Koh, Dong-Yeon
고동연 高東延

The Writing Subject - Devoted Critic - In Response

Dorian Vale

Museum of One

-Written at the Threshold-

I think your move from anonymity toward independence gets closer to what has been troubling me, because it opens a distinction that I hadn’t quite found the language for. If independence means existing outside language, history, culture, friendship, economy, or recognition altogether, then of course no critic is independent. No person is. But I don’t think that settles the question. There are other kinds of independence, and they matter precisely because the conditions under which criticism is produced are not the same for everyone.

Before getting there, though, I want to return to what you wrote about the reader, because I think you’ve identified something real in what happened with the name Dorian Vale. I understand more clearly now what you were doing when you followed the name toward Dorian Gray, and why you didn’t want to see my face. The association didn’t have to be historically correct to become part of your experience of reading. Something had already happened. The name produced an image, and the absence of a face gave that image room to develop. I find that strangely beautiful. Reading permits a kind of intimacy built partly from what isn’t there.

There is still a small distance, though, between having an association and turning that association into a claim. A misunderstanding may be inevitable and still remain a misunderstanding. The reader can imagine freely. The difficulty begins when imagination starts carrying the weight of evidence. “Dorian Vale” may call up Dorian Gray, a romance novel, a particular voice, perhaps even a face that doesn’t exist. All of that belongs to the experience of reading. But if the association later becomes evidence of what the writer intended, something has shifted. Imagination has moved into assertion, and assertion asks more of us. PIC has no reason to police the first movement. It becomes interested when the first movement starts speaking with the authority of the second.

That’s one reason anonymity still interests me even after accepting that it can’t control what a reader invents. It was never meant to. Its usefulness may be more modest than that. Removing information doesn’t produce an innocent reader. It simply changes the conditions under which judgment begins. Double-anonymous peer review is useful here, not because anyone seriously believes bias vanishes when a name disappears, but because identity, institutional prestige, nationality, gender, and prior reputation can shape judgment before the argument has really been encountered. Anonymity doesn’t purify the encounter. It can still interrupt some of the permissions that arrive before it.

The Guerrilla Girls offer another version of this inside art. Their anonymity has never guaranteed the disappearance of ego, and I don’t think anonymity could ever do that. What it can do is move attention around. Concealing individual identities changes what becomes immediately available to the viewer and what remains withheld. Whether that works perfectly seems less important to me than the fact that anonymity can have a structural purpose. It can change the distribution of attention without pretending that the self has somehow vanished. Your use of the word narcissism made me think about something else. Writing can certainly become narcissistic. Criticism can too. But deep absorption in writing isn’t the same thing by default. Absorption tells us where attention is concentrated; narcissism tells us what that attention has begun to serve. A researcher may spend years in an archive, a translator may live inside another person’s sentences for months, a conservator may devote extraordinary attention to an object almost nobody will ever see, and a writer may remain with a problem because it has become impossible to abandon. A self leaves traces in all of these situations. That isn’t the same as making the self the subject.

I’m also not sure writing itself always needs to be understood as performance. It can become performative, certainly. A writer can begin anticipating a reader, cultivating a voice, protecting an image of themselves, or writing toward the person they hope to appear to be. But selection alone doesn’t seem enough to make something a performance. Choosing one sentence over another may simply be part of trying to say something accurately. Revision can be an act of presentation, but it can also be an act of correction. A private note, a letter never sent, an archival description, a testimony written under pressure, and a public manifesto all involve language being shaped, yet I’m not sure the self is being staged in the same way in each. Maybe the distinction is somewhere between composition and staging. Composition is unavoidable. Performance seems to require something more, some sense, however faint, of an audience before whom a version of the self is being enacted. Even then the boundary moves. A public essay can be written with very little interest in displaying the writer, while a private diary can become intensely theatrical before an imagined reader who doesn’t exist. I’d rather leave that category open than make performance the condition of writing itself. The question that stays with me is when the writer begins to become part of what the writing is asking us to look at.

Tehching Hsieh is useful here almost for the opposite reason. In his case, performance isn’t a metaphor. It’s the medium. Yet some of his most severe works were built around conditions in which immediate recognition, exhibition, and response were radically reduced. That tells us nothing definite about his interior psychology, nor should it. What it does show is that performance and self-display aren’t the same thing. A work can be performative in the strongest possible sense and still organize itself around duration, obligation, repetition, and what continues when applause is unavailable. My earlier writing on Hsieh was already trying to understand sincerity in that way, not as something an artist says about himself, but as something that becomes legible through structure. The question of independence becomes more complicated here. I agree that nobody writes outside society, language, history, or human relation. But I think institutional and professional independence are different questions, and I don’t want to collapse them into that larger truth. Critics do not all depend on the art world in the same way. Some criticism begins through commissions, appointments, universities, museums, galleries, journals, grants, friendships, or professional obligations. Other writing can begin without an invitation, without institutional permission, without a guaranteed audience, and even without any expectation that anyone will notice it.

