Re: Re: Turning

“So you walk into this restaurant

All strung out from the road

And you feel the eyes upon you

As you’re shakin’ off the cold

You pretend it doesn’t bother you

But you just want to explode

Yeah, most times you can’t hear ’em talk

Other times you can

All the same old clichés

Is it woman, is it man?

And you always seem outnumbered

You don’t dare make a stand

Make your stand”1

Extract from “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger via Metallica

Soyoung Yoon, Ph.D.

Director of Parsons Fine Arts MFA

Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts

The New School 

__________________________________________________________

Footnote 1: 

Dear __________,

Thank you for reaching out to me.

Yes, the title of my Director’s note is “re:re:turning.” The Director’s note, then, is a reflection on the title of your class’s thesis exhibition and more importantly, your discussions about turns, about turning, about how “re:turning” speaks to the exhibition as a collective endeavor and expression, and to your individual practices, their singularity, their differences.

My Director’s note extracts from—if you like, is a détournement of—the Bob Seger song, “Turn the Page.” “Turn the page” is an idiom for “fresh starts.” However, the lyrics of the song and Seger’s singing render the desire for fresh starts, to start anew, much more charged, poignant, ambivalent. In short, it’s another contribution to the thesis exhibition’s reflection on “turning”/“returning.” “Turn the Page” is also a song about an artist’s journey—the desires, the difficulties, the longing, the loneliness of an artist’s ambition—through the motif of the road trip. Each act of performance, each work of art, as a fresh, new start—a creation, a redemption, a clearing of debts, or a declaration—over and over and over again. 

“Turn the Page” is also a song recorded and released in the year 1973, a year that historians have described as one of “nervous breakdown,” defined in the United States by the end of the American-Vietnam War, the passing of Roe vs. Wade, the oil crisis, and the Watergate hearings. The listener of the 1973 song becomes attuned to the culture wars of this breakdown, through the following confrontation from the original version of lyrics: “Is that a woman or a man?” The band Metallica, as such a listener, heightens that sense of confrontation in the original lyrics, adds a defiant rejoinder, renders the song into an anthem: “Make a stand.” 

We could say that the urgency of the lyrics also resonates with our own culture wars, where a renewed politics of resentment and revanchism are being articulated, through the forcible suppression and repression of change, of transitions—of turns. (“As of today,” the American President says, “it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”)  My Director’s note, then, is also a defiant rejoinder—and a celebration of the turning, of the re:turning, of this exhibition. 

On November 6, 2024, I wrote to you and your fellow students, as your Director, as your faculty, about the clarity of that morning, and I repeat the call here: “There is a need to work through the material conditions of our thoughts, our beliefs, our prejudices and our blindspots, as well as our dreams and our leaps of imagination. There is a need for care to how thought is practiced; embodied as techniques, habits, dispositions; formed or de-formed into a line, a shape, a dimension, a hue, an intensity, a value; how thoughts are made to matter. If artistic practice is one means by which we can recall the age of limitless imagination, of passions unchecked, unrestrained, ‘cradled in tempests’ as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley put it—that age before language, that age we call ‘childhood’—art is also the means by which we can move our imagination and our language forward. For much is asked of our imagination today, and I insist, we must meet this demand.” Make a stand. 

Congratulations on your thesis. I look forward to continuing to learn anew from your journey as an artist. 

Soyoung Yoon

New York, NY

Friday, March 14, 2025