telling stories

"Some people do not tell you what their work means. They offer no explanation of it. All they do is tell how it was they happened to think of doing this or how they hit upon that. Most contemporary painters and scuptors still take this line, despite the external pressure to legitimize their work by dressing it in a theory in the way that architects of note very often feel obliged to do. It is note that painters and sculptors are more honest and less pretentious: there is more advantage in it than this. It allows them to evade, to some extent, the intrusive, constricting authority of words. Although they are visual artist, there is no way they can keep their work out of range of words, any more than a writer could keep their work out of range of vision. Since silence is no answer, they tell stories.
[...]
The rapid obsolescence of the thoughts in the writing compensates for the changelessness in the architecture. Under the circumstances there would be no point at all in demanding that architecture live up to the writing or that the writing correspond to the architecture, reasonable as the request may seem."
in Translations from Drawing to Buildin and Other Essays by Robins Evans