Private Experiences in Public Spaces:
“Technologies of the Self ” within VideoBased Confessional Art and its Relationship
to Subjectivity
Jaye Early
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy (Visual Art)
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3033-4696
January 2018
Visual Art, VCA & MCM, The University of Melbourne
© Jaye Early 2018
email:jayescottearly@gmail.com
Abstract
This practice-led research project examines the notion and prevalence of our
contemporary confessing society and its impact on, and relationship to, the visual arts.
More specifically, it examines a contemporary confessional art practice that utilises
video-based performance. The research examines how Michel Foucault’s
philosophical notions of the self can be appropriated and mobilised in a contemporary
confessional video art practice. The research also discusses how Foucault extended
his philosophical approach to subjectivity and truth through the examination of how
the human subject fits into certain ‘truth games’ in scientific practices of control.
These preoccupied Foucault’s later work regarding the technologies of the self. By
turning to antiquity, Foucault demonstrates how the discourse surrounding GrecoRoman rituals of technologies of the self – and their relation to ‘truth games’ – could
be conceived as a potential practice of self-formation for the subject, rather than a
purely coercive practice. Through an extension of Foucault’s reworking of power, my
research frames contemporary confessional discourse as a less coercive and
regulatory practice, by establishing a dialogue between technologies of the self and a
contemporary confessional video art practice. As the boundaries between private and
public space become increasingly problematised in our confessional society (for
example, on Instagram, the blogosphere and Facebook), my research posits that
contemporary confessional video art gives voice to displaced subjectivities that
challenge coercive mechanisms of heteronormative public spaces to present a more
complex politics of self.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces- i
Declaration
This is to certify that:
i.
This dissertation comprises only my original work towards the PhD except
where indicated.
ii.
Due acknowledgment has been made in the text to all other material used
iii.
This dissertation is approximately 40,000 words in length, exclusive of
figures, references and appendices.
Signature:
Jaye Early, January 2018
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page ii
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks goes to my initial supervisors Dr Toby Juliff and Dr Aylson
Campbell, whose guidance and theoretical grounding has made this research possible.
I would also like to thank my subsequent supervisors Professor Su Baker and Dr
Mark Shorter for their invaluable expertise related to all aspects of the research. Their
contribution remains unsurpassed.
My gratitude must also be given to the library staff at the Baillieu Library at The
University of Melbourne. Their patience, generous insights and speedy assistance
over the past four years has been nothing short of phenomenal.
I would also like to acknowledge and express my gratitude for the financial assistance
provided by The University of Melbourne. Specifically, The Fay Marles Scholarship,
The Faculty of Small Grants Scheme, the Scovell Gardner Family Bursary, the
Housing Bursary, and also the kind support from both The Wilin Centre and The
Murrup Barak Indigenous centre.
I also acknowledge the editorial support of Sarah Endacott, of edit or die, and
Rebecca Conroy who performed editorial services on this document, complying with
IPED standards for the editing of academic publications.
Last but no means least, I would like to dedicate this PhD to Melissa and Liam, both
of whom received all of my confessions with warmth, tenderness and above all, a love
that will always astonish me.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page iii
Contents
Abstract
i
Declaration
ii
Acknowledgments
iii
List of Illustrations
6
Introduction
8
Chapter 1: Private Life Is Public Business: Contemporary Confessional Forms
and Confessional Art
27
Outline and Definition of Confessional Art
27
Approaches to Subjectivity and the Confessional Subject Through Fictitious
Narratives and Disguise
30
Self-Disclosure or Verbalisation within Historical Confessional Frameworks
37
Abandoning Privacy as a Transformative Mechanism
39
The Relationship Between Confessional Forms and Confessional Art in LateTwentieth Century British Culture
50
Chapter 2: Technologies of the Self as Confessional Art
54
The Potential For the Self to Constitute Itself as a Subject
54
Outline and Definition of Technologies of the Self
58
How Pre-modern Confessional Frameworks Became Re-Inscribed within Modern
Practices via Specific Rituals of Confession
62
Exomologēsis and Exagoreusis
74
The Self in Performance Art from the 1960s to the 1990s
81
The Radical Origins of Early Video Art as a Political Tool
89
Chapter 3: Re-imaging Public Spaces, Subjectivity, and Confessional Art
107
Early Twenty-First Century Definitions of Public and Private Spaces
107
Institutionalised Heteronormativity in Public Spaces
110
Re-imagining Public Spaces and Subjectivity as a Site of Politics and
Democratisation
116
Subjectivity in a Postmodern Landscape
121
The Emergence of Video Art and Subjectivity from the 1990s and Beyond
129
Conclusion
References
Appendices: Documentation of the PhD examination
exhibition at Rubicon Gallery, 30 August – 16 September 2017.
142
152
163
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 4
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 5
List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Trecartin, Ryan and Lizzie Fitch. Re’Search Wait’S, a quartet of video
works from 2009–10 comprising The Re’Search, Roamie View: History,
Enhancement, and Temp Stop single channel, high colour definition video, 40:06 mins.
Figure 2. Saint John, Shaye (aka Eric Fournier), TWENTY4SEVEN, single channel
video with colour, sound, 2:48 mins, 2003.
Figure 3. Emin, Tracey. Why I Never Became a Dancer, Film, Super 8 mm shown as
a video projection, colour and sound, 6:32 mins, 1995.
Figure 4. Ono, Yoko. Cut Piece, performed at the Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto,
1964. The performance has subsequently been re-enacted a number of times by Ono.
The most recent was performed in September 2003 at the Theatre Le Ranelagh, Paris,
France.
Figure 5. Abramović, Marina. Rhythm 0, live performance at the Studio Morra,
Naples, Italy, table of 72 objects, duration: 6 hours (8pm- 2 am), 1974.
Figure 6. Krystufek, Elke. Satisfaction, live with a massage brush, portable CD
player, dildos, baseball visor, TV, performance at a site specific space within the
Kunsthalle, Vienna, duration unknown, 1994.
Figure 7. Flanagan, Bob. Visiting hours, live performance with mixed media,
performed in collaboration with Sheree Rose at the Santa Monica Museum of Art,
California, 1992. It was subsequently performed the following year (1993) at the New
Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, and again at the Museum of the School of Fine
Arts in Boston (1995).
Figure 8. Benglis, Lynda. Female Sensibility, single channel video, with colour and
sound, duration 13:05 mins, 1973.
Figure 9. Burden, Chris. The Confession, single channel video with a TV monitor in
a nearby room, shown at the Contemporary art Center in Cincinnati, duration 30
mins (approx), 1974.