That difference matters. Circulation is not the same thing as cause. A piece of writing may eventually enter a journal, a library, an archive, an exhibition, a university, or a conversation, but none of those things necessarily explains why it was written in the first place. Sometimes the writing precedes the social world that later gathers around it. Sometimes that world never gathers at all, and the writing still happens. I keep coming back to a very simple question: what does the criticism depend on in order to continue? Does it need access, commission, affiliation, reputation, payment, approval, or a certain kind of recognition? Or can the artwork itself remain enough of a reason to return to the page? That last possibility matters to me because the object of devotion need not be the artist, the institution, the profession, or even the audience. It can be the artwork. I mean that quite literally. A critic may care about the artist, know the history, study the institution, understand the politics surrounding the work, and remain conscious of the viewer. But none of those things has to become the final subject. The work can remain the reason the writing exists.

That doesn’t make independence virtuous by itself. It can produce its own blindness, pride, isolation, or certainty. But it does produce a different set of pressures from criticism whose continuation depends upon maintaining particular relationships or positions. I think those conditions are worth distinguishing. Otherwise, we risk making professional embeddedness sound like the universal condition of criticism when it is really one condition among several.

That’s closer to what I mean when I use the word independent in relation to Museum of One. Independence doesn’t require the absence of relationships. Conversation itself would make that impossible as a definition. My exchanges with you, Tomoki, artists, philosophers, architects, historians, curators, and others enter the work constantly. They change questions, expose weaknesses, introduce things I wouldn’t have encountered alone, and sometimes send the argument somewhere I hadn’t intended. The point isn’t to prevent relation. It’s to preserve the possibility that the work could continue without relation becoming its permission to exist. Your idea of devoted criticism becomes especially important here because it forces the question of what devotion is actually directed toward. Devotion to an artist can’t simply mean agreement with the artist. Devotion to an institution can’t mean protecting the institution. Even devotion to criticism itself can become dangerous if every encounter turns into another opportunity for criticism to prove how necessary it is.

The kind of devotion I recognize is more austere. It’s devotion to the integrity of the encounter and to whatever remains true after our own interests have entered it. It includes the artist without belonging to the artist. It includes the viewer without reducing the work to the viewer. It includes history without allowing history to decide everything in advance. And at its centre is still the artwork, which does not owe the critic a career, a relationship, an argument, or even an answer. Seen this way, devotion and independence don’t feel opposed to me. Devotion gives the writing something beyond itself to answer to. Independence protects the possibility of answering honestly, even when honesty gives us nothing socially useful in return.

Your remark about reducing the repeated act of writing also made me think more carefully about restraint. I don’t think restraint can finally be measured by how much writing there is. Three sentences can violate a work completely. Twenty pages can sometimes be necessary to correct a false history, distinguish competing accounts, establish context, or show why an inherited interpretation no longer holds. Restraint isn’t a word count. It has more to do with proportion: what the evidence permits, what the encounter has actually given, and how far the critic decides to go beyond it. There is an obvious irony here. PIC has produced a great deal of writing about restraint. I understand the joke. But the claim was never that criticism becomes ethical by becoming shorter. The critic as custodian was always meant to suggest something more difficult than silence. The question is how much authority speech assumes, what it displaces, and whether it leaves the work more closed than it found it. Sometimes restraint will mean saying very little. Sometimes it will require considerable speech because silence would leave a distortion untouched.

Your discussion of the critic’s embeddedness also helps clarify something that has been changing in my own understanding of PIC. I no longer think “before interpretation” should suggest an unmediated ground zero. We arrive with language, memory, culture, bodies, expectations, education, and prior knowledge already active. Mediation begins long before we formulate an interpretation. The distinction I’m increasingly interested in is simpler: an aesthetic encounter may be pre-interpretive without being pre-mediated. Something can happen before I’ve formed a reflective claim about what the work means even though nothing about the encounter was ever culturally or perceptually pure.

