So I wanted to share a passage from an essay by Robert Hughes that helped clarify this problem some years ago.
Thirty years ago, Abstract Expressionism was pretty well a mandatory world style. We in Australia looked at it with awe. The bottle in which its messages washed up on our shores (since the paintings themselves did not cross the Pacific) was the magazine ARTnews. Its hagiographic tone was clear. Except for the titans of the history books, whose work we hadn't seen either - from Michelangelo and Leonardo down to Picasso and Matisse - we had never read the kinds of claims made for any artist that Harold Rosenberg or Thomas Hess made for Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. They were grand enough to stifle aesthetic dissent. Only contact with the originals could have tested them, and we could not see the originals. Thus, although we didn't know it, we were in a situation of man American artists outside New York in the 1960s - flat on our backs, waiting for the missionary.
The copy of ARTnews would arrive and we would dissect it, cutting out the black-and-white reproductions and pinning them on the studio wall. One was, say a Newman. You had just read one of Thomas Hess's discourses on how Newman's vertical zip was Adam, or the primal act of division of light from darkness, or the figure of the unnamable Yahweh himself. How could you disagree? On what could you base your trivial act of colonial dissent? A mere reproduction, two inches by three? But Yahweh doesn't show his face in reproductions. He shows it only in paintings. And if you got to see the paintings, what if you didn't see it? Did that mean that his terrible and sublime visage was not there either? Of course not; it meant that you had a bad eye; or that Yahweh doesn't show himself to goyim in the South Pacific. And since it is difficult for the young and otherwise uninitiated to avoid, still less be skeptical about, the language in which peak experiences are offered to them, you were apt to assume that it was your own unpreparedness or sheer obtuseness prevented you from seeing the deity that lurked within Newman's zip or Rothko 's fuzzy rectangle.
...which is a round about way of retelling the emperor-has-no-clothes story, but not just that. Images are used in arguments as evidence, to be persuasive. If they're included, it's because they're persuasive...a truism that's too seldom open to critique. What I think young artists writing about their work in relation to others sometimes forget is that the image is evidence in someone else's argument, not the argument itself. To cite a painting or sculpture (or whatever) without having really looked at it is too often to try to bring, whole cloth, the value of that object to your writing. And how can you really look at it without, well, really looking at it? And to what extent are we really looking at things when what we see is what another writer has written? Or what a photographer has framed, excluding all else?
Art surprises us. It is, in spite of the cliche, in some fundamental way, both window and mirror. We get a view to something else while the art works simultaneously tells us something about where we stand (and whether we are funny looking or have bad hair). Seeing in art what you're told by historians and critics should be as much a cause for alarm as for celebration. It's great to have the validation that comes with having your unfocused, unspoken impressions converted into language, but it's an act of robbery if that language gets between you and the object you're interested in.
Works Cited
Hughes, Robert. “The Decline of the City of Mahagonny.” Nothing if not critical: selected essays on art and artists. New York: Pengun, 1990. p.5