Figure 10. Early, Jaye. These are patriarchal times. Private life is public business,
(performance still), PhD confirmation exhibition, video, performance, painting,
mixed media, sound, 2014.
Figure 11. Taylor Wood, Sam. Killing Time, four-screen video installation with
colour and sound, first installed at The Showroom gallery, duration 48:30 mins (each
video), 1994.
Figure 12. Benning, Sadie. If Every Girl Had a Diary, single-channel Fisher-Price
camera, black and white, sound, duration 8:00 mins,1990.
Figure 13. Wearing, Gilliam. Dancing in Peckham, single-channel video, colour,
sound, duration 25 mins, 1994.
Figure 14. Marti, Dani. time is the fire in which we burn, single-channel HD video,
colour, sound, installation with mixed media, duration 2 hours:35 mins, 2009.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 6
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 7
Introduction
This practice-led research project looks at how Michel Foucault’s philosophical
notions of the self can be appropriated and mobilised in my confessional art practice.
My research’s chief ambition is to come to fresh terms with the conceptual details and
broader dimensions of Foucault’s thought, specifically his later work around the
cultivation of the self found in the publication, Care of the Self, Volume 3 of The
History of Sexuality (1984). During this latter part of his career (1980–1984) Foucault
recognised a specific category of historical practices by which people ethically
constitute their own subjectivity or, how “a human being turns him or herself into a
subject”.1 This marked a critical shift in Foucault’s intellectual focus. Here, he
deviates somewhat from his previous studies, which centred on systems of power and
concerns related to epistemology, and begins to establish both a genealogy of
confession and an anthropology of ethics in ancient, philosophical care-of-the-self
practices. This juncture of Foucault’s career—the re-encountering of previous themes
surrounding discipline and systems of power—constitutes productive ground to
explore the relations between subjectivity and contemporary confessional art practice
further—specifically, a confessional art practice that utilises video-based
performance.
In Care of the Self (1984), Foucault forms an ontology of ourselves that attempts to
situate the formation and development of the modern subject ultimately in order to
determine the foundations of obedience of the Western subject. In his genealogy of
confession, Foucault outlines how care-of-the-self practices were widely conceived in
antiquity as a method for individuals to substantially engage with the possibilities of a
1 Foucault, M. “The Subject and Power”, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, (USA:
University of Chicago Press,1982), 208.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 8
public, ethically orientated self-formation. For Foucault, certain ancient philosophical
teachings can be realised as an enormous undertaking in developing, enlarging and
implementing a complex technologies of the self endeavour. Such an endeavour
facilitates individuals to gain reflexive distance from their subject positions and to
enhance a positive self-fashioning—souci de soi—approach towards their existence2.
Technologies of the self was a significant focus in Foucault’s last intellectual
trajectory and a theme that he presented as a method of potentially transforming both
the history of ethics and the history of subjectivity 3. According to Foucault, the
subject is no longer, as philosopher and author Christian Iftode, remarks, “an end
point or the condition of possibility for all experience but merely, a kind of effect, a
‘folding’. This is the result of a process that Foucault calls ‘subjectivation’, which
involves a set of particular practices and techniques by which human beings come to
recognise themselves as ‘subjects’ of knowledge. It also involves power relations, as
well as ethical relationships to the self; these come to be tied to a distinct personal,
social and cultural identity ” 4. Foucault’s examination of truth and the subject focuses
on the historical relationship between truth and subjectivity. Foucault writes, “I have
always been interested in this problem, even if I framed it somewhat differently.”5
Truth and subject discourse are linked together through the combination of techniques
to form the ‘truth’ and the subjectivation of individuals. The field of analysis of
Foucault’s later work is concerned with alternatives; alternatives to biopolitical
subjectivation. By recognising the available contingencies of biopolitical
2 Iftode, Christian, “Foucault’s idea of philosophy as ‘Care of the Self’: Critical assessment and conflicting metaphysical views”, Procedia: Social and
Behavioural Sciences 71, Elsevier Ltd (2013).
3 Ibid., 82.
4 Ibid., 78.
5 Foucault, Michel, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom” in Michel Foucault: ethics, subjectivity and truth: the essential works of
Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1, (trans. Robert Hurley et al.), edited by Paul Rabinow, (USA: The New York Press, 1997), 281.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 9
subjectivation in our everyday lives, the individual can potentially constitute, both on
a personal and interpersonal level, an ‘ethics of the self’ formulated as a point of
opposition to regulatory power. Foucault outlines three historical methods of ethical
subjectivation, “the Christian hermeneutics of the self, the Greek and Roman
philosophical care of the self and the Cynical notion of parrhêsia or fearless speech”.6
Thus, Foucault turns to antiquity as an exploration of the art of existence and ascetics
of the self. Of these three historical methods of ethical subjectivation, my research
will primarily focus on the Greco-Roman philosophical care-of-the-self-practices. The
terminology employed by authors to describe these practices of ethical subjectivation
are varied. For the purpose of clarity, the research will refer to them as technologiesof-the-self practices. Foucault’s lectures during this period at the Collège de France
(1971–1984) were often exploratory; they were used as a kind of testing ground to
complement the monographs that he was working on.7 These lectures offer that the
theological structuring system inherited from ancient Christianity, and imposed on the
European populace during the early Middle Ages, came to form an inescapable politic
of the subject. Foucault makes a number of observations outlining the relationship
between confession, truth and sexuality. He asserts that confession, as practised in
many religious rituals across Europe, was focused on obtaining from confessants their
private thoughts, experiences and narratives in exchange for absolution. The
unburdening of personal sins or truth was, for the confessant, a one-way ticket to
salvation and sanctity. However, as Foucault reveals, far from liberating or
exonerating the confessant, such religious rituals served to condemn the confessant to
6 Ibid., 76.
7 Foucault taught at the Collège de France from January 1971 until his death in June 1984. The title of Foucault’s chair at the Collège de France was The
History of Systems of Thought. During this period Foucault presented 12 lectures in total. My research focuses on two main lectures from this period namely
The Hermeneutics of the Self (1981-1982) and Lectures on the Will to Know (1970-1971). Here, the issues surrounding the ethical formation of the self in
antiquity, Foucault maintains, forms the background for examining questions relating to contemporary notions of subjectivity. In addition, these lectures also
elucidate Foucault’s repositioning relating to the self: truth-telling, technologies of the self and the genealogy of confession.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 10
a perpetual endless spiral of shame, subjugation and more confessions. Foucault
describes the coercive force beneath such rituals of exoneration and purification and
claims that such confessional practices do not reveal truth,— they produce it. As
feminist philosopher Sal Renshaw notes, “The confessant’s desire to confess followed
the act of their confessions […] confession as Foucault initially very clearly
demonstrated, was historically more associated with the profanity of violence than it
was with the sanctity of heaven.”8 This pre-modern framework of Christian
confession and power, Foucault maintains, remained a significant method for
establishing social obedience for a number of centuries to come. In my research, premodern confessional frameworks will refer to the historical confessional forms
utilised from the Greco-Roman philosophies of the first two centuries ACE of the
early Roman Empire and ancient Christian spirituality, in particular the monastic
principles developed in the fourth and fifth centuries ACE of the late Roman Empire.
