Koh, Dong-Yeon
고동연 高東延

The Interpreting Subject

 

Dorian Vale

Museum of One

-Written at the Threshold-

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The more I think about this question, the less convinced I am that interpretation begins where we usually say it does. By the time we arrive at a sentence like this is what the work means, quite a lot has already happened. Attention has chosen something. Memory has wandered in with its old associations. The body has moved closer or pulled away. Something has irritated us, seduced us, bored us, frightened us, or simply refused to leave us alone. Recognition has already begun sorting what is unfamiliar into forms we know how to carry. Interpretation often presents itself as the beginning of understanding, but I suspect it usually arrives after the encounter has already begun rearranging us.

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This is why I have become slightly suspicious of the phrase my interpretation. The possessive makes the whole thing sound much cleaner than it is. What I call my interpretation contains things I didn't invent: teachers whose language I have forgotten borrowing, books whose sentences have dissolved into my own thinking, artworks that trained me to expect certain things from other artworks, places I have lived, things I have lost, judgments I once made and never properly examined again. Even resistance has a history. Sometimes what I distrust immediately tells me almost as much about myself as it does about the thing I am distrusting. Still, I would not take your phrase “I simply emerge from relationships” to mean that there is nothing within us before relation begins. I read it more as a reminder that the self becomes visible, tested, and altered through contact with others. An interior life still matters to me. So do memory, conscience, conviction, and the strange continuities that survive changes of place, language, circumstance, and company. But perhaps those things are never fully known in isolation. Sometimes a relationship doesn't create the room so much as reveal that it was there. Something in us becomes legible only because another person, an artwork, or an encounter has reached the door.

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Art can do that in a way I still find difficult to explain without making it sound mystical. We speak constantly about interpreting the artwork, as though the direction were obvious: I arrive, I look, I make meaning. But I have had enough encounters where the opposite seemed to happen first. The work exposed the quality of my patience. It showed me what I was avoiding. It made a vocabulary I trusted suddenly feel inadequate. It revealed that I had been carrying a certainty I didn't know was there. In those moments, interpretation stops feeling like a one-way act. I may be trying to understand the work, but the encounter is also exposing something about the person doing the understanding.

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That matters to me now because Post-Interpretive Criticism has existed long enough to become one of the things I carry into a room. This creates a problem I didn't have when I first began writing it. If I enter an exhibition already alert to wall texts, institutional framing, residue, silence, restraint, over-explanation, then Post-Interpretive Criticism itself has become part of the conditions of my seeing. It has trained my attention. That can be useful, but anything that trains attention can eventually begin directing it. I have to remain suspicious of that. If I enter every museum and immediately notice the wall text, am I noticing something genuinely important, or have I simply trained myself to find evidence that Post-Interpretive Criticism was right? If I am moved by quiet, restrained, unresolved works, is something happening in the encounter, or am I rewarding the work for resembling an ethic I already admire? If a work is loud, explicit, highly contextualized, politically direct, do I actually meet it where it is, or do I begin measuring it against a discipline it never agreed to enter? Those questions matter because a theory becomes dangerous when the world can no longer surprise it. Post-Interpretive Criticism is not exempt from that danger simply because it talks about restraint.

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This is where humility becomes more than good manners for me. I increasingly think it belongs near the beginning of knowledge. I don’t mean humility as self-denial or modesty performed beautifully. That can become vanity very quickly. I mean the more difficult humility of admitting that what I see may be real and still incomplete, that what I know may need revision, and that finding language for something doesn't give me ownership of it. The ego isn't especially patient with uncertainty. It wants the relief of having understood, the pleasure of naming the pattern, the private satisfaction of believing it saw what others didn't. The danger begins when interpretation starts serving that image of the self. Interpretation can feed that appetite very easily. Even ethical criticism can become a way of admiring oneself. I identify violence, therefore I imagine myself outside violence. I recognize exclusion, therefore I become the person who recognizes exclusion. I expose institutional authority, and quietly my own authority becomes harder for me to see. The interpretation may be perfectly sound while the interpreting subject uses its correctness to protect an image of itself.

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I think that is one of the more uncomfortable things that criticism has to admit. Knowledge can become a mirror. We can spend a great deal of time explaining the world while arranging the explanation so that we continue appearing to ourselves as intelligent, just, sensitive, or morally awake. That frightens me more than simply being wrong. A wrong interpretation can sometimes be corrected. An interpretation that gives the interpreter emotional reasons to keep believing it is much harder to disturb. Perhaps that is why people can become so defensive over interpretations that seem, from the outside, strangely minor. They aren't always defending only a proposition. Sometimes they are defending the person who became possible through the proposition. To abandon the interpretation may feel like abandoning something about themselves.

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We do this outside art constantly. Someone disappoints us and we begin explaining them. Perhaps they are selfish. Perhaps afraid of intimacy. Perhaps manipulative. Sometimes we are right. But once the explanation settles, contradictory evidence can become strangely powerless. The person apologises and we call it strategy. They change and we call it inconsistency. They explain themselves and we say, of course you would say that. At some point the interpretation becomes almost impossible to defeat, because everything the person does has already been assigned a meaning. That is not understanding. It is a kind of captivity. The same mechanism can operate in criticism with far more elegant language. A framework becomes comprehensive enough that everything can be returned to it. Psychoanalysis can find psychoanalysis everywhere. Political criticism can find politics everywhere. Formalism can find form everywhere. Post-Interpretive Criticism can walk into every exhibition and discover that interpretation has become excessive. At that point the theory has stopped encountering the world and begun recognizing itself. I would consider that a failure.

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The interpreting subject has to remain vulnerable to defeat. There should be some condition under which I can say, I thought I understood what was happening here, and I was wrong. That sentence is more important to criticism than we often admit. It doesn't diminish knowledge. It's one of the things that keeps knowledge alive. This is also why I don’t think humility comes after expertise, as though one first becomes knowledgeable and then learns not to boast about it. Humility is part of what prevents expertise from hardening. To know something seriously is to know something about the conditions under which one might have to revise it. The subject who can't be revised eventually becomes authority, and authority isn't always dramatic. Sometimes authority is simply an interpretation that has forgotten somebody made it. 

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There is another danger here, though. The viewer can't spend the entire encounter examining themselves. If every artwork becomes an occasion for asking about my positionality, my assumptions, my cultural formation, my emotional history, then the work disappears beneath self-consciousness. The critic becomes the most interesting object in the room. That would be a strange outcome for Post-Interpretive Criticism. I don't want to replace excessive interpretation of the artwork with excessive interpretation of the interpreter.

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The work still matters. Something outside me has to remain capable of resisting me. That capacity for resistance may be one of the simplest tests I know. Can the artwork make my account less secure? Can another viewer show me something I missed without my immediately explaining why their seeing is less sophisticated than mine? Can an artist’s own account disturb a conclusion I had become attached to? Can historical evidence embarrass a beautiful sentence I would rather keep? Can I return to something I wrote and admit that the work has outlived the interpretation I gave it? If not, then I'm no longer sure I am interpreting. I may simply be administering meaning. That distinction matters because interpretation should remain capable of correction. I don’t mean that every interpretation has to collapse under disagreement. Some survive because they are good. But their survival means more if they could have failed. Anything incapable of failure is no longer responding to the world. It has become a system for arranging the world so that nothing truly contradicts it.

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There is a personal difficulty in this for Dorian Vale as well. I chose the pseudonym partly to place distance between biography and reception, but over time the name has gathered habits. There is now a recognizable way Dorian Vale writes. Certain concerns recur. Mercy. Restraint. Residue. Silence. Consequence. Beauty. After a while, the writer can begin seeing in the style the writer has become known for. That possibility interests me more than somebody discovering the person behind the name. Can a critic become trapped inside the interpreter they have successfully created? Can I begin entering an exhibition already searching for the next Dorian Vale essay? Can consistency become more important than the encounter? Can the voice become so familiar that the eye begins selecting only what the voice knows how to say? I think it can. A public identity can become a small institution of its own. Readers begin expecting certain gestures, certain moral textures, certain kinds of sentence. The writer begins expecting them too. Eventually even restraint can become style, and style can become dangerous when we begin confusing it with truth. The pseudonym can't save me from that. Anonymity can delay biography, but it can't prevent the formation of an interpreting subject. Perhaps this is why I now think humility protects me more than anonymity ever could. The real protection is the willingness to let an artwork embarrass the persona, to write something that doesn't sound like Dorian Vale if the encounter requires it, to abandon a concept I introduced if the concept begins preventing me from seeing. That is much harder than hiding behind a name.

