{"id":1216,"date":"2016-07-01T21:16:26","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T21:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/?p=1216"},"modified":"2022-11-16T21:16:38","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T21:16:38","slug":"juillet-2016-ego-me-absolvo-catholicism-as-prototype-in-paul-ryans-experimental-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/juillet-2016-ego-me-absolvo-catholicism-as-prototype-in-paul-ryans-experimental-video\/","title":{"rendered":"Juillet 2016 – Ego Me Absolvo <\/i>\u00a0:\u00a0 Catholicism as Prototype in Paul Ryan\u2019s Experimental Video"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Everyman\u2019s Moebius Strip<\/em>\u00a0by Paul Ryan, video installation, 1969
video still from documentation by Ira Schneider\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In May 19691<\/sup>, a video installation entitled\u00a0Everyman\u2019s Moebius Strip<\/em>\u00a0appeared at the\u00a0Howard Wise Gallery\u00a0show\u00a0TV as a Creative Medium<\/em>\u00a0in New York. When an individual entered a curtained booth, they found a video camera, a blank monitor, and an audio recording prompting participation. \u201cReact to the following people,\u201d spoke the recording. \u201cNixon, your mother, Eldridge Cleaver, Teddy Kennedy, you.\u2026 For the next ten seconds do what you want.\u2026 Now, let your face be sad.\u2026 Turn away from the camera.\u2026 Now turn back.\u2026 Press the stop button.\u2026 Thank you.\u201d After two minutes of this guidance, an attendant played a videotape of the viewer\u2019s face back for them. Like its topological namesake, explained the artist,\u00a0Everyman\u2019s Moebius Strip<\/em>\u00a0\u201cis used to take in our outside,\u201d providing the viewer \u201cone continuous (sur)face with nothing to hide.\u201d Since each recording taped over the previous one, each participant received a unique, private experience of communing with the self2<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lest the resemblance of this booth of self-revelation to a Catholic confessional be too obscure, in 1970 the installation\u2019s creator,\u00a0Paul Ryan, published a description of another installation which would also prompt a participant and then show them a tape of their reactions.\u00a0Ego Me Absolvo<\/em>\u00a0was unrealized, but it would have been an \u201cordinary single penitent confessional set up against the wall of the gallery,\u201d wrote Ryan. \u201cPenitent (gallery goer) goes into the confessional and kneels. He flips on an audiotrack which guides him through an appropriate confession. While he confesses, his face is videotaped. When finished making his confession, he goes round where the priest sits and watches the replay of his own confession3<\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experimental videographers of the 1960s and 1970s drew on a variety of resources, including video technology itself and discourses about the futures of media and humanity, in their efforts to create new aesthetic and social experiences. (Collopy, 2015)\u00a0For Ryan, these resources included Catholic spiritual practices. Over the course of his artistic and intellectual career, Ryan would continue to find insight and inspiration not so much in Catholic theology as in the lived practices of Catholicism, which he treated not as authoritative structures for his life but as a set of prototypes for his own aesthetic, psychological, and ecological experiments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Monk to McLuhanite<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Paul Ryan, far right, in Passionist robes, photograph from\u00a0Guerrilla Television<\/em>\u00a0by Michael Shamberg and\u00a0Raindance Corporation\u00a0with design by\u00a0Ant Farm, 19714<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Paul Ryan had become a Roman Catholic monk, a member of the Passionist order, in 1960 at the age of 17. He left five years later, recognizing that the order hadn\u2019t changed as he hoped during the era of the Second Vatican Council and complaining to his superior that he found the monastery intellectually, communally, and liturgically unsatisfying5<\/sup>.\u00a0In his new life as a layperson in New York, Ryan protested the Vietnam War and then, frustrated that \u201cmarches seemed to have so little effect,\u201d turned to writing fiction. \u201cI locked myself up in a garret on the Lower East Side and pounded a typewriter,\u201d he later wrote. \u201cThe war went on. Midway through the summer of 1966, I tuned in to WBAI\u2019s coverage of the International Writers\u2019 Conference. The speaker was saying, \u2018Of course in this electronic age of computers, satellites, radio, and television, the writer can no longer be someone who sits in his garret pounding a typewriter.\u2019\u201d This was media theorist\u00a0Marshall McLuhan, and Ryan became a convert to his new doctrine. (Ryan, 1993, p. 11-12)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In McLuhan\u2019s books, Ryan found a theory in which societies based on electronic media recapitulated the attitudes and social order of an earlier age of orality. (McLuhan, 1994, p. 50) As Tina Edan and\u00a0Jonathan Sterne\u00a0observe, both the devoutly Catholic McLuhan and his Jesuit student Walter Ong believed that the dominance of literacy since the development of print undermined Christian community and spirituality, and that the \u201csecondary orality\u201d of electronic media offered an opportunity for revival6<\/sup>.