My research argues that confessional forms utilised from ancient Christianity through
to the late eighteenth century was a period wherein the coercive subjugation of the
individual occurs. My research posits that prior to the institutionalisation of
Christianity within the fourth and fifth centuries, confessional forms or care-of-theself practices were less coercive. Confessional frameworks that developed after the
nineteenth century (during the scientification of a number of biopolitical discourses)
through to the early twenty-first century will be referred to throughout the research as
postmodern confessional frameworks.
Over time, new mechanisms of power emerged that shifted the conditions of how the
production of power and its effects could be manipulated, particularly in relation to
8 Renshaw, Sal, (review),Taylor, Chloë. “The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’”, 2009 in Foucault
Studies, No. 8, (2010): 174. https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/2915/3014
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 11
population control, or social obedience. These new mechanisms are visible in the
scientification of a number of biopolitical discourses during a time when the
European populace was becoming increasingly denser and widespread. Academic
Christopher J. Menihan maintains that, from its institutionalisation during the fourth
and fifth centuries, through to the late ninetieth century, Christianity moved towards
subjugating the individual; collectively it functioned to “phase out antiquity’s practice
of self-finalising subjectivity or care-of-the-self practices. As a result, Christianity
subsequently introduced to modern Western thought the understanding that the self is
already determined and that the formation of the self is outside the ability of the
subject”.9 My research aims to re-contextualise the theoretical concepts that situate
ancient technologies-of-the-self practices that existed prior to the institutionalisation
of ancient Christianity in order to demonstrate how such concepts, when appropriated
within postmodernity, potentially escape regulatory limitations on subjectivity. We
need to recognise here that despite the availability of individuals to participate in selffinalising subjectivity in postmodernity, “we can never”, as Andreas Fejes and
Katherine Nicoll note, “entirely exist outside of power relations, we will always be
products of power”.10 Adherence to this position remains firm throughout this
research. While acknowledging that a disciplinary power discourse in late modernity
may indeed work toward the subjectification of the individual, my research will
establish that it is also, through my contemporary confessional video art practice,
works toward enabling expansionist self-fashioning in ways that defy traditional
assumptions of power and status. My research will establish how video practice
achieves this through the exploration of the personal via the confessional act. It is in
9 Menihan, Christopher J, “Care of the Self, Foucauldian Ethics, and Contemporary Subjectivity”, DigtitalCommons@URI, (2012): 2.
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=srhonorsprog
10 Fejes, Andreas, and Katherine Nicoll, Foucault and a Politics of Confession in Education, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN, Routledge Publishing, 2015, 205.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 12
the field of confessional video art practice that I draw on the available contingencies
of contemporary confessional discourse to examine representations of subjectivity
through the exploration of the personal made public. Additionally, such examinations
take place, for me, by exploiting the tele-visual capabilities available through the
mechanism of video and by adopting it as a confessional tool to reveal, observe and
scrutinise my own private, intimate narratives and histories which subsequently
become a political act of freedom and defiance. Freedom is a prerequisite for the
exercise of power and is found in the agonism of power relations from the individual.
There is always an incitement to act in a particular way, but individuals can always
act wilfully in disregard of this incitement11. This assertion is noticeably apparent in
postmodernity, given the prevalence and ubiquity of contemporary confessional
forms. These are discussed in greater detail in Chapter one. Contemporary
confessional forms underline much of our personal, moral and social life.
Additionally, public forms of confession influence our educational, health and legal
discourses.12 The ubiquity of contemporary confessional forms also underpins, much
of how we experience and participate in society, and even, as Christine Fanthome
observes, “play a significant role in our family interactions, and sexual
relationships”.13 Observing the diminishing boundaries between public and private
spaces and spheres in a predominately online postmodernity and their impact on
narcissism and unconcealed voyeurism, the curator Svetlana Reingold remarks:
“[T]he new online circumstances of perception and observation create new
11 Fejes, Andreas, and Katherine Nicoll, Foucault and Lifelong Learning, Governing and Subject,” Educational Philosophy, issue 8 (2011).
12 Benhabib, Seyla, “Models of Public: Hannah Arendt, the liberal tradition and Jurgen Habermas”, eds. Chis Calhoun (USA: MIT Press), 123.; Brooks,
Peter, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (USA: University Press of Chicago, 2000), 65.;Tim Dean, “The Antisocial Homosexual.”
PLMA, 121 (3) (2006): 827.; David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Critical Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (USA: Verso, 2006), 43.;
Diana Richardson, “Claiming Citizenship? Sexuality, Citizenship and Lesbian/Feminist Theory,” Sexualities Vol. 3, Issue 2 (2000): 257; Robbins, Bruce,
“Introductions: The Public as Phanton,” in The Phanton Public Sphere (USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii.
13 Fanthome, Christine, “The Influence and Treatment of Autobiography in Confessional Art: Observations on Tracey Emin’s Feature Film Top Spot,” Project
Muse, Biography, Vol. 29, No. 1, (2006): 30.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 13
circumstances of self representation”.14 The technology available today (for example,
Facebook, reality TV programs, Instagram, the blogosphere), and its use in everyday
life has meant that individuals now, more than ever, can become increasingly
knowledgeable and acquainted with themselves and others through increasing their
visibility. 15 This environment creates a new post-millennial16 condition for examining
self-representation. Whilst the main source of cultural imagery within the West
continues to be provided by mass media and the commercial interests that fuel it, the
possibilities for exploring self-representation remains a significant issue within a
contemporary confessional landscape. Present within this new condition, within a
visual arts context, is the examination and deeper understanding of my political self. It
is at this level of examining my own self-representation that self-crafted
subjectivities, within a confessional video art practice, find their power. Some thirty
years on, Foucault’s observations regarding the deconstruction of previous regulatory
and coercive mechanisms of confessional discourse have retained their analytic
power; they now seem more relevant than ever when examining contingencies
surrounding contemporary confessional discourse and its relationship to subjectivity.
