Robert Adams：艺术家解释自己的作品，等于承认失败

写 Writing

Robert Adams说：

ART IS by nature self-explanatory. We call it art precisely because of its sufficiency. Its vivid detail and overall cohesion give it a clarity not ordinarily apparent in the rest of life.

艺术在本质上是不言自明的。我们称他为艺术恰恰是因为它的充分性。它生动的细节和全局性的浓缩给了一种明示，这在生活中的其他部分通常是不明显的。

And so if the audience lives in the same time and culture as does the artist, and if the audience is familiar with the history of the medium, there is no need to append to art a preface or other secondary apparatus.

如果观众生活在与艺术家相同的时代和文化当中，如果观众熟悉这种媒介的历史，就没有必要去附加艺术一种前言或者是另外一种解释。

Successful writing about works of art is accordingly an unusual achievement. It is self-effacing, devoted to establishing the adequacy of the art without the writing. John Szarkowski described an appropriate measure for critical writing: " The better the writing is the more necessary it makes the picture." There are only few commentators who can do that - Robert Hughes, for instance, and Szarkowski himself.

关于艺术作品成功的写作是一个不同寻常的成就。它是一种自谦，是致力于建立没有写做的艺术的充份性。John Szarkowski描述了一种评论的适度尺度: 写作越好，越有必要制作照片。只有极少的评论员可以做到这点，例如，Robert Hughes, 和Szarkowski自己。

Several important artists have been effective critics - the painter Fairfield Porter was, for example, an accomplished writer for The Nation but they have not earned reputations either as artists or critics by explaining their own art. Photographers are quick to note this because they are so often asked to spell out the significance of their pictures, something they resist trying to do. Yes they can say a little about what brought them to begin, though this is not to discuss what resulted, and they can describe the equipment they used and the processes they followed in the darkroom, but they know that if these are the secrets then the pictures are not very important.

几个重要的艺术家是有效的评判者，例如，画家Fairfield Porter, The Nation的作者，但他们没有像艺术家和批评家一样靠解释他们的艺术获得好的声誉。摄影师很快就注意到这点因为他们经常被要求说出他们图片的特点，也就是他们努力回避做的事情。他们的确可以说一些是什么让他们开始的，就算这不是在讨论结果是什么，他们也可以描述他们所用设备，他们在暗室里所采用的过程，但是他们知道如果这些就是秘密，那么他们的照片就不是那么很重要了。

The frequency with which photographers are called upon to talk about their pictures is possibly related to the apparent straightforwardness of their work. Photographers look like they just record what confronts them - as is. Shouldn't they be expected to compensate for this woodenness by telling us what escaped outside the frame and by explaining why they chose their subject? The assumption is wrong of course, but an audience that knows better small, certainly smaller than for painting. Photographers envy painters because they are usually allowed to get by with gnomic utterances or even silence, something permitted them perhaps because they seem to address their audience more subjectively, leaving it more certain about what the artist intended.

摄影师被要求谈论他们作品的频率，有可能与他们作品的直白有关。摄影师看起来仅仅是记录了他们面对的东西。他们不应该被期望补充一些什么吗？告诉我们在框架之外有什么？解释为什么他们选择了这主题？当然这种假设是错误的，能理解的观众数量是很少的，甚至于少于绘画的。摄影师羡慕画家因为画家经常被容许用格言来表达或者甚至于用沉默，可能是因为他们对观众表达时更加有主题性，留下更多艺术家想做什么的确定性。

Years ago when I began to enjoy photographs I was struck by the fact that I did not have to read photographers ' statements in order to love the pictures. Sometimes remarks about the profession by people like Stieglitz and Weston were inspiring, but almost nothing they said about specific pictures enriched my experience of those pictures. Photographers seemed so strikingly unable to write at length about what they had made, in fact, that I came to wonder if there was any exception at all, a single case where an artist's writing did not end up making a picture smaller, less complex less resonant, less worthy of comparison with life.

多年前当我开始享受摄影时我被事实震惊，我不必去读摄影师的陈述来爱上一幅作品。有时候，像Stieglitz和Weston的专业评论的确是令人鼓舞的，但是，他们对这些特定的照片说的话对我没有影响。摄影师意外的不能对自己的作品做出过多的写作。我变得有点疑惑到底有没有哪个艺术家的描述不会把作品的震撼力缩小，复杂减少，共振减少，以及降低作品和生活比较的价值。

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision. Other ways are relatively imprecise and incomplete. Why try the other ways? As Charles Demuth said, " I have been urged… to write about my paintings… Why? Haven't I, in a way, painted them? " Or as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, " You want me to say it worse? "

解释失败的部分原因是摄影师像所有的艺术家一样，以视觉作为最完整真实的表达。其他的方式相对不精确不完整。那么为什么要尝试其他的方式？如Charles Demuth说：我被敦促于写关于我的绘画，为什么，我不是画出来了吗？或如Robert Frost对一个问他的诗的意思的人说，你希望我以更差的方式来表达吗？

Photographers are like other artists too in being reticent because they are afraid that self-analysis will get in the way of making more art. They never fully know how they got the good pictures that they have, but they suspect that a certain innocence may have been necessary. The poet X. J. Kennedy speaks of this in his amusing verse " Ars Poetica " :

摄影师像其他艺术家一样沉默，因为他们害怕自我分析将阻止他们创造更多艺术。他们从来没有完全知道过他们是怎样获得的他们的好照片，但他们猜测有一种天真是必需的。诗人X.J .Kennedy在他的趣味诗句诗歌艺术中写到：

[A]rtists don't willingly describe or explain what they produce is, however , that the minute they do so they've admitted failure. Words are proof that the vision they had is not, in the opinion of some at least, fully there the picture. Characterizing in words what they thought they'd shown is an acknowledgment that the photograph is unclear and that it is not art.

