Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private Experiences in Public Spaces: Jaye Early: Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity

Private Experiences in Public Spaces

Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity

Private Experiences in Public Spaces

Description

This is the first book of its kind to examine the development of the confessional subject in video art and demonstrate how it can provide a vital platform for navigating the politics of self, subjectivity, and resistance in society. In doing so, it reframes video art – the most ubiquitous and yet most understudied art form of recent decades – as an urgent socio-political tool that is increasingly popular among contemporary artists as a means of exploring a broad range of social issues, from politics and identity, to the body and technologies of self-representation.

Analysing a diverse selection of case studies from the 1960s up to the present day, covering the work of Yoko Ono, Gillian Wearing, Ryan Trecartin, Tracey Emin, Anatasia Klose, and Heath Franco, among others, the book brings together theory and practice to look afresh at contemporary video art through a Foucauldian lens. It also brings the analysis of video art up to date by showing how social media and digital self representation has informed and further politicized time-based art practices.

Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity shows how forms of confessional discourse not only play an important function in the construction of subjectivity but also open spaces for personal resistance and agency within contemporary video art. As a result, it offers researchers of contemporary art practice, and media and cultural studies, an updated framework through which to view this constantly-evolving genre and a deeper understanding of wider contemporary video practices.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Author Preface

Introduction

1. Private Life is Public Business: Contemporary Confessional Forms and Confessional Art
1.1. Outline and Definition of Confessional Art
1.2. Approaches to Subjectivity and the Confessional Subject through Fictitious Narratives and Disguise
1.3. Self-Disclosure or Verbalization within Historical Confessional Frameworks
1.4. Abandoning Privacy as a Transformative Mechanism

2. Technologies of the Self as Confessional Art
2.1. The Potential for the Self to Constitute Itself as a Subject
2.2 Outline and definition of technologies of the self
2.3 The self in performance and video art from the 1960s and beyond
2.4 The Radical Origins of Early Video Art as Political Tool

3. Re-imaging Public Spaces, Subjectivity and Confessional Art
3.1. Early 21st-century Definitions of Public and Private Spaces
3.2. Institutionalized Heteronormativity in Public Spaces
3.3. Politicizing Subjectivity and Re-imagining Public Space as a Space of Resistance
3.4. Speculative Subjectivity
3.5 Subjectivity in a Postmodern (neo-confessional) Landscape
3.6 The Emergence of Video Art and Subjectivity in the 1990s and Beyond
3.7 Post-millennial Confessional Video Art Practices

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography

Product details

Published	Apr 17 2025
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	184
ISBN	9781350400207
Imprint	Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Illustrations	16 bw illus
Dimensions	234 x 156 mm
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

This inspired contribution engages Foucault's late theories of “technologies of the self” with the burgeoning digital landscape of confessional art video in recent decades, especially in the U.S. and the U.K, offering lively accounts of the author's own artworks amongst many others.'

Thomas Waugh, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, School of Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec
A compelling exploration of how contemporary confessional video art complicates the intersections of subjectivity, privacy and public space. Jaye Early astutely connects Foucauldian analysis with recent
video art practices to offer profound insights into contested relationships between private
experience and public expression in a media-saturated world.

Sean Lowry, Associate Professor and Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia
This timely book explores the confessional subject within contemporary video art, offering a new framework by which to understand this genre of media art as a socio-political tool for navigating the politics of self, subjectivity and resistance in society.

Ina Blom, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Norway
Provides a fascinating review of confessional video art and its theoretical contexts, informed by active practice in the field. He highlights the potential of an increasingly pervasive form of self-representation to elude the regulatory limitations imposed on subjectivity by power.

Dr Matt Huppatz, Lecturer in Contemporary Art, South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia