The self-design of contemporary confessional art

ABSTRACT

If the 1990s saw what Outi Remes has identified as ‘the confessional turn’ in contemporary art, more recent practices have sought to further deconstruct coercive mechanisms of ritual and shame. Michel Foucault’s late examination of the confessional and its potentiality to form ‘the technologies of the self’ that break the bonds of confessor and confessant marks out confessional practices as the establishment of power structures that lends itself to its own subversion. More recently the ubiquity of confessional forms in culture and its structural relation to institutions of power have taken on different sets of values than earlier art examined. As Boris Groys has attested in a set of essays (2009–2019), there exists an anxiety of self-image and the consumption of that image that marks out a different set of conditions from that explored by Foucault. The shift – from the ‘zero-design’ confessional of Rousseau to the ‘self-design’ confessional of Shia LaBeouf – has been widely embraced by a new generation of video artist. This paper suggests that the previous oppositions – zero-design = truth, sincerity, shame vs. self-design = mistrust, insincerity, power – demand a deconstruction. This paper argues for the capacity of contemporary confessional video art practices to occupy these slippages.

KEYWORDS:

• Confession
• self-design
• video art
• Groys
• Foucault

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Toby Juliff http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1673-8723

Jaye Early http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3033-4696

Notes

1 ‘The Obligation to Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility’, eflux #0, June 2008 and ‘The Production of Sincerity’, eflux #7, June 2009. These essays were collected and published along with seven further essays in Going Public, Sternberg Press, 2011. This paper uses this edition.

2 Exagoreusis is the second discourse of the self-disclosure associated with early Christian practices identified by Foucault. Prominent in the fourth and fifth centuries, ‘exagoreusis’ was a less public and theatrical technology than ‘exomologēsis’ used in the disclosure of the self. Acts of ‘exagoreusis’ were expressed verbally and often consisted of prayers which formed around an intricate framework of theological rules, and involved taking account of one’s everyday actions.

3 Though, as this paper will argue, the phenomenon of self-design arguably reached its apotheosis in mid-late 1990s art. More on this later.

4 The conditions of ‘online confessions’ – Vlogging, Youtubing, etc. – are not of disinterest to this paper. We focus however on the pervasiveness of this deconstruction strictly in video practices. We hope to pick up the question of the online confessional at another time but for now note that we believe that the instrumentalising of zero-design, ‘low-fi’ and mythically unmediated confessional forms are in fact completely consistent with Groys’ argument here. 

5 For related, if sometimes conflicting readings of the narcissistic impulse of early video practices, Rosalind E. Krauss’ benchmark ‘The Aesthetics of Narcissism’ (1976) and David Joselit’s ‘Touching Pictures: Toward a Political Science of Video’ (2009) are important to this reading. Whereas Krauss proffers a psychoanalytic reading of the artist on video as a structuralist play on the synchronous and asynchronous performances of self, Joselit favours an Arendtian strategy of deconstructive political binaries of oikos [private] and polis [public]. Joselit’s work is of particular interest here as it marks out the exacerbated conditions of the amelioration of private=zero-design=sincerity that Krauss and Foucault began to unpick in the mid-1970s.

6 Artists working with confessional discourse have experimented with how such themes could be implicated and more fully articulated in their creative practices, within a number of mediums within and outside of video. Briefly, some examples here include: Tim Miller, Ana Mandeita, and Peter Land, Dias & Riedwig, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Louise Bourgeois.

7 One might think of Ai Weiwei’s blog, Richard Prince’s Instagram and Grayson Perry’s countless media appearances as extensions of their own confessional practices.

8 ‘Thus, to make the politicians look trustworthy, one must create a moment of disclosure – a chance to peer through the surface to say, “Oh, this politician is as bad as I always supposed him or her to be.” With this disclosure, trust in the system is restored through a ritual of symbolic sacrifice and self-sacrifice, stabilizing the celebrity system by confirming the suspicion to which it is necessarily already subjected’ (Groys 2011, 41).

9 In January 2014, LaBeouf stated that his Twitter account was ‘meta-modernist performance art’, see ‘Shia LaBeouf Explains Plagiarism Drama: My Twitter Is “Meta-Modernist Performance Art’” by Lily Harrison (http://www.eonline.com/uk/news/502383/shia-labeouf-explains-plagiarism-drama-my-twitter-is-meta-modernist-performance-art) accessed 28 January 2016.

10 In the whole film, the only cut in the film is – it is inferred – a break during which Marti and ‘John’ have sex.

11 ‘Set against a narrative of rejection, indifference, and exploitation, the combination of his garrulous stories and on-screen gestures exposes an intense longing for touch, attention, and physical intimacy. He scrutinises Marti's body, stroking his skin and picking at his blackheads as he talks.’ Incidentally, Lloyd explores Groys’ Art Power, published one year before his two eFlux articles. In the later articles – which we consider here – self-design and the ‘ethical subject’ is key to Groys’ argument, something that Lloyd believes to be lacking in the earlier Art Power.

12 Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992) and The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) both exhibit a similar such deconstruction. The Wild Blue Yonder in particular articulates the destabilizing effect of zero-design read in a world of self-design. Carefully edited location shots of deep underwater diving in and around both Arctic circles – as you might find on the National Geographic television channel or narrated by David Attenborough – are juxtaposed with low-fi zero-design ramblings of a nameless oracle narrating an apocalyptic disaster that recontextualises the high-definition location shots of isolated and inhospitable underwater seascapes. Here, the appearance of zero-design (as always, carefully choreographed and highly designed by Herzog) undoes the truth of the high-definition underwater footage. Here, as with other practitioners in what has been termed ‘the documentary turn’ in post-millennial practices, the myth of zero-design (as Groys might read the minimal turn in the 1960s) and its conflation with sincerity demands a rigorous re-reading. Though of a different currency of Currall, Marti and Emin, the mobilisation of the zero-design confessional form similarly calls into question the inherited forms in cinema and documentary.

13 This essay, along with several later essays of 2017, were collected together in 2018 by Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle and Mark Wigley as part of Superhumanity: Design of the Self, a publication of over 50 essays by thinkers each exploring the new design of the self. Employing Groys’ first observations in self-design as their starting point, the collection appeared following the drafting of this paper and we hope to consider the implications in due course.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toby Juliff

Toby Juliff is a lecturer in Critical Practices and coordinator of the Fine Art Honours program at the University of Tasmania. From 2012 to 2017 he was lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Toby has published widely on modern sculpture, contemporary video and heritage studies. He lives and works in Hobart.

Jaye Early

Jaye Early is a Melbourne-based, multidisciplinary artist. A lecturer and tutor at the University of Melbourne, he has exhibited nationally and internationally in a number of group and solo exhibitions. He has been a finalist for a number of prominent art prizes, including: The Koorie Heritage Prize (2016), Hornsby Art Prize (2016), Redlands Art Award (2016) Bayside Acquisitive Prize (2016), and the Black Swan Prize for Portraiture (2013). He was also a semi-finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (2013).