Michael Ashkin
Michael Ashkin
Were It Not For
256 pages
11 x 8.5 x 0.9 inches
Sofrcover
FW:Books
From the artist:
American artist Michael Ashkin works across a range of media: painting, photography, video, sculpture, and text. Uniting these diverse practices is a conceptual focus on the way that notions of spaces and place, landscape and self are shaped by wider political and economic forces. The photographs in this series were all shot in the Mojave Desert and are joined in this publication with a textual work. The combination creates a powerful sense of unease throughout the document, one that explores the idea of fear and haunting as an effect of the violent legacies contained within the landscape, as well as a function of the technologies that we use to represent it.
Book photo by Marissa Iamartino
Book review by Marissa Iamartino |
It’s an inch-high stack of white pages. A brown craft cover hosts a list of left-aligned sentences. I think of blackboard detention assignments. Baldessari. Stacks of ‘were’s’ and ‘it’s’ and ‘not’s’ form individual columns. Pattern becomes visual illusion. Visual illusion becomes pattern. A nameless high school teacher repeats the phrase, “Metacognition is thinking about thinking” and my memory follows a blood trail in the woods. Red drops scream atop green leaves, though I’ve dated three color-blind men and one had an unlucky habit of running red lights. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault. The red circles would blast my pupils with incredible force, but the cones in his eyeballs translated that into the ALL-OK, KEEP GOING. As we’d approach intersections, I’d choke down my words and unwanted awareness, pushing my body backwards into the passenger seat, and after passing through, in an exasperated sigh of relief, I’d say, “Another blinking green?!”. Only once were we met with sirens. The red and blue lights flickered on his face. I wonder what colors he saw.
were it not for is a humble object, perhaps made intentionally inconspicuous. It bridges the mundane and the other-worldly, packaged like a secret file to be carried by a detective. For weeks, I flipped through the black and white images struggling to find a place to land, but the more time I spent with the work, the more it began to shift from cold and isolating to fiery and connected. Michael Ashkin works with painting, sculpture, photography, video, and writing, and with all mediums he is a master at creating worlds. He explores how political and economic structures define space and place.
Book photo by Marissa Iamartino
At the crux of this work lies grammar, both in a literal and structural sense. A long list of sentences propels the book forward, all starting with “were it not for” and ending in varying dependent clauses. Despite following a rigid structure, the words come together in a way I can only describe as a memory song, shifting my role from reader to ritualist. I think of my second-grade self reciting The Pledge of Allegiance, poorly mumbling words to a familiar rhythm with complete lack of understanding. Ashkin’s chant however, carries me through waves of sadness, optimism, horror, laughter, and anger. The list-form is a necessity; a simple vehicle transporting content that feels utterly hard to swallow.
The phrase “were it not for” uses were in the past tense, implying that the narrator is looking back or at circumstances from above. It’s a statement often used with regret, a negative alternative to ‘Maybe If’. The work functions as a subversion of the American landscape, ripping holes into the past and present of this country at a micro and macro scale. Sentences cover attitudes, mental health, feelings, law enforcement, politics, money, justice, ideas, relationships, highways, holidays, the media. Some feel pointed, triggering. These out-of-order samples:
were it not for the unmarked border
were it not for the marketing of dreams
were it not for those who would handsomely profit
were it not for the un-potable water
were it not for the upcoming election
cause my neurons to fire in a parallel stream...
ICE raids
Bernie Madoff
the Sackler family
Flint
two men onstage screaming (with forty-five more already framed in gold).
Book photo by Marissa Iamartino
Some sentences are more ambiguous, bringing me to consider the sun, cornfields, Star Trek, an old friend, or true crime TV. Ones like the samples above, however, face-slap me with the failures of capitalism, the repeated destruction of Native communities and lands, the horror of a broken democracy, the continuation of historic racism and systematic oppression, the impenetrable force that is socio-economic inequality, and the perpetuation of blind nationalism. All is distinctly and undeniably American.
My attempts to look at books with a critical eye are undoubtedly steeped in my past experiences and ideologies, but despite the strict and limiting parameters that sculpt were it not for, it’s algorithmic structure (paralleling ones we interact with daily) does not eliminate subjectivity, either. Just as tiny grains of sand accumulate to create desert dunes, this gathering of text and image creates unrelenting proof. The desert is harsh, the desert is bleak, and we’re all living in it.
Looking at photobooks is so often about the act of the swoon, meaning a seduction through color/light/tone -- but these photographs function on a completely different level. They are strong in their multiplicity, pulling together nods to conceptual art and modes of landscape painting. I see a melding of the subliminal and the sublime. Like Caspar David Friedrich, Ashkin presents us with the allegorical landscape, minimizing human scale and nearly eliminating first-person perspective. Rather than focusing on the “I”, he draws attention to larger systems, building from territorial, to national, to global, to existential. Like so many of Friedrich’s mid-career paintings, Ashkin’s imagery depicts a haunting emptiness that incites fear and awe. The vastness of the desert feels endless, but even larger is the grand scale in which we have simultaneously built-upon and destroyed it.
Book photo by Marissa Iamartino
Ashkin’s photographs, like the writing, exist in strict parameters: all black and white, same page placement, accompanied by one sentence, all made in the Mojave Desert. There’s an absence and presence of human life that is shown through traces rather than bodies. Images depict an after-math. Remnants. Buildings. Fences. Footprints and garbage. In a way, it’s all reactionary, like a gathering of notes or evidence, as if someone has seen the entirety of America’s history from above. I picture Wanderer above the Sea of Fog looking down at us, shaking his fist.
Put bluntly, were it not for kicks some serious ass because it does the one thing that most photobooks (and most photographic works in general) fail to do. It holds form and content equally accountable. Not only does Michael Ashkin present information in masterful parameters, but even better, does so wrapped in a kraft cover. There’s a playfulness to this idea, that a book with such charged undertones could appear as mundane as a manila folder full of tax paperwork. I love that it’s accessible on multiple levels but also somewhat unappealing. A parallel object to metacognition. Not thinking about thinking, but structure about structure. And if you’re not looking for it, you just might miss it.
Book photo by Marissa Iamartino
Or, it is possible that my red light is your green light, and everything I’ve written here is total bullshit. Regardless, we’ll both make it through the book unscathed. I can’t turn your world into my world. Or, better-said by Sontag:
“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)
The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.”
— Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, 1964