This is why your mention of the Art School exhibition at ARKO stayed with me. Perhaps even more than Minnie Evans, because ARKO puts the problem inside an actual structure of learning. An exhibition organized around the idea of the art school raises a question that feels very close to where our conversation has arrived. Interpretation may not simply be something an individual critic decides to do after encountering a work. We are taught how to encounter art. We learn to look for the wall text, establish context, locate politics, recognize references, place the artist historically, and gradually assemble all of that into an account. Much of that is necessary. But once interpretation is understood as something learned rather than something that simply appears inside an isolated viewer, another possibility opens. Institutions don’t only provide information about artworks. They help form the habits through which artworks become visible to us in the first place. That makes me wonder whether an institution can also teach hesitation. Whether it can prepare someone to encounter a work without deciding too quickly what kind of knowledge that encounter should become.

I keep thinking there may be a practical method beginning to emerge from Conversation itself. Rather than asking abstractly whether interpretation helps or obstructs experience, we could start by tracing what actually happens during an encounter. What did you notice before reading? What remained uncertain? What changed when factual information entered? What became visible once a stronger interpretive frame appeared? And after that frame had entered, was there anything that became harder to see?

The point wouldn’t be to prove that the least mediated encounter is somehow the purest or best one. I’m more interested in what different forms and timings of mediation actually do. For now, I keep seeing the sequence quite simply: encounter → information → interpretation → return. The return may matter most. After knowing more, can we go back to the work and notice whether the explanation enlarged the encounter, narrowed it, redirected it, or left something behind? If you can remember your own sequence of looking at ARKO, even imperfectly, I’d be very interested in comparing that first encounter with the way you understand the exhibition now.

Maybe this is where a shared research method begins to take shape between us. Not a method for proving PIC right. I’d rather it exposes PIC to the possibility of being wrong. We could follow mediation as it happens instead of treating it as one abstract condition: what enters, when it enters, what it reveals, what it displaces, and what remains when the viewer returns to the work. ARKO feels especially fertile because learning is already built into the exhibition’s structure. It gives us a chance to ask not only what viewers interpret, but how habits of interpretation are taught, staged, delayed, or reorganized. At first this could simply become a way for us to read exhibitions together. Later, perhaps, it could become something more practical: one work, one room, one curatorial situation, different conditions of encounter, and then a comparison of what each condition makes possible. I wouldn’t want to decide in advance which condition is better. I’d rather see what happens.

Minnie Evans raises something similar from another direction. You didn’t encounter those works without knowledge. You already recognized the available frameworks: race, gender, self-taught practice, Christian imagery, African and Caribbean inheritance, transcultural formation, art-historical marginalization. None of that disappeared. Yet the abundance of possible interpretation seems to have produced hesitation rather than confidence. You found yourself before a body of work that could sustain several legitimate accounts and wondered whether another account was necessarily the most meaningful thing to add. That feels very close to the intelligence PIC has been trying to name. Knowledge didn’t disappear. Interpretation wasn’t defeated. Knowing more produced the capacity to hesitate before turning everything known into everything that had to be said. 

Your uncertainty about whether the devoted critic imagined by PIC can ever be practiced fully also seems important. I’m not sure PIC needs the critic to become that figure completely. That would ask for purity when criticism probably needs something more ordinary and more difficult: discipline. The critic will still be vain sometimes, tired, ambitious, frightened, attached to institutions, pleased by recognition, wrong about works, seduced by theories, and protective of ideas that should have been abandoned. None of that surprises me. What matters is whether the method gives us ways of noticing when those things have started governing the work.

For me, restraint becomes practical there. It means allowing delay before closure, keeping claims proportionate to evidence, disclosing relationships when they matter, distinguishing what was encountered from what was later explained, being willing to revise, refusing situations where obligation begins to govern judgment, and asking what an interpretation has made invisible. Most of all, it means leaving open the possibility that the artwork may resist the framework brought to it. PIC doesn’t require an innocent critic. I don’t think such a critic exists. It requires one who can be corrected. That may be where your “atonement” and my “devotion” come closest. Atonement recognizes that writing leaves consequences behind us. Devotion asks what should govern the next sentence. Neither produces moral purity, and neither needs to. Both begin from the recognition that intelligence doesn’t absolve the critic from responsibility. And perhaps that’s where I’d leave the writing subject for now. I don’t want the writer to disappear. Disappearance can become another kind of self-consciousness just as easily as visibility can. What interests me is a writer present enough to answer for what has been written, but not so enlarged that every artwork becomes another occasion for the writer to encounter himself.

The self belongs in criticism. It just shouldn’t become its measure.

Dorian Vale