Paul Ryan E-Book

Paul Ryan

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 80

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

 In einem Gespräch mit Ayreen Anastas und Rene Gabri, Agenten der dOCUMENTA (13), gibt der in New York lebende Videokünstler Paul Ryan Auskunft über die theoretischen wie biografischen Hintergründe seiner Arbeit, über seine prägende Tätigkeit für Marshall McLuhan sowie über seine Rolle innerhalb der Videogruppe Raindance und der von ihr herausgegebenen Zeitschrift Radical Software. Die verschiedenen Einflüsse weckten in ihm den Wunsch, seine künstlerische Tätigkeit mit einer revolutionären sozialen Praxis zu verbinden, innerhalb derer das Konzept des »Threeing« eine zentrale Stellung einnimmt. Dabei handelt es sich um  eine »freiwillige Beziehungs-Praxis beziehungsweise -Übung, bei der drei Personen abwechselnd drei verschiedene Rollen übernehmen«, die auf den von Charles Sanders Peirce eingeführten phänomenologischen Kategorien der Erstheit, Zweitheit und Drittheit beruht. Das Gespräch wird ergänzt von einem ausführlichen Anhang mit illustrierten Texten zum »Threeing« sowie dem ebenfalls von Ryan entwickelten Beziehungskreislauf.      Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch 

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº015: Paul Ryan

Two Is Not a Number / Zwei ist keine Zahl

A Conversation with / Ein Gespräch mit

Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Agent, Member of Core Group, Head of Department / Agentin, Mitglied der

Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke

Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Claire Barliant

Proofreading / Korrektorat: Sam Frank, Cordelia Marten

Translation / Übersetzung: Ralf Schauff

Translation pp. 37–47 / Übersetzung S. 37–47: Clemens Krümmel

Graphic Design and E-Book Implementation / Grafische Gestaltung und E-Book-Produktion: Leftloft

Production / Verlagsherstellung: Stefanie Langner

© 2011 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel; Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Ayreen Anastas; Rene Gabri; Paul Ryan

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Fridericianum, September 1941 (detail / Detail), Photohaus C. Eberth; Waldkappel; Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel; p. / S. 39: Ayreen Anastas (based on earlier versions by Paul Ryan / nach früheren Versionen von Paul Ryan); p. / S. 41: Rene Gabri (based on a 1992 version by Gary Allen / nach einer Version Gary Allens von 1992); all other illustrations / alle anderen Abbildungen: Paul Ryan

documenta und Museum Fridericianum

Veranstaltungs-GmbH

Friedrichsplatz 18, 34117 Kassel

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.documenta.de

Chief Executive Officer / Geschäftsführer: Bernd Leifeld

Published by / Erschienen im

Hatje Cantz Verlag

Zeppelinstrasse 32, 73760 Ostfildern

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.hatjecantz.com

ISBN 978-3-7757-3044-0 (E-Book) ISBN 978-3-7757-2864-5 (Print)

Gefördert durch die

funded by the German Federal

Cultural Foundation

We cannot be held responsible for external links; the content of external links is the full responsibility of the operators of these sites. / Für externe Links können wir keine Haftung übernehmen. Die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind ausschließlich von deren Betreiber zu verantworten.

Paul RyanTwo Is Not a Number

A Conversation with

Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri

Introductory Note

In March 2010 we started recording an interview with Paul at his apartment on West End Avenue in New York, attempting to work together several ideas connected to Paul’s work, among which Threeing is central. Upon transcribing, and in the process of editing, we realized that there was a potential for Threeing as a mode of re-working our interview. In firstness, we were all present in the room and in conversation. In secondness, we each responded to what we had done—disappointments and affirmations. In thirdness, which is this version, a severe edit was made, basing itself on our own responses and efforts to keep the structure of our conversation. The conversation became in some sense a rough draft of a script for the finalized version, which you can read now. We decided to take out our names and put instead the numerals [1], [2], and [3]. Even though it may be clear that, for example, number [3] corresponds to Paul’s voice, the numbers nevertheless allow an opening, a depersonalization, and a movement to happen between the three of us.

—AA, RG

[1] We’d like to have a conversation with you that enters your work from different places and angles.

[2] Perhaps we can start with the idea of Threeing.