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This returns me to Art as Truth. One of the things I was trying to defend there was the possibility that the truth of art may not lie only in what can be stated about it, but in what happens to the person who encounters it. The viewer changes, sometimes almost imperceptibly. A work enters memory, rearranges attention, disturbs a confidence. If that is true, then the interpreting subject is one of the places where the truth of an encounter may become visible. A work may not tell me what it means. It may reveal what kind of interpreter I have become. That interests me more. I can master context, identify references, understand the history, place the work within a movement, write an intelligent essay, and leave essentially unchanged. Nothing has resisted me. Nothing has made me revise the structure through which I see. Other encounters are less comfortable. They make a familiar explanation feel insufficient. A concept I trusted becomes awkward in my hand. Something returns days later and ruins the sentence I had already prepared. Those encounters stay with me. Not because confusion is superior to understanding, but because the subject remained revisable. Perhaps revisability is the quality I want most from an interpreting subject. Not neutrality. I am increasingly doubtful that neutrality exists in the form criticism sometimes imagines it. Not purity either. Not endless uncertainty. Simply the ability to remain answerable to what lies beyond oneself. Knowledge matters enormously, but knowledge without humility becomes armour. Humility without knowledge can become innocence pretending to be virtue. Neither is enough alone.

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I also resist the disappearance of the critic from critical language. I don’t want every sentence prefaced with I think; that would become unbearable. But I notice how easily grammar can make interpretation appear as fact. The work signifies. The image evokes. The installation critiques. Sometimes these are perfectly defensible sentences, but there is still a human decision inside them. Somebody decided that this relation mattered, that this history was relevant, that this interpretation deserved emphasis. The subject need not occupy the centre of the sentence. It should simply remain visible enough to answer for what is being said. Perhaps this is where I differ from the older fantasy of the critic as someone who stands above confusion and supplies coherence. I still value coherence. I still value expertise. I still value someone who knows enough to show me what I couldn't have seen alone. But I am less willing to trust the height from which coherence sometimes claims to descend. The critic is in the room too. They have a body, a history, preferences, ambitions. They get tired. They misunderstand. They are seduced by elegant explanations. They sometimes fear looking foolish. And then they write. That doesn't invalidate criticism. It makes criticism human.

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Maybe a more ethical criticism begins there, not by abolishing the subject but by refusing to mythologize the subject as a transparent instrument of knowledge. The interpreting subject participates in the encounter and is also one of the things the encounter can alter.

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This is where your idea that the subject emerges through relationships comes nearest to my own thinking. I still hesitate to dissolve the self entirely into relation. I think something arrives. Something remembers. Something carries continuity from one encounter to another. But I no longer think that something leaves every relationship in the same condition in which it entered. The artwork contributes to the subject who later interprets it. So does the institution. So does another viewer. So does disagreement. So does the act of writing itself.

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There are times when I don't know what I think until I write the sentence and realise I don’t believe it. Writing can expose the interpreter to themselves.

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Perhaps that is one reason this conversation has become useful to me. A thought kept privately can preserve its coherence far more easily than a thought another person keeps touching. You disagree, and suddenly I have to discover whether I am defending an argument or merely defending the comfort of having made it. Sometimes the argument survives. Sometimes it becomes narrower. Sometimes the question itself changes. I don’t experience that as a loss of authority. If anything, it is evidence that the subject is still alive. So when i think about the interpreting subject now, I dont image innocence, mastery, or endless self-doubt. I think of a certain permeability: the ability to know without sealing, to form conclusions without mistaking them for finality, to speak without believing that speech has emptied the room of whatever could still contradict it. The interpreter should leave something outside themselves, and something of themselves should remain outside the interpretation too. 

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There has to remain enough distance for return, enough uncertainty for correction, enough humility for surprise. Otherwise, the subject stops encountering the world and begins recognizing itself everywhere.

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That is probably the danger I worry about most. Not that we interpret too much, but that one day we may become unable to tell the difference between encountering something and finding ourselves in it.

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Dorian Vale

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Museum of One — Research Office

Publisher of Post-Interpretive Criticism (ISSN 2819-7232)

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