MICHAEL ASHKIN: HOLIDAY IN THE SUN
As I proceeded through the eight pieces in this exhibit–and I strongly recommend viewing them in order, starting left of the entrance and proceeding clockwise–it became clear that the works had a kind of story to tell. Ashkin portrays motorized conveyances–trains, planes, cars, trucks–and the industrialized landscapes we’ve created as utterly alienated from the natural world. The vague feeling of unease generated by the sparse Long Stretches in subsequent works approaches paranoia. We see planes and trucks losing their bearings in the wilderness, threatening to vanish into the “north”; in two of the last pieces solitary wanderers leave their cars and set off on foot–arguably the best way to begin to have a less alienated experience of the land.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As in the other pieces, the details are what give this work its life–the sense that it shows an actual event. The wingtip is causing a small wake, beginning at one of the exposed rocks, implying that this was the point of initial impact. The plane’s descent is clearly not “peaceful,” but the shallows are; except for the wing’s wake, nary a ripple mars the surface. This plane is about to be destroyed in an encounter with one aspect of Ashkin’s impeccably depicted natural world: the rocks that break the water’s surface.
There’s a social meaning here as well. The chaos is the result of our society’s reaction to someone who’s found a way to live in this alienating and inhuman setting–the entire social order is threatened when one person converts a fragment of this man-made desert into a home. The landscape is generic, anonymous–this combination of highways, warehouses, and empty land could be almost anywhere. Ashkin seems to suggest that such settings are antihuman, and so is the civilization that created them and that calls out all its forces to prevent a lone wanderer from converting them to his own use.
If Friedrich’s suns and moons have an ethereal luminousness that suggests transcendence of the physical world, Ashkin’s figures can transcend the physical world only by leaving the image–as in His Chauffeur Would Wait, or as may happen in Free Now. Ashkin’s hiker in He Set Off will gain altitude, just as Friedrich’s figures gaze upward at mountain landscapes; but Ashkin’s landscape conveys no otherworldly light. Yet Ashkin shares the romantic’s distrust of the quotidian present–even as industrial civilization crashes down around his figures, they seek out some space in the invisible distance.
