Art Can Help (1)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Art Can Help by Robert Adams.

Robert Adams, From the front porch of an abandoned one-room school house, looking into the Niobrara River Valley, Dawes County, Nebraska, 1978, gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches (sheet), courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery (source)

The prodigiously published, widely feted, and extensively exhibited Robert Adams published Art Can Help in 2017, to assert that “It is a responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it” (p. 9). His gallery, Fraenkel, quotes a critic regarding Adams’s books that they “are defiantly free of postmodern attitudes and theorizing, arguing that one of the chief purposes of making art is to keep intact an affection for life.” That said, he’s not precisely a modernist either, at least not in every way I am. His conception of good art is a representation that exceeds the importance of its subject. One reason that such art has become rare is the “sometimes misplaced faith in the communicative and staying powers of total abstraction” (p. 10).¹ Furthermore:

This atrophying away of the genuine article is a misfortune because, in an age of nuclear weapons and overpopulation and global warming, we need more than ever what art used to provide. Somehow we have to recommit to picture making that is serious. It is impermissible any longer to endorse imitations that distract us or, openly or by implication, ridicule hope. The emptiness of material by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, for example, is born of cynicism and predictive of nihilism.

I’m all for having a social conscience, but I hope that we deserve serious pictures for better reasons than the subjects of our social conscience. Wilhelm Worringer characterized art as an attempt to relate to the nature of the universe, whether frightful and remote or familiar and knowable. I favor that framing. Robert Adams describes a plausible framework for making photographs by Robert Adams, but I doubt it is normative. The dismissal of abstraction is tiresome—it’s the 21st century, for pity’s sake.

After that somewhat off-putting start, the book begins in earnest with a discussion of two paintings by Edward Hopper, whose work Adams discovered as a child. As is often the case with such books, the author is better when he has specifics to deal with. Hopper’s paintings “began to give me something lasting, a realization of the poignancy of light. With it, all places were interesting” (p. 13). “Light explains nothing about meaning, but for Hopper it was the basis of a lifetime’s faith” (p. 17). For Adams too.

The subject then turns to photographs, one or two at a time, discussed a page or two at a time. Here the book shines. On Golf Course under Construction, East of Boulder, Colorado (1989) by Ken Abbott, Adams writes (p. 31):

Leo Rubinfien once encouraged me by writing that I had as a photographer “laid form lightly on life,” a compliment I do not always deserve but one I think Ken deserves with photographs like this. Form in a picture is justified by our experience of wholeness (coherence) in life, and if we are to be convincingly reminded by art of such experience then the shape in art has to be believably tentative, as fragile as meaning seems to be in life, as problematic even as the future is for those cottonwood shoots there on the far side of the creek.

Adams’s copy is not particularly quotable, but at length, it aggregates in modesty, warmth, charm, and incision. He prefaced the book with a quote from Keats: “Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.” Which again, is a plausible framework for writing poems by John Keats. Adams has taken it to heart as a kindred spirit.

Page 39:

The affirmations that we credit are often those that we can check. We accept as plausible the flowers in Terri Weifenbach’s pictures, for instance, because they are the same ones that grow in our gardens.²

And with that confirmed, we can be rescued. All winter we have stared at the backyard, and have ended nearly hypnotized by brown. How could we have missed the peony shoots?

While Adams and I part ways on total abstraction, we are the same kind of modernist in an important sense: we both appreciate that there’s no way into a work of art except the work itself. In art, one can propose general statements based on specific observations, but not the converse. If one starts with general statements, they eventually collide with counterexamples. Adams sees photography beautifully, and he sees it rightly. That in itself is a lesson, one that applies apart from any specific claims in Art Can Help.

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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art Can Help by Robert Adams. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.

1. The other two are the “disillusionment from a century of war” and “the ease with which lesser work can be made and sold.”

2. Under discussion was XXV, 25 March 1995 and II, April 1996 by Weifenbach.