Director Soyoung Yoon Says Critical Theory Still Anchors the Whitney ISP, Just Not the Way It Used To

Earlier this summer, scholar Soyoung Yoon was named the new director of the Whitney Independent Study Program. She succeeds Ron Clark, who led the program for more than half a century. Yoon is a graduate of ISP herself, having arrived as a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies fellow in 2006. She returned as faculty in 2012, and recently served on a 15-member advisory committee convened by Whitney curator Adrienne Edwards to help shape its future, following a censorship controversy that caused the museum to suspend the program. Yoon teaches film and media theory at The New School, and is at work on three books as she prepares to welcome the program’s next class. We caught up with her to talk about big shoes, the figure of the student and why critical theory still anchors the ISP.

Your appointment follows Ron Clark’s 54-year tenure. How do you feel about stepping into such big shoes?

Big shoes indeed. I am honored, I’m excited. I would add that I am among many who have had the great fortune, or a shared commitment, according to which I can describe Ron as a teacher, a mentor, a friend, as well as the leader and steward of this storied institution, this constellation of people that Ron also calls friends: the faculty, the guest speakers, the alumni of the ISP over multiple generations across different fields and movements of study and practice. The lessons of such friendship, its potential, its risks, its promise, are not ones that I take lightly.

You were a Rubinstein fellow in 2006-07, and then faculty from 2012 to 2023. What did you learn about the ISP, both as a student and as a teacher?

Both as a student and a teacher, and this perhaps continues my earlier comment, it is a practice and ethics of what we could describe as peer-to-peer learning, one that is particularly manifest in the horizontality of the seminars that serve as the backbone of the ISP. It is a horizontality not only among the participants of the seminar, but also with the faculty and guest speakers. The ISP is quite distinct from the culture of a traditional MFA or Ph.D. or residency. The aim is not to train or professionalize students to become artists, curators, critics, or scholars, but really to encourage them to be thinkers. There is a culture of, let’s call it public intellectualism, at work.

The ISP is for those artists, curators, critics, and scholars who are really thinking anew about their practice, regardless of where they are in their career. The key is to think differently. This aim and this culture mean that as a participant, whether student or faculty, there is an invitation, or for some a challenge, to really rethink and reimagine what it means to be a student, or what it means to be a teacher. The ISP is a highly influential, internationally renowned community, but it is also drawn from people who have not felt quite at home in their home institutions, disciplines and practices, and are seeking change. The ISP is a space for that kind of thinking.

You were part of a recent committee, where Adrienne Edwards convened 15 alumni and faculty advisors to help shape the program’s future. What were those discussions like?

It was very interesting, not least because the working group represented the ISP across multiple generations, and people who are now in very different but related sectors of the professional field. What was interesting for me was to recognize the difference in what people imagined, or remembered, as distinctive about the ISP, and that difference itself was quite illuminating. But across that difference, what came across again and again was a shared commitment, a real passion that this program must continue, and how decisive it was in each person’s very different trajectories. If I speak for myself, the ISP was decisive.

You credit the Seoul student movements as where you first encountered the ISP as, quote, “an ideal for theory in practice.” Could you speak more about that? How does that activism inform how you teach?

To put it simply, it is the scene, or the context, in which I first learned about the ISP, and especially the ISP’s relationship to critical theory, its establishment in 1968 and its formative role in the practice of critical theory. But I want to use this opportunity to talk about study, because especially in relationship to the student movements in South Korea, it is important to highlight this particular figure of the student, and how it is part and parcel of a very long history of student-led movements, not least in the modern era, from the protests against the Japanese occupation of Korea. As a reference, the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, in her retrospective exhibition that will travel to Artists Space in New York City shortly, is very interesting to look at in the context of this figure of the student.

I am highlighting this partly to reimagine what it means to study, what this figure of the student might mean in relation to the ISP, and how I experienced it. If we bring the scene closer to home, we are in this different context of what is rather euphemistically described as the “restructuring” of higher education, where there is a battle with the figure of authority and knowledge that the student embodies. What is the value of their education, not only in terms of financial risks, but also intellectual risks?

I wanted to highlight this as a context that informs a certain ethos of what it means to be a student, or the study of the ISP. To directly answer your question, it is one of the lessons of what a student can be, one I learned in the student-led movements, of which I was just one among many, many others on campuses throughout the country.