\u00a0Inspired by McLuhanism, Ryan \u201cdeveloped a strategy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI could go from the oral monastic culture to the electric. Skip the gutenburg [sic<\/em>] galaxy.\u2026 Get my hands on the new media.7<\/sup>\u201d\u00a0\u00a0In 1967, then, Ryan found a job as one of McLuhan\u2019s research assistants when Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in the Bronx, persuaded McLuhan to visit for a year away from his usual professorship at the University of Toronto. At Fordham, Ryan began experimenting with two Sony video recorders donated by an admirer of McLuhan. (Collopy, 2015)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Infolding the Self<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Paul Ryan from\u00a0The Rays<\/em>\u00a0by Raindance, video, 19708<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With this technology, Ryan developed techniques for building the insight and community he had sought in the monastery, coming to believe in the process that videotape was fundamentally a tool for psychological reflection and self-exploration as much as for communication. \u201cVT,\u201d wrote Ryan, \u201cis not TV. If anything, it\u2019s TV flipped on itself. Television\u2026 has to do with transmitting information over distance. Videotape has to do with infolding information. Instant replay offers a living feedback.\u201d\u00a0(Ryan, 1968, p. 38)\u00a0This was the theory embodied by\u00a0Everyman\u2019s Moebius Strip<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Frank Gillette from\u00a0The Rays<\/em>\u00a0by Raindance, video, 19709<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ryan loaned one of Fordham\u2019s video recorders to painter\u00a0Frank Gillette, who was taping a documentary in New York\u2019s East Village when he met Victor Gioscia, a philosopher and therapist who\u2014like a small network of other therapists at the time\u2014was also using video. The two began collaborating. \u201cI experimented,\u201d explained Gillette, \u201cwith the effects of videotape on kids with bad trips\u201415 to 19 year olds\u2014burnt-out acid cases\u2014let them use the cameras on me, themselves, as a means of expression10<\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ryan and Gioscia also collaborated, recording a conversation, playing it back in slow motion, and each imitating the other\u2019s movements in order to better understand each other. \u201cWhen I woke up the next morning,\u201d recalled Ryan, \u201cI felt like I was wearing his body.\u201d\u00a0(Ryan, 1973, p. 39)\u00a0Ryan rejected psychotherapy as a modality, though, describing himself as \u201cone of those people\u2026 who has been raised Catholic and doesn\u2019t like the whole notion of therapy.11<\/sup>\u201d\u00a0 A decade later, he heard Michel Foucault lecture on \u201cSexuality and Solitude\u201d at New York University and wrote Foucault a letter, describing his efforts to develop a topological model of the psychological relations inherent in video. \u201cPerhaps such mapping relates,\u201d wrote Ryan, \u201cto what you are calling the \u2018technology of self.12<\/sup>\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ryan and the video therapists had inherited two of the great sacraments of incitement to discourse, confession and psychoanalysis. (Foucault, 1990, p. 18, 30)\u00a0Both were indeed, in Foucault\u2019s terminology, technologies of the self, methods which \u201cpermit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.\u201d (Foucault, 1988, p. 18)\u00a0While Ryan shared with Gioscia and other video therapists a belief that the incitement to mediated discourse with the self could bring about self-understanding, he adopted the venerable Catholic mode of confession rather than the modern mode of psychiatric examination.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Media Ecologies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the 1970s, Ryan became interested in using video to produce experiences of community and ecology as well of the self. In these domains, too, he continued to draw on Catholic practices. In 1973, Ryan founded Earthscore, an \u201cintentional community of videomakers\u201d near New Paltz, New York. In composing a set of rules for his new community, he incorporated rituals such as video wakes for the dead and drew on the\u00a0Rule of Saint Benedict\u00a0that organizes Benedictine monasteries. Ryan later described Earthscore as \u201ca non-celibate, aesthetic order capable of interpreting ecological systems with video that would be as sturdy and long lasting as the celibate, ascetic orders of the monastic tradition13<\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its ideal form, Earthscore would have brought together 36 members working and living in \u201cself balancing groups of three,\u201d who would \u201cdecode the ecology and feed it back to the local community over cable TV.\u201d Since Ryan was only able to recruit two other members, Earthscore consisted instead of a single triad of three men who produced tapes documenting ecological systems and their own triadic interactions. Like most intentional communities of the 1970s, Earthscore was short-lived, dissolving in 197614<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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