Since the mid-1990s, confessional forms have, as curator Outi Remes observes,
“become one of the most popular forms of entertainment, control and therapy in
postmodern society”.17 An apt example of how the everyday participation, observation
and judging of other people’s confessions have become normalised is the construction
14 Reingold, Svetlana. “AnonymX: The End of the Privacy Era”, (February 2017).
ahttp://www.hma.org.il/eng/Exhibitions/4087/AnonimX%3A_The_End_of_the_Privacy_Era
15 Benhabib, Models; Brooks, Troubline; Fanthome, The Influence; Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(USA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Landry, Jean –Michel, “Confession, Obedience and Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s Unpublished Lectures on the
Government of Living,” Academia.edu, Issue 166 (2009).
16 I use post-millennial to refer to the period of time taking place after the millennium (2000), not the term, postmillennialism, which is used in Christian endtimes theology (eschatology).
17 Remes, Outi, “The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth-Century British Art” (Ph.D., The University of Reading, 2005), 1.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 14
of reality TV and its pioneering efforts in reconceptualising confession as a medium
of mass consumption. Confessional-style programs now dominate TV networks as
highly specialised and popular modes of entertainment, where people are invited to
speak about themselves. In such highly mediated environments, the discourse of
confession seems far removed from previous historical confessional frameworks.
Rather than being an overtly disciplinary discourse, confession in this TV
entertainment format is more orientated towards an unorthodox therapeutic exchange,
in which a form of validation is sought by the confessants through their increased
visibility to others on a mass scale. Through the normalisation and ubiquity of
confessional forms, particularly online confessional spheres, there is not only a
destabilising of historically ritualised and institutional practices of Christian
confession, but also a shift in the parameters of how and where the disclosure of
private narratives take place. As the boundaries between the private and the public
become radically redrawn, private life is now very much public business. Not unlike
reality TV, many online spheres can be conceptualised as a confessional platform to
increase our visibility and knowledge of ourselves and others. They have also
become, in many ways, a mandate to narrate our own existence in an attempt to give
meaning to our lives.18 What can also be seen here is a shift in how confession as a
phenomenon is now widely used to disrupt previously held concepts about privacy
through the abandonment of what was historically not permissible (or encouraged) in
public life; namely, the disclosure of private experiences. If pre-modern confessional
frameworks within ancient Christianity demanded a coercive stripping of the
autonomy of the confessant, less regulated contemporary confessional forms can be
interpreted conversely as an empowerment of self and subjectivity. How we currently
18 Alan Aycock, “Technologies of the Self: Foucault and Internet Discourse,” Wiley Online Library, (September 1995),
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1995.tb00328.x/abstract ; Renshaw, The Culture,176.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 15
think about confession, its application, its relationship to privacy and its influence in a
society increasingly more at ease with expressing highly personal experiences in
public spaces has, according to writer Janna Malamud Smith been greatly influenced
by the confluence of two major developments during the twentieth century: mass
media and the increased popularising and acceptance of psychological thinking.19 In
other words, as Malamud Smith elaborates: “the emergence of a post Freudian culture
that takes for granted the public expression of once private narratives and experiences
and parts of the mind”.20 Malamud Smith expresses the futility of locating any fixed
definition of privacy, noting its multidimensionality as a word and as a phenomenon.
Conceding privacy to be a complex ecology, Malamud Smith ultimately concludes
that privacy is essentially information or, more specifically, personal information. In
linking privacy to information, Malamud Smith upholds that a conscious lack of
control over personal information directly equates to a loss of dignity or an
individual’s sense of self. Similarly, privacy scholar Edward Bloustein also reveres
the nobility of privacy, arguing that it is a crucial element in determining dignity and
selfhood. Bloustein emphasises that privacy is an inherent component of one’s
independence and sovereignty. Accordingly, such individual sovereignty ultimately
leads to a more self-determined being.21 Both Malamud Smith and Bloustein posit that
in order to secure a more honourable sense of self, personal experiences and personal
information should remain unpublicised and concealed in both public and private
spaces.
19 What Malamud Smith is referring to here with the term “acceptance of psychological thinking” is the significant impact that mass media has had on
making psychoanalysis more widely available (and understood) within popular culture and its subsequent impact on blurring boundaries between private and
public. For example, confessional-like formats within mass entertainment and the emergence of personal development industries. For further information see,
Smith Malamud, “Private.”
20 Smith Malamud, Janna, Private Matters: In Defence of the Personal Life, (UK: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 23.
21 Bloustien, Edward, Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity: An Answer to Dean Prosser (USA: New York University, 1964).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 16
Establishing a connection between privacy and the protection of authenticity,
Malamud Smith comments that, “Privacy shields and nurtures what is unique and
authentic in people, while its absence or its violation often contributes to
dehumanizing them”.22 The practicalities pertaining to Malamud Smith’s assertion
have logical merit in its association of the privacy of personal information with
protection.23 In their defence of privacy, both Malamud Smith and Bloustein equate an
individual’s subjective personal narratives with their personal information. Here, the
link between private experiences and personal information seems securely bound. If,
according to Malamud Smith and Bloustein, privacy is the control of personal
information and the vigilant control of such information equates to integrity and
personal dignity, then the total and candid expression of personal experiences in
public would equate to the opposite. Malamud Smith and Bloustein associate the
disclosure of private experiences in public with shame or a limiting shame-inducing
discourse without an apparent personal or wider social function. Consequently, what
remains largely unexamined or denied from such a perspective is the fundamental link
between personal disclosure, the politics of the self, and subjectivity. Given that selfdisclosure in contemporary confessional forms can be considered in part to potentially
influence the construction of subjectivity, an aim of the present research is to examine
self-disclosure through a contemporary confessional art practice that challenges
Malamud Smith and Bloustein’s limiting shame-inducing discourse. My video art
provides a public platform to reconstitute myself using speech, gesture, notions of
sincerity and insincerity and, at times, fantasy. By virtue of its immediacy, ease of use
and its ability to be reproduced and transmitted, my confessional video art remains a
22 Ibid., 25.
23 For example, in Australia, the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) regulate the handling of personal information by Australian government agencies and
some private sector organisations. Such principles serve to generally (and perhaps ideally) increase a sense of security and welfare.
www.surveymanager.com.au/privacy-policy/ Accessed 23 March, 2016
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 17
potent medium for revealing the personal as political within public space. By further
considering the relationship between self-disclosure, subjectivity and space, my
research focuses on my confessional video art practice which more directly and
explicitly deals with self-disclosure in public space as an attempt to extend the
boundaries of traditional self-representation. To this end, my research posits that the
relevance of public space—where the majority of contemporary confessions now take
place—is useful in that it facilitates the process of increasing individual visibility,
which in turn facilitates the development and extension of subjectivity.