To encapsulate what this figure of the student might mean, recently I have turned to the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s term the ignorant schoolmaster, this figure of equality and his proposal for a reimagination of the practice of teaching. According to the ignorant schoolmaster, to teach is not to transfer knowledge from a position of knowledge, but to translate from a position of difference: to revivify a text for the student’s own uses, to permit the freedom and spontaneity of learning for themselves about what matters and why, and then to learn from them. That is the figure of the student, part and parcel of the context for the ISP.

Critical theory anchored the ISP for decades. Does that framework still hold for artists formed by the internet, or does the syllabus need rebuilding?

The short answer is yes, the framework still holds, but I want to answer in a two-part way. First, the ISP’s relationship to critical theory. I think it is known that critical theory constitutes a key foundation of the ISP’s curriculum. But perhaps it is not as known how much it is part of the ISP’s history, not only its establishment in 1968 and its seminars, but who spoke at the seminars, who attended, how influential they were, what these seminars did, how people presented in them, what circulated. What I am trying to emphasize is how much more dynamic the relationship between the ISP and critical theory was, especially with the rise and influence of certain chapters of critical theory, and how formative the ISP’s role was. So, yes, to use your word, anchor, but anchor not only in terms of foundation, but in a relationship that was much more dynamic and formative, represented in this constellation of people who are part of the program’s history. That relationship will always be there.

That gets to the second part: does the syllabus need changing? I would ask, what is an ISP syllabus? I have spoken to others about the perception that there is a certain tendency, even “dogma,” to the ISP’s curriculum, and this is where I would differ. Yes, there were certain commitments, but the syllabus was always much more fluid and flexible, embodied by who came to speak and how. As an example, if you were to ask me, will we still be reading, say, psychoanalytic theory? My answer would be yes. But the psychoanalytic theory that was read, and how it was read, in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s would be quite different from the way it would be read today: which thinkers, and how it is practiced. So for a younger generation whose knowledge might be primarily formed by different modes of technology, one would argue all the more that critical theory, from the perspective of engagement, is necessary. That will be what the ISP’s role continues to be.

The alumni list is long and prestigious. It includes you, of course, and runs from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Roberta Smith to Naomi Beckwith. How do you think the ISP manages to identify such talent at a relatively early age?

That’s a great question, but I would flip it and say it is not so much that the ISP identifies talent, but that these ambitious people are attracted to the ISP. This perhaps goes back to the question of the syllabus, the curriculum and the history. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that kind of peer-to-peer learning. Often people are attracted to the ISP for very different reasons, but one of the key things is to find allies who share different kinds of questions, and the curriculum is quite open to that kind of questioning. For decades, it has hailed people of very different ambitions. Everyone is very ambitious, and it becomes a very fertile space of collaboration, but also conflict, and those are quite charged. It is really driven by the idea that we should do things differently, and I think that is why so many of the alumni, and also the faculty, include people who have changed the field as we know it.

You are currently writing three books at once, Walkie Talkie, TV Buddhas, and A Mattress Is Not a Bed. Can you tell us about them, and how you find the time?

I can answer the second question: I don’t actually find enough time. But it also means I have learned to write differently and constantly, in different modes: writing through teaching, writing through discussions, writing on the commute. Writing becomes a much more polymorphous practice than perhaps my initial training conditioned me to have.

In terms of the projects themselves, there is a real continuity between them. Walkie Talkie is a book about the rise of cinéma vérité as a particular mode of documentary filmmaking amidst anti-colonial struggles, and the rise of new techniques of policing, as well as the new technological capacity and desire for sync sound: the desire and capacity to hear the voice of others at the site of speech. It tracks the intertwined history of documentary filmmaking and new artistic practices that emphasize the context of both urban warfare and urbanism itself as a new sphere of action, and then the rise of a practice of institutional psychotherapy, which again speaks to the practice of walking and talking.

TV Buddhas, in a sense, deals with the other chapter, the fantasy of communication and when communication breaks down, particularly pivoting around the work by the artist Nam June Paik, TV Buddha: this particular kind of fantasy of both feedback and rupture, and how it is appropriated by other fantasies about communication and technology.

The last project, about the mattress, is in part an invitation to think about the history of art and film through a motif. It is a relatively short book about the artistic motif of the mattress. How have mattresses been mobilized as a particular kind of artistic motif? For me, it is also another way to think about how figure-ground relationships work, the way the base itself is activated through different approaches to the motif of the mattress. Base and superstructure again.

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