Beginning in 1970 and continuing to the present, Adams has continuously kept journals which have noted linguistic experiments, phrases that have struck Adams and appealed to him, quotations from books and magazines, notes for future work, dates to be remembered. At this formative time, Adams was absorbed by the philosophies of Duchamp first, then Guy Debord, Ezra Pound, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Robert Bresson, Albert Camus, James Joyce and numerous others.

“I was always interested in language, but in the beginning I was somewhat intimidated until about age 20. You didn’t come to being an artist out of philosophy”.

In 2012, along with Adams’ completion of his 42 minute video Malraux’s Shoes, he was simultaneously referencing his own extensive library and archive documenting the intellectual climate of the 1960s. Entitled Tagging the Archive, this suite of 24 text pieces were montaged over revolutionary ephemera from the 60s as well as book covers such as Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book (1971), Franz Erhard Walther’s Objekte, benutzen (1968), Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, Claude Levi Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, Henry Miller’s Black Spring, and others. This was Adams’ opportunity to formulate a critical dialogue filled with ambiguous clues. Juxtaposed against forerunners such as Broodthaer’s Departement des Aigles (1968-72), or Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1866-1929), or Malraux’s Le Musee Imaginaire, or Richard Prince’s extensive personal library of vintage pulp fiction, Tagging the Archive forms a cryptic link to the underpinnings of Adams’ oeuvre. The mere act of bringing together books and ephemera in the form of a personal library allowed issues to be raised, contiguities to be revealed and borders between disciplines to be transgressed. The project composes a brilliant series of satirical and polemic “flysheets.”