Despite the growing prevalence of confessional forms, there remains a lack of critical
discourse concerning this subject in the visual arts, specifically in regard to a
confessional video art practice that examines subjectivity and its relationship to space.
However, an examination of confessional art as a substantial mode of practice was
introduced in 2005. By focusing on the role of confession in late twentieth-century
British art, Outi Remes initiated a serious and overdue dialogue that analysed the role
of confessional art and its relationship to wider socio-political confessional
discourses.
In her doctoral thesis The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth-Century British Art
(2005), Remes identifies confession as a vital phenomenon and inspiration for a
number of British artists during the mid-1990s—namely, Tracey Emin, Gillian
Wearing and Richard Billingham. Remes reveals how these artists adapted
confessional discourse as a subject of integration through a variety of media, such as
photography and video, to navigate and deconstruct themes of inter-subjectivity, the
politics of self-exposure and an analysis of the artist–audience exchange in the
confessional. By situating confession as a key feature in late twentieth century British
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 18
culture, Remes succeeded in situating confessional art as a serious genre for
producing art that satirises, reimagines and departs from the historical frameworks of
confession.
Adding to Remes’ research, the present practice-led project further examines videobased performance in confessional art practice and its relation to subjectivity from a
practitioner’s lens. This is will be achieved through an analysis of Foucauldian
philosophical notions of the self and its relation to a new, post-millennium,
confessional art practice. In addition, the research explores how, through the ubiquity
of contemporary confessional forms and their structural realignment with institutions
of power, a new generation of video artists have taken on a different set of values to
those examined by earlier video and performing artists from the mid-1960s to the
1990s. A new set of values relating to confession that question structures of autonomy
that Foucault began to deconstruct during the early-to-mid 1980s in his essays on the
genealogy of confession, is taken up by media theorist Boris Groys. Groys analyses a
similar structural realignment of autonomy that reveals new conditions for postmillennial confessional art practice. The new conditions Groys, maintains, “force the
artist […] to confront the image of the self: to correct, to change, to adapt, to
contradict this image”.24 Between 2008 and 2010, Groys published a number of
interrelated essays which reiterate the accepted wisdom of canonical theorists—
Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin and Frediech Nietzsche—and push its concepts to
the extreme when questioning notions of sincerity and insincerity and their
relationship to secularism and mass media.25 In shifting focus from the political and
formalist rhetoric of modernism to a study of its psychological underpinnings, two
24 Groys, Boris, “Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility”, e-flux #7, (June–August 2010), p. 3. worker01.e-flux.com/pdf.article_68.pdf
25 Groys, Boris, The Obligation to Self-Design” E-Flux, #00 (2008):http://www.e-flux.com/journal/00/68457/the-obligation-to-self-design/;Groys, “SelfDesign.”; Groys, Boris, Going Public (Berlin; New York: Sternberg Press, 2010).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 19
powerful themes emerge that underpin Groys’ work: first, the deep interpretation of
the political and the aesthetic and second, the structural continuity between religious
and secular media practices.26 Groys positions Christian ethics as inherently aesthetic;
he asserts that the theological rituals and behaviours involved in the act of pleasing
God and getting into heaven are essentially the self-design of the soul, in which the
individual is set in an internally imprisoned and designed condition. Groys’ posits that
since the death of God in the late nineteenth century, a post-Christian self-design
shifted the moral imperative to the presentation of the body. It is during this period
that the concept of the soul underwent a seismic shift—from an internally imprisoned
and designed condition to one designed from the outside by external factors (politics
and aesthetics); the soul no longer became a vehicle for the body but its clothing. This
radical privileging of the aesthetics of the soul—which Groys names ‘self-design’—
takes on a new orientation: Where religion once was, design has emerged. Groys
shows that in postmodernity, ‘self-design’ has eclipsed the function of religion to
become creed. Thus, Groys tries to show how Benjamin’s warning about the
aestheticisation of politics has now taken root in our media-based political culture.
Groys takes this one step further, in his essays, by claiming that the aesthetic realm is
not only a medium, but also the most important content of political messages. Groys’
concept of ‘self-design’ is clearly visible within the mechanisms of contemporary
confessional forms as it evidences the potentiality for a total, externally formed,
aestheticisation of the self. My research examines the relationship between Foucault’s
technologies of the self and a set of video practices from the mid-1990s in which
contemporary confessional forms have proven fertile ground for post-millennial
confessional video artists to occupy and perform. This interrelation forms a valuable
26 Sidorkin, Gleb, Strategies for Surviving the Death of God, (Belrin: Stemberg Press, 2010), 123.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 20
conceit in my own confessional art practice which mobilises video to explore a new
paradigm of confessional art that locates an urgent and self-designed political
framework as productive grounds to examine self-subjectivity. Groys’ self-design’ is
not merely an exacerbated form of Foucault’s earlier technologies of the self. Rather
the Foucauldian impulse that runs through Groys’ ideas surrounding ‘self-design’
helps to successfully situate a new set of conditions to further understand and
scrutinise contemporary confessional forms and its relationship to contemporary
confessional video art practice.
While the narcissistic tropes of mock heroics and reflexivity of the artist on screen
became ubiquitous with the emergence of video art in the 1960s and 1970s, the
capacity of video to provide a platform for such a maneuverer re-emerges in the mid1990s and beyond, to examine a new set of possibilities for the confession and its
relationship to confessional video art practice. The, at times, excruciating confessional
performances of earlier artists—Hannah Wilke and Gina Pane, for instance—whose
work frequently scrutinised and deconstructed the self, whilst presenting synchronous
and asynchronous structures of self-reflexivity, now belong to a previous time. Far
from the private critically coercive disclosures of the past, my confessional video art
practice, is neither shameful nor coercive. As an adopted technologies-of-the-self
practice, my confessions are liberated, public and triumphant and reflect both the
ubiquitousness and unreliability of confessional forms inherited from a number of
confessional video art works from the mid-1990s.27 Post-millennial video artists
gravitated towards an examination of biopolitical production as a shift away from, as
Groys explains: “the traditional tactics of mimesis and representation to instead stage
27 I acknowledge and thank my initial Ph.D., supervisor Dr Toby Juliff for the many discussions that took place throughout 2015–16, during which we
discussed contemporary confessional video art practice and its relation to the social/political climate in Britain during the 1990s and also the theoretical
connections/influences between Boris Groys and Michel Foucault.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 21
experiments, shape situations, and otherwise direct social realities”.28 The research
acknowledges that the artists referenced herein by no means exhaust the rich,
international panorama from which they have been selected. To include them all
would have been impossible. The chosen works illuminate the distinctive chronology
relating confessional art practice to the research question; works nominated for
discussion were chosen for their salience and consideration of subjectivity and
confessional (or confessional-like) themes.
Chapter one titled “Private Life is Public Business: Contemporary Confessional
Forms and Confessional Art” outlines and defines the themes and terms relating to the
research question through an examination of the methodological, theoretical and
historical context of contemporary confessional forms and its relationship to, and
impact upon, the development of post-millennial confessional video art practice. The
chapter begins by providing a definition of confessional art, followed by a detailed
outline of contemporary confessional forms. This is undertaken with the aim to more
accurately position the intentions and parameters of my own confessional art practice.
Structured around the notion that contemporary confessing individuals have little in
common with confessing subjects of the past,29 this chapter examines how, through a
discussion of the relationship between emerging confessional forms in British popular
culture during the early-to-mid 1990s, new principles of the ‘aestheticisation of the
self’ emerged. As this chapter reveals, for many confessional video artists since the
1990s we see new structures of confessional practices emerging that seek to occupy
the cracks that have emerged in the collapse of regulated structures of contemporary
confessional discourse. As contemporary confessional video art practice becomes
28 Ibid.
29 Renshaw, The Culture, 176
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 22
ubiquitous—not from a growing disempowerment but from an increasing autonomy
and self-subjectivity—the chapter asks: what does it mean to practice confessional
video art today? In attempting to address this question, the chapter suggests that the
theological structuring system inherited from ancient Christianity—coercion,
humiliation, truth versus a late-modern framework of confession, power, suspicion,
mendacity—warrant examination.
Foucault’s more multifarious conception of disciplinary power opens up new
perspectives regarding the socio-historical conditions that mediate power and its
effects. In his genealogy of confession, Foucault emphasises the possibility of
politicising the relationship to the self. While Foucault’s later work relating to
confession, subjectivity and the ethical thematic of technologies of the self in
antiquity is both a departure point and prominent conceptual framework for the
research, consideration of wider theoretical discourses including Groys and his
conceptual framework surrounding ‘self-design’ will be examined within this chapter
in order to enrich and extend Foucault’s ideas. Taking inspiration from Foucault’s
writings on the influence of power and discipline in his genealogy of confession, a
central premise motivating Chapter two — “”Technologies of the Self” as
Confessional Art”—is how Foucauldian philosophical notions of the self (or
technologies of the self) can be mobilised in my confessional video art practice. More
precisely, it examines Foucault’s understandings of subjectivity relating to the self in
a number of technologies-of-the-self practices in antiquity, specifically stoicism and
ancient Christian spirituality. The exploration of the historical forms which confession
has taken from antiquity through to postmodernity helps to contextualise and explain
the production of contemporary confessional forms raised in Chapter one. By
positioning the ideas and origins of pioneering video artists (and, in part, performance
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 23
artists) as a prism through which to offer an understanding of post-millennial
confessional art practice, this chapter outlines the continuities and commonalities that
exist across video art practice from the mid-1960s to the present. In addition, this
chapter demonstrates how a reimagining of the mechanism of contemporary
confessional video art, as an appropriated technologies-of-the-self practice, provides a
valid opportunity to further analyse the contingency of both confession and
subjectivity in contemporary confessional video art practice. Lastly, by generating
new perspectives regarding the relationships between Foucault’s technologies of the
self and contemporary confessional video art, this chapter establishes productive
grounds to approach my own confessional art practice as a strategy for rethinking the
politics of myself. In turning to antiquity to examine modes of power and its relation
to technologies-of-the-self practices, Foucault highlights how technologies-of-the-self
prove relevant in postmodernity. For instance, the impact of unparalleled
consumerism, environmental awareness and technological advancements has
influenced how identity and self-subjectivity are potentially conceptualised as
definitions of power and truth in postmodernity. By outlining the details and
techniques of ancient technologies-of-the-self practices, Foucault attempts to form a
historical ontology of ourselves by establishing an expanding framework of selfsubjectivity—or a hermeneutics of the self.
Chapter three— “Re-imaging Public Spaces, Subjectivity, and Confessional Art”—
focuses on current speculations of private and public space and the potential for
further democratisation through a re-imagining of subjectivity in confessional art
practice. This is undertaken through an examination of traditional axiomatic
disciplinary discourse as it relates to biopolitical discourse and its relation to early
twenty-first century definitions of public and private spaces. For example, previous
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 24
sociological studies of the relationship between the individual and public space and
spheres have demonstrated that such spaces are predominately constructed around
fixed notions of heteronormativity that implicitly exclude non-heteronormative lives
and behaviours.30 Such studies often critically explore public space and spheres as
sites of policy and examine the way in which spatial agendas have been directed by
normative paradigms of community.31 These studies underscore that the elimination of
non-heteronormative lives and behaviours or dissidents reflect definitions of
heteronormativity and citizenship.32 Additionally, my research aims to produce a
theoretical account of new approaches to enhancing the role of subjectivity in
contemporary confessional video art practices. This chapter considers public space
and spheres and their relationship to self-disclosure in contemporary confessional
video art practice; it establishes public space and spheres less as a metaphoric or
authoritative space where validation is sought by the confessing individual, and more
as a space after Foucault, of pleasure and desire. Through an examination of the
interconnectedness and redefinitions of subjectivity available in contemporary
confessional video art practices, a repositioning of public space as a site of politics
and democratisation becomes visible. These are the potential spaces to which this
chapter is dedicated.
30 Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution
to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text Issue 25/26 (1990); Gibson, Alexandra and Catriona Macleod, (Dis)allowances of Lesbians
(South Africa Rhodes: University Press, 2012); Harvey, Spaces.
31 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public,” 23; Richardson, “Claiming,” 260.
