If they are inclined toward political activism, it is the kind of activism that understands the difference between the artistic arena and the political arena and is prepared to act in both. If they are inclined toward lyrical responses to nature, they indulge these responses with their eyes wide open to the real plight of the environment today.
Consider, for instance, the black-and-white photographs of Robert Adams. Born in 1937, Adams has created recent work that looks, at first glance, unprepossessing. Quite deliberately, Adams chooses views of landscapes that are shapeless and unendearing rather than composed and inviting.
His vision draws us in with its modesty, but then it reveals many cherishable subtleties. Along with the detritus, the evidence of erosion, the sunspots and distant telegraph wires, there are signs of amazing hardiness, and a beauty that is frayed but real, like worn velvet. These images may seem bleak in their refusal to pander. But look at them long enough, and you are ready to believe Adams when he says, in an interview published in the catalog, that "the experience of making [them] was among the most joyful in my life."
Adams is someone who talks sincerely (and credibly, I might add) about the importance of "getting out of the car as often as possible" and improving "our friendliness with trees." Ed Ruscha, another senior artist in the show, is a more guarded and troubling figure. His work here, from a 2006 series called "Country Cityscapes," adds a degree of menace that acts as ballast for the chirpier works in the show.
Panoramic landscapes - vaguely reminiscent of work by Hudson River School artists like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church - are interrupted by strips of blocked-out text. The phrases that have been blocked out are indicated in the titles: "Noose around your neck," or "You will eat hot lead." The discord between image and (censored) text suggests something irreconcilable, even schizophrenic, in our relationship with reality, and it's from this that Ruscha's work gains its peculiar charge.