艺术家们不想描述和解释，一旦他们这样做了就等于承认失败。在一张图片中语言证明了视觉没有证明的。用文字描述他们展示的东西是承认照片不清楚和这不是艺术。

Of course if you believe in the merit of your work you reject the accusation of failure that is implied by a request to explain it.

当然如果你相信你的作品，你就拒绝暗含要求你们解释作品的请求。

In this respect all artists are elitists. They are convinced that some viewers lack patience to see what is clear.

在这方面所有的艺术家都是精英。他们相信一些观众缺乏耐心去看什么是明显的。

Probably the best way to know what photographers think about their work, beyond consulting the internal evidence in that work, is to read or listen to what they say about pictures made by colleagues or precursors whom they admire. It is as close as photographers usually want to come to talking about their own intentions, though even this testimony must be interpreted carefully because it is guarded ( no one undergoes the trouble of serious picture making if he or she believes that anybody else has done exactly what most needs doing ). Almost all photographers admire a selection of work by others, though, and sometimes the achievements they notice are closely related to their own.

了解摄影师是如何看他们自己的作品的最好方法可能是，除了查阅该作品内部证据以外，就是去读去听他们讲关于他的同事是怎样做出照片的，或他们所崇拜的前辈。像摄影师通常想去谈论他们自己的意图一样靠近，虽然这些被保护的见证必须被小心翼翼的被解读（没有人愿意去经历制作照片严肃的过程的带来的麻烦，如果他们相信其他人能够准确的完成他所需要的。）几乎所有的摄影师崇拜至少一个其他人的系列作品，有时候，他们所注意到的这些成就近似于他们自己的成就。

For photographers, the ideal book of photographs would contain just pictures - no text at all. There have been a few volumes like that, but publishers complain they don't sell, so not many have been allowed, which leaves photographers to endure the botched clarity and wasted effort required of them. ( Writing under the best of circumstances is demanding; Red Smith, the eminent sportswriter, addressed everybody who supposes otherwise: " There's nothing to writing, " he said, " all you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein. " ) I remember once working through more than a hundred drafts of a four-paragraph statement for a catalog. all to find something that would just keep out of the way of the pictures.

对于摄影师来说，理想的摄影书籍是仅仅包含了图片没有任何的文字。仅有很少的几卷书是这样的，因为印刷者抱怨他们不好销售，因此，被允许的不多，留给摄影师的是忍受拙劣的清晰度，和被浪费的努力。（在最好情况下的写作是要求很高的。Red Smith , 杰出的运动作家，对每个不认可的人说：这没什么好写的。他说你要做的就是坐在打字机旁放松。）我记得曾经为了一个关于目录的四段话做过一百多份草稿，一切都是为了想出一些不会妨碍图片的东西。

Things are not about to improve either. University presses for example, which publish some of the best photography hold increasingly to a policy that requires books of pictures to incorporate "substantial " texts. This often means not only layering together pictures with the photographer's words but also sandwiching the concoction between slabs of social scientific balloon bread.

事态也没有在变好。印刷过最好的摄影作品的一些大学出版社越来越坚持一个政策：图片的书籍需要包含大量文本。这意味着不仅将图片与摄影师的文字叠加在一起，还要把这些混合物夹杂在社会科学之间。

Photographers continue to write because they need to have their pictures reproduced in quantity; is the only way they can convey an adequately sized vision of things. To get published I have tried every kind of cheating - I have quoted others to the same end as mine, I have talked about photography in general in order to imply what I was attempting personally. Experience has shown, however, that the best way to avoid talking about the pictures is to talk about their subjects - tract houses or fields or trees or any of the myriad and interesting details of life. If you have to fill the quiet of a picture, the least destructive way seems to be to speak about what was in front of the camera rather than about what you made of it. It seems the least a trick, the closest you can get to speak about the meaning of a picture without actually doing so

摄影师继续写作是因为他们需要把他们的照片大量的复制；这是传递事物的唯一方法。为了印刷出版我尝试过各种手段，我有用其他人的话来说自己的作品，有讨论过摄影这整个主题来暗示自己的意思。经验表明，避免解释照片最好的方法就是谈论他们的主题，田野和树木和任何有趣的生活细节。如果你必须填满一张照片，破坏性最小的方式看起来就是讲照相机前面是什么而不是你是怎样完成它们的。这似乎不算是技巧，但是是在避免描述作品最接近的方式。

C. S. Lewis admitted when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters.

C.S. Lewis承认，他从没有对自己的信念感到有多不确定直到他被要求阐述它们。摄影师知道这个弱点。对他们来说，用词语来表达重要的事物是一种苍白且无针对性的方式。