32 Despite an exploration in the research of public space and its closely woven links with heteronormativity, it is not an intention of the present research to
adopt a purely queer deconstructivist lens to interrogate public space, public practices or even queer art and artists. Out of alignment with the practice-led
component of the research, I do not position myself as a queer artist with the deliberate intend of exposing queer cracks in heteronormative facades or regimes
of normativity that support the sexual and gender status quo in public spaces. However, and not entirely in indirect contradiction to this, the engagement with
ideas of queerness in the practice-led component is at times indistinguishably bound up in certain autobiographical components relating to my own sexuality.
While acknowledging that components of queer theory does in fact succeed in creating discursive forms of subjectivity, it is not an indented desire to take on
queer theory/culture as a definitive subject matter in the research.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 25
Understanding the nature of confession and its application, evolution and its
relationship to subjectivity within a number of confessional and confessional-like
video artist, is not a straight forward task. It requires examining previous
social/cultural constructions of confession from antiquity to postmodernity in order to
comprehend its contingent forms, consequences, nuanced applications and
connections to a visual art context. Through a consideration of the relations between
subjectivity and truth, and the analysis of ancient, philosophical, technologies-of-theself practices, my research provides an outline of how Michel Foucault’s
philosophical notions of the self can be appropriated and mobilised in my own
confessional video art practice to enhance subjectivity.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 26
Chapter 1: Private Life Is Public Business:
Contemporary Confessional Forms and Confessional
Art
It just means that in spaces turned confessional, art that speaks of the personal
made public, there is a version of us, a space for each of us. There. Somewhere.
Katrina Stuart Santiago
33
Outline and Definition of Confessional Art
In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976) Foucault analyses confession as
part of late nineteenth/early twentieth century discourse on sexuality. However, his
analysis reaches far beyond this. Indicating the importance of confession in the arts
(in this case literature), Foucault writes: “a literature ordered according to the infinite
task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the
very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage”.34 If confessional art
can be categorised as work that intentionally expresses or publicly documents highly
personal and intimate narratives, then autobiographical formats in literature are an
ideal departure point from which to initiate a closer understanding of confessional
art.35
During the 1950s, both critics and literary scholars paid considerable attention to the
number of poets and writers whose work centred on confessional personal narratives;
Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and a number of other poets working in the 1950s made
work that focused on intimate and deeply personal narratives and experiences.36
33 Santiago, Katrina Stuart, “Art Review: The Daring of Confessional Art in ‘Curved House’” GMA News Online, September, 2012.
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/272846/lifestyle/art-review-the-daring-of-confessional-art-in-curved-house
34 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, (Vintage Books, New York, USA, 1990), 59.
35 Galenson, David W, “Portraits of the Visual Artist: Personal Visual Art in the Twentieth Century,” NBER Working Papers, No.13939 (2008),
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13939
36 Literary scholars and critics who examine confession/personal poetry include Allan Williamson, Lionel Trilling, Donald Davie and Robert Elliott.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 27
Locating a lineage to confessional literature (specifically the poetry of the second half
of the twentieth century), David W. Galenson observes that such poetry was primarily
a backlash against the orthodoxy of the traditional poetry of the first half of the
twentieth century, which was characterised by the doctrine of persona.37 The work of
these poets namely Allen Ginsberg, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke
and Syliva Plath created poetry that Galenson argues was:
Highly subjective and privileged the personal over the universal. It was written
in the language of ordinary speech that often took alienation as theme, and
38
recognised no subject matter as off limits.
Discussing the impossibility of avoiding objectivity in the work of certain
confessional poets in the mid-twentieth century, author Robert Phillips made the
assertion that whatever the cost of public exposure these poets created works in
which, “their subjects are most often themselves and always the things they most
intimately know”.39 In their publication, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for
Interpreting Life Narratives (2001), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson establish clear
differences between what they call life writing, life narrative and autobiography.40
Life writing, the authors observe, takes a more “historical, novelist or biographical
life as subject matter”.41 The more self-referential life narrative, which prioritises
highly subjective and personalised perspectives and experiences, is considered a
subcategory of autobiographical and more confessional-type modes of writing. Both
confessional art and autobiographical literature apply to the past various levels of
37 Persona in early twentieth century literature was a term “used by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and others to stress the distinction between the poet and the
speaker of a poem; the ‘I’ of a poem was not the poet, but a mask created by her or him”. This enabled detachment and objectivity on the part of the poet.
Elliot, Robert. C. The Literary Persona, (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 16.
38 Galenson, “Portraits”.
39 Phillips, Robert, The Confessional Poets, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 1973, 15.
40 Remes, “The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth century British Art,” 8.
41 Ibid., 8.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 28
personal experience as its subject matter, and both can be categorised as selfreferential. Therefore, confessional art can be viewed as a subcategory of
autobiographical literature (or life narrative), and can generally be categorised as
work that documents the externalisation of private experiences.42 While there are
cogent, worthy and well-argued positions asserting that potentially all artists’ work
could be perceived as having confessional or autobiographical aspects, my research
focuses on a framework of confessional art (in the visual arts) that explores a more
direct mode of self-disclosure in order to examine self-representation and its
relationship to subjectivity.
Confessional art, in particular video-based confessional art, approaches subjectivity,
the confessional subject (not always the artist) and the viewer from a range of
perspectives, revealing complex and often ambiguous confessional forms, needs,
motives and meanings. Likewise, confessional art (however genuine or deliberate its
intention) often confronts and sensationalises its audience by revealing too much
personal information.43 More than autobiographical literature, confessional art
practice indirectly encourages the viewer to consider the dynamics of confession
surrounding the often-nuanced cultural process of receiving and consuming
confessions. Here, confessional art practice not only addresses confession from the
artist’s and the confessant’s perspectives, it also, consciously (or unconsciously),
suggests that the viewer examine intimate questions about the confessional subject
and their own relationship to the topic. Confessional art not only reflects a style of
consumption seen in confessional forms (for example, social media and reality TV); it
somewhat paradoxically, at times, provides more information than the viewer wants
42 Galenson, “Portraits”.
43 Remes, “The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth century British Art”.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 29
or needs to know, or what is ‘safe’ to know. Given that much of contemporary
confessional art imitates, satirises and impersonates the language and mode of
confession predominant in Western popular culture, what it inadvertently captures is a
societal obsession for voyeurism (at any cost for the viewer) and its relationship to art.
