The discourse surrounding this book is less bleak than the images themselves. Being a fan of Michael Ashkin’s work, I find this book to be his bleakest, yet when I read his words about the meaning of the book, I do not get the impression that it is necessarily its intention. First, we will start with the press release on the publisher’s site (1).

There will be two of you reorganizes and adds to the original 133 panoramic images of the New Jersey Meadowlands commissioned by Okwui Enwezor for Documenta 11 in 2002. The black and white photographs were installed at Documenta as a wall grid but are restored to the sequence in which they were taken during a year of meandering walks. The NJ Meadowlands have long been at the core of Ashkin’s visual imagination. In the accompanying text, “There will be two of you,” an enigmatic incident at the landscape’s symbolic center promises a redemptive allegory it cannot deliver. 

In thinking through this passage, I was curious about the aim of Documenta 11 and why Enwezor may have tapped Ashkin for inclusion into what has been heralded as an essential Documenta by several writers considering the topic. Knowing very little of Documenta and its traditions, I tried to find some literature about Ashkin’s inclusion. Still, I was met more with what the photographs were about than how they fit the curatorial remit of the festival held in Kassel, Germany, in 2002. This is not to suggest that they did not fit Enwezor’s remit, but instead that I was curious about why these specific photographs were included as I find them fantastic, if depressingly post-industrial, a genre or topic of photography that I am particularly drawn to for its necrotic tendencies. In reviewing the associated vocabulary, very little came to light besides this passage in Frieze, which is a general observation about the opening talks of Documenta 11 in 2002 (2)

Each of artistic director Okwui Enwezor’s six co-curators – Sarat Maharaj, Octavio Zaya, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, and Mark Nash – spoke briefly, followed by Enwezor himself. Maharaj identified the point of art today as ‘knowledge production’ and the point of this exhibition as ‘thinking the other’; Nash declared that the exhibition aimed to explore ‘issues of dislocation and migration’ (‘We’re all becoming transnational subjects,’ he observed); Ghez stressed the unusual fact that as many as 70% of the works in the show were made explicitly for the occasion; Basualdo spoke of ‘establishing a new geography, or topology, of culture’; and Bauer spoke of ‘deterritorialization.’ Finally, Enwezor began his reflections by referring to Chinua Achebe’s classic novel of pre-colonial Africa Things Fall Apart (1958). He spoke of the emergence of post-colonial identity and said that he and his colleagues had aimed at something much larger than an art exhibition: they were seeking to find out what comes after imperialism.

Suppose I focus on the idea of dislocation or ‘establishing a new geography, or topology, of culture.’ In that case, I can see how these photographs, in their gloom and strange formatting, fit the program. Still, I am then slightly baffled as to why Ashkin’s pictures and not his dynamic sculptures of architectural models that often discuss power, territorialization, and control were not included with these photographs or were exhibited as a focus instead. Given the lengths of the words, geography, topology, and even more broadly, culture, including the pictures, is fair. I get the pursuit of the matter even if the more political tonality of Documenta 11 and its political rhetoric seems absent from this particular work. What strikes me as resonant in this context is the idea of a Maximal Hinterland that I see in the work, which addresses a palimpsest of place where lots of nothingness crosses at other points of nothingness.

These photographs represent vague territories, outlined by their potential for utility and function over the splendor of their form. They are maximal in that this typology is pursued to a state of overdrive. There is so much nothing that it becomes ornate or perhaps philosophically baroque in that a vast potential to project the landscape’s usage supersedes what lies represented within the frame. Here, the goings on of semis, infrastructure, and mud-caked delivery systems at work, all refuse and discarded 18-wheeler rubber creating inadvertent sculpture at the roadside begging questions about global commerce and the function of society, if not culture at its most hermetic, the delivery systems in their voluminous multitude remain hidden inculcating America not with the result of products, but the murky business of transport and its deadening ecological byproduct.

Ashkin, in his book, writes, if not in a bucolic manner, a manner which suggests that the Meadowlands were something of a nostalgic playground for him and that these pictures, which he stopped taking one week before 9/11 offer some visual observations of the way he remembers the Meadowlands of his youth, clambering through holes in fences, dodging guard dogs and the like, a veritable post-industrial playground in which the outcome might be a torn bit of jean covering a scabbed knee. I can imagine these maximal dead spaces as places of profound imagination the same way that children invariably find skips and festering garbage heaps to play on at some point in their adolescence, drifting toward these sites because fewer rules, overseeing adults, or controls are present. As Charles Manson once opined…

Perhaps worth noting on the historical timeline is that in 1963, Penn Station in New York was demolished with all architectural elements brought to the Meadowlands as an architectural dump site, the body of McKim, Mead, and White’s American angels and eagles laid fragmented and broken waiting to be reclaimed by the soil had they not been saved. The meadowlands as a site for dropping architectural bodies fits nicely with this odd crime scene-like photographs by Ashkin. I cannot un-feel the tendency to read the pictures forensically. Some of this has to do with the 90s when they were made and the general sense of a dumping ground that can be seen in the photos. With Ashkin, the marauder of uncertain topology bordering on wasteland pornography, we find a consummate photographer patching together a puzzle of the unobserved, undervalued, and often downright rotten. In There Will Be Two of You, this tendency is at its pitch, and there isn’t a point of return when we consider all the artist sees. He has been to the end of the world, peered over the last highway at the last stop before the pavement collapsed into the vast void beneath the cement’s crumbling support.

Regarding design, it is challenging to work with panoramic photographs within the photobook form, especially while attempting a vertical format. Hans Gremmen of Fw: Books has done a fantastic job of making the 133 photographs in the book feel significant without reducing their scale too much. Taking them to the edge of legibility at this reduced scale without going over the line and making them seem like catalog entries must have been quite a maddening experience. As tricky as some of the subject matter is, or as easy as it may be to read it as stale or hopeless, one should take the time with a book like this. Perhaps its place on the historical timeline will make even more sense from a point in the future, but for the present, I have to commend the risk in publishing images like this in a full volume on the publisher and artist’s part. It is not an easy book, though I highly recommend it for that very principle.

Michael Ashkin

There Will Be Two of Us

Fw: Books

(1)https://fw-books.nl/product/michael-ashkin-there-will-be-two-of-you/

(2)https://www.frieze.com/article/documenta-11-1