The Role of the Artist?

The role of the artist, says Robert Adams, is to "bring varied aspects of life into a new harmony within one frame . . . to make something whole and clear . . . ." For those that know Mr. Adams, this idea of making something unified out of incongruous parts has been a focus of his work. Adams likes especially to think about the juxtaposition of untamed nature and the detritus of modern industrial life, "the call of the dove . . . against some sterility like the flapping of a plastic bag caught on barbed wire." In a talk that he gave at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the late '80s, Adams said, "[A]rt is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, of shape beneath confusion. Art does not deny that evil is real, but it places evil in a context that implies an affirmation; the structure of the picture, which is a metaphor for the structure of the Creation, suggests that evil is not final."

Now, Mr. Adams would undoubtedly feel that the smelter stack at Anaconda, Montana is "evil," or that the people and processes that put it there . . . and turned it into a superfund site . . . were evil. This is not a feeling shared by Rural Ways. At least, not the way that Robert Adams means it. For Mr. Adams there seems to be an underlying current of us versus them, the greedy versus the good. At Rural Ways, all are greedy; which is to say that we all want what we want when we want it; we are, every one of us, evil in that sense. And this is the thing that both makes our lives more comfortable and damages the natural world with copper smelters. It is an ambiguous position: Loving one's copper, while hating rain made of arsenic. In any case, Rural Ways has a picture that shows, I think, a cottonwood tree and a smelter stack, a vision of disparities reconciled, and a suggestion that evil is not final.