeds, of chain-linked fencing. An extension of Politics and Economics. An extension of wreathed flowers, of New Jersey, of New York City, an extension of Exxon, Budd Enterprises LTD, the Skyway Motel, Citgo, Paul Arpin, Checkers, Xtra Lease, Putnam’s Truck Stop. An extension of violence. An extension of us.

There will be two of you, Michael Ashkin’s latest book, is a series of images made in New Jersey’s ‘Meadowlands’, an ecosystem of urbanised wetlands a few miles west of New York City. The gritty panoramic photographs were made between the years 2000 and 2001, and commissioned by the late Okwui Enwezor for the Documenta (11) contemporary art exhibition, in Kassel, Germany.

Ashkin’s fascination with the Meadowlands was kindled on childhood car rides between New Jersey, (his home at the time) and New York in the 1960s. This fascination stayed with him. In the 1980s, he’d gaze over their marshes from an office high in the World Trade Center towers. Eventually, in the 1990s, Ashkin began to explore the Meadowlands on foot, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, ‘using satellite photos [he’d] taped together’ as navigation. This peregrinating affair of place and self is enwrapped in Ashkin’s photographic explorations of space, and the obscured political and economic hilt of landscape itself.

Ashkin’s peregrinating affair of place and self is enwrapped in his photographic explorations of space, and the obscured political and economic hilt of landscape itself.

Antithetically to his highly praised book, were it not for, where the photographs were cropped from a landscape to a portrait format, There will be two of you amplifies the landscape form into sweeping panoramas full of detailed information. Despite these drastic changes in form and shape, the two works bear a striking similarity. They simultaneously reveal so much and so little, (almost nothing) providing comprehensive detail of a place, whilst consistently harbouring a need to know what is just outside the bounds of the frame. The images never quite satisfy the traditional desire of the landscape image – the capturing of the spectacle, the picturesque and the sublime – instead they hint at the repeated rhythms of the everyday or the mundane. It is in this hinting, this never quite revealing, that this ‘nothing’ in Ashkin’s photographs appears.

In the bleak panoramic views we see masses of rubble, piled high with sweeps of plastic and jutting rusted metal, mounds of wrenched tree roots and misshapen tyres. We see plains of gravel reaching towards the horizon with pervasive weeds sprouting up from the stoney ground . Each seemingly vacant lot is surrounded by chain-link fencing topped with gnarls of barbed wire. What exactly they’re safeguarding, or who they’re trying to keep out, is hard to tell.

These ravaged vistas present the Meadowlands as an extension of the economically and politically motivated, the human impacted, decline of nature. Ashkin’s exploration reveals the bastardisation of an integral natural ecosystem to make way for a desolate strewn nowhere; the once burgeoning habitats of freshwater, brackish water, and saltwater eventually making way for thoroughfares and parking lots, landfills and wastelands.

These sites are home to a wealth of articulated trailers, some intact, others torn apart, their heavy plastic casings shredded, leaving gaping holes to peer through. As they idle in vacant lots, their cabs rush along the winding roads that connect site to site, passing by the hot-rolled steel of unswerving train tracks. The roadsides are littered with petrol stations and cheap motels, used auto part shops and auto repair centres, diners that serve hamburgers and coffee, the essential commodities of a concrete wasteland.

The once burgeoning habitats of freshwater, brackish water, and saltwater eventually making way for thoroughfares and parking lots, landfills and wastelands.

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon uses the phrase ‘slow violence to describe’ “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.” This violence isn’t the instantaneous one of war or conflict , but one that is drawn-out, gradual. There will be two of you uncovers these repressed, accretive acts of ‘delayed destruction’. The decisions that have haunted the Meadowlands since our interventions began come to the fore in Ashkin’s photographs, and the scars of entropy we choose to ignore become startlingly visible.

There will be two of you ends with a short story, used as both a mode of recall and a method of comprehension. Two characters journey through “desolated housing and marshland covered in rail yards, truck routes, and rubbished lots” to reach a hangar “surrounded by destroyed workshops, locker rooms, littered offices, [and] narrow hallways.” They both enter the hangar and “before [their] eyes can adjust, [they] will see it, in the middle, on the cinder floor beneath where the roof has lost one metal sheet.” In a moment of recall when the two characters sit later that night in a bar, one tries to describe what it is they both witnessed, but language seems to falter and fail at the immensity of the experience. Suddenly they feel alone as their “recollections and [their] descriptions… diverge” and they begin to “behold each other in disbelief, in distrust.” With this shared experience breaking down, the two, choose another day to journey to the hangar, “from any direction, but always through desolated housing and marshland covered…”

Ashkin speaks of the story as offering a “momentary promise of unity, even as it dissolves.” It’s as if the photographs aren’t enough on their own to divulge the impression his explorations had left on him… that his journeys into the Meadowland’s wastelands offered more than exploring ideological concepts of globalism and politics and violence, that they were, in fact, an opportunity to try and understand his own relationship to them.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker, a guide leads two characters, a writer and a scientist, into the ‘Zone’, a heavily guarded post-apocalyptic wasteland which harbours indefinable horrors, where the normal laws of physics don’t apply. The promise which lures people into this desolate wasteland is The Room, which, when you cross its threshold, will grant you your most longed for wishes. The three characters in Stalker don’t cross this threshold, instead turning back, deciding that it’s impossible for one to ever truly know your own desires. Perhaps this is the same fate that the Meadowlands has in store for Ashkin, that no matter how he explores, on foot, through images, or by words, a unity between himself and this place will always elude him.