[3] Well, what I call Threeing is a voluntary practice of relating, in which three people take turns playing three different roles. The idea is to preclude two-against-one dynamics that characterize normal three-person interaction, and make it possible for three or more people to create collaborative, sustainable relationships. The practice of Threeing is based on the Relational Circuit, an original, unambiguous topological figure that enables participants to keep the three roles from becoming muddled. The three roles correspond to the three comprehensive categories of American philosopher Charles Peirce. He called these categories firstness, secondness, and thirdness. In firstness one is spontaneous, fresh—you are as you are without regard for any other. Secondness is the role of the other. You react to the person in firstness. He or she is “up against” you. In thirdness you mediate between firstness and secondness. You find or create patterns that all three of you can share. There are both nonverbal and verbal ways of Threeing.

[2] So Threeing is a kind of collaborative skill, and that skill can become a social practice?

[3] Yes. Threeing can be described as a yoga of relationships. A cultural historian once explained to me that yoga started during a time when people were tired of the storytellers. The yoga folks figured out a way to withdraw from the stories—no story line. Go inside and get enough awareness and strength and discipline that you can carry yourself without being programmed by the storytellers. Threeing is like that. A non-narrative practice that can keep you from being trapped by the story lines of the “media.” Unlike yoga, however, Threeing is a social practice. It is not an individual practice.

[2] So Threeing is a kind of collaboration that is not necessarily verbal and yet is a social practice.

[3] Yes. Perhaps it will be helpful to reference the fact that I spent over four years in a Roman Catholic monastic order after high school. As the etymology of the word “monk” implies, monks work alone, in solitude, to discipline themselves and remake themselves as docile bodies obedient to the abbot. The monastic community is a community of loners. They practice together, but the practices are designed to connect the individual soul to a transcendent God. You can do yoga or pray by yourself. You cannot practice Threeing by yourself. Threeing is not directed at a transcendent God, Threeing supports the singularity of each practitioner but it goes beyond that. Threeing enables people to be together and to learn together. Threeing creates a fullness of feedback among three or more people.

[1] After leaving the monastic order, you actually experimented with setting up a new kind of order, which was to be a video community. I’m curious how you went from monastic order to video community.

[3] After I left the order in February of 1965, I studied literature at New York University. I took classes with Conor Cruise O’Brien and George Steiner. I wanted to be a writer. In the summer of ’65, I heard McLuhan giving a talk on the radio. He described the history of Western communication as an oral, literate, electric sequence. Here I was coming out of an oral, monastic tradition, wanting to be a writer in the literary tradition, and yet being ignorant of the electronic possibilities that were emerging. I began to think in terms of electronic culture. I wound up performing my alternate service as a conscientious objector to the draft by working as a teaching assistant to McLuhan at Fordham University.

[1] Tell us about working with McLuhan.

[3] McLuhan was brilliant and he had a lot of guts. I had an office two doors down from him, so I got the chance to familiarize myself with his way of operating. Amazing man. Always reading an eclectic selection of books, always probing: “The sense ratio of a Russian peasant is like tar.” “The New York Daily News has two front pages. One of them is on the back.” “War is education. Education is war.” It got to a point where I said to myself: “This man is either full of it or what he has got to say is really worthwhile. I will never know unless I test it out for myself.” So, I got hold of some video equipment and started experimenting. If the medium is the message, what are we to make of the medium of portable video? My first concern was to distinguish video from television, so in 1968 I coined the aphorism “VT is not TV,” and went on from there.

[1] Would you agree with commentators who say McLuhan was naive?

[3] When McLuhan came to New York one of the things he wanted to do was invite members of the Mafia to a public forum about how they did business without paper. How they kept their word without paper. His two friends John Culkin and Ted Carpenter persuaded Marshall it was not a good idea. I’d say yes, in ways McLuhan was naive, but that naïveté made possible the unique insights of a well-educated, fearless innocent with first-rate rhetorical skills. Maybe a McLuhan-Mafia dialogue would have significantly illuminated the oral/literate/electric schema.

[1] In your encounter with McLuhan, what were the doubts that lead you to say, “I will have to test it out for myself”?

[3] I couldn’t get the politics; the politics were not clear. I’d say to McLuhan, “So, what do we do?” He’d say, “Well, it is too early to tell.” When you’re a young guy with the Vietnam War burning on your butt, that’s not the kind of thing that you want to hear. You want to get something done. McLuhan was an academic; he could say, “Wait, wait, we don’t understand.” He was not offering any strategy other than the traditional artistic one; you contribute to the perception of problems and move on. For me, that wasn’t good enough. I was looking for both social change and aesthetic concern.