💥✍ "Is art a sufficient consolation for life? Can beauty make suffering tolerable?" Art is being affirmed here in the positive register, life in the negative, one of struggle, suffering & survival, something that applies to third-world countries before & now & tomorrow & tomorrow… Worlds where the luxury to reflect is never proffered in the day-to-day, never mind in art. But here we are, photographer Robert Adams doing just that in the context of the New Topgraphers who saw beauty and Truth (with a small 't') in the social intimacy under the silent vertices of the American suburban landscape, in black, white & the splendour of light; far, far away from Warhol's jittery world of what now? what next? In reviews of Adams' work from the 1980s, when his book 𝘉𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘗𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺 was published, the word "tradition" is continually ascribed to his way of thinking, writing & making photographs. He is self-conscious about this fact, titling his critical essays "In Defense of Traditional Values." Adams is as erudite in his writings as he is eloquent in his photography, having a PhD in Literature before he turned fulltime to photography. Words came to his defence, but not ideas. Contra to poet William Bonk, Adams believed "Ideas are [not] always wrong" but rather in William Carlos Williams' formulation "No ideas but in things." I don't know why Adams' photography & writings have become so important to look at during the rise of this crisis. His photography seems to register something of now, albeit set in the past & elsewhere. Adams writes that art is only partly sufficient consolation for suffering. A photographer sent me a DM sharing concern "that old work I’ve made won’t have the same standing in whatever new-world emerges from this crisis". I think Adams' example proves that partly wrong. Some of those exhibitions that are on pause or delayed indefinitely will suffer a future viewer that has been irreparably changed after all this ends. Art cannot be viewed so cheaply as distraction. Most of the time art is not reflective of any particular time, but dips in & out of temporal consciousness when the time is right. Art's legacy is 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴🖤

APRIL 5, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night