Through the enacting of private experiences in public spaces, confessional art
uncovers questions of intimacy, authenticity and sensationalism which compel the
viewer to confront their own position as a voyeur. However, as Remes outlines, the
ubiquitous acceptance of contemporary confessional forms in our everyday lives often
positions viewers to overstress the confessional characteristics of confessional art at
the expense of a wider social-political reading of the work, she observes:
A key difference that distinguishes confessional art and confessional
entertainment lie in its very definition; art vs. entertainment. The key focus of a
reality TV show is to provide entertainment […] In spite of its association with
popular culture, confessional art is not tied to any requirements to please or
attract its audience. Moreover, the use of popular language and the association
with commodity culture may draw attention away from the fact that confessional
art often deals with serious issues and concerns […] Wearing’s, Billingham’s
and Emin’s addresses complex issues such as abortion, ageing, alcoholism,
44
depression and trauma.
Approaches to Subjectivity and the Confessional Subject Through
Fictitious Narratives and Disguise
Confessional art, by reiterating and repositioning confessional elements and
situations, influences the viewer’s perception by situating the confessional subject as
the narrator. In order to do this, confessional or confessional-like art employs
elements such as disguise while embracing the fictitious in its relation to constructs of
self-representation. These are constructs of self-representation that, as Remes notes,
44 Remes, “The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth century British Art,” 8.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 30
are often “based on a selection of autobiographical memories, feelings, and events”.45
The viewer is situated to receive the information revealed in confessional acts,
sometimes in disguise, in entirely unique ways, which differ from viewer to viewer.
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 1. Trecartin, Ryan and Lizzie Fitch. Re’Search Wait’S, a quartet of video works from 2009–10
comprising, The Re’Search, Roamie View: History, Enhancement, and Temp Stop, single channel, high
definition colour video, 40:06 mins.
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch are contemporary video artists who construct and
extend self-representation by embracing various levels of disguise. Trecartin and
Fitch produce video work that concentrates on a style and approach that navigates
fictitious (predominately digital) realities, including menacing accounts of a pre- and
post-apocalyptic mayhem. For instance, their video titled, Re’Search Wait’S (2009–
10), reflects their signature cut-and-paste editing style, along with the use of
fragmented, often disjointed, post-internet narratives set against a high-pitched synth
audio-visual framework. These characters play out misshapen, hyper-dystopian
realities which, at first, seem to depict excess and an abject narcissism that does not
easily fit in video’s inherited televisual lineage. However, a more considered reading
45 Ibid., 8.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 31
of Re’Search Wait’S (2009–10) reveals an immersive reflection on the caustic and
often banal nature of hyper-individualism located in a bubble of unceasing, deliriumlike, consumerism and its resulting impact on the construction (or deconstruction) of
self and identity in late capitalism. Suspending narrative cohesion for blurred
informational structures, the mostly hysterical characters in Re’Search Wait’S (2009–
10) endlessly splurge their intimate, and at times overtly fictitious, dislocated
confessions and self-assessments to themselves and the world around them with an
eerie, almost neurotic campiness and blunt candour that somehow leaves a prickly and
almost bewildering residue on the viewer. In this splurge of self-centric monologues
which seemingly side-step any clear definitions of the interior or external self, the
characters, Phillip Brophy writes:
Embrace the hysterical unfit between the self and its socialisation, here
expressed by the tyrannical voice-track which dictates all the fragmented
responses, engagements and altercations acted out and up by its self-immolating
cast. In this sense, Trecartin (and Fitch) is listening to not only what people say,
but how what they say about themselves likely contradicts any sense of self
46
identity… in this type of linguistic disjuncture.
A similarly layered and equally disturbing use of disguise and artifice is found in the
work of pioneering underground absurdist video artist Eric Fournier, who could
arguably be credited for inspiring much of Trecartin and Fitch’s work. The
similarities certainly overlap. In 2001, Fournier developed the character Shaye Saint
John, an ex-fashion model who, as a result of a near fatal car crash, is outfitted with a
number of prosthetics, takes to YouTube, to discuss a variety of topics, including: her
outrageous dietary experimentations; her endless transplants and failed surgeries;
America’s ‘star fucking’ culture; and her body image struggles and its resulting
46 Brophy, Phillip, “Talk about fucked up”, Ryan Trecartin, Re’Search Wait’S”, RealTime, Issue 127 (June–July 2015),18–19,
www.realtimearts.net/article.php?id=11958
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 32
neurosis, while creating memorable aphorisms that would, prophetically, mimic
subsequent social media language to come.
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 2. Saint John, Shaye (aka Eric Fournier), TWENTY4SEVEN, single channel colour
video with sound, 2:48 mins, 2003.
As Remes notes, it is through the use of such disguise and artifice, combined with an
exploration of loose autobiography, that confessional art “seldom presents a factual
account, rather it often manipulates and even fabricates subjective and edited
memories”.47 The use of fabricated narratives and the avoidance of exceptional
honesty are tactics employed by a number of artists since the 1960s working with live
and performance-based video art.48
47 Remes, “The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth century British Art,” 17.
48 Examples works where artists examine notions of the self and subjectivity through the use of props, masks, costumes and disguises to become a masquerade
of identity, particularly in regard to traditional gender roles include: Pierre Moliner (The spur of love, 1966–68), Faith Wilding (Waiting, 1971) Adrian Piper
(the mythic being series, 1972-–1975: cruising white women, 1975), Eleanor Antin (The King, 1972), Paul McCarthy (Sailor’s Meat Sailor’s Delight, 1975)
and Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena (Two Undiscovered Amerindians visit Madrid, 1992).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 33
One artist who works directly with confessional themes is Gillian Wearing. Wearing
examines, in contrast to Trecartin, confessional situations and elements which
potentially influence audience perception—not only through low-cost disguises and
amateur, often unpolished lighting and editing techniques, but also through the verbal
confessions of the participants. The confessions in Wearing’s videos are often
delivered with minimal input by the interviewer (the artist), and often with a
heightened and occasionally inconsistent style suggestive of fabricated story telling.
This becomes a clever strategy Wearing employs to problematise and expand the
constrictions relating to representation of herself and others in order to present
deliberately unstable frameworks of portraiture.
Here, video is used as an intentional and intimate encounter by Wearing as a study
into authenticity, self-awareness and exhibitionism. This sort of examination is the
focus of Wearing’s 10–16 (1993) video, where ventriloquism and lip-sync techniques
are utilised to unsettle the viewer’s expectation of an established identity. In the work,
adults lip-sync pre-recorded voices of adolescents and children (ranging from ten to
sixteen years), who make a variety of personal disclosures relating to a number of
issues including social alienation, violence and abuse. In describing the 10–16 (1993),
Wearing reveals: “We know children have interesting things to say and use language
in a rich way, but when you channel this through an older body, then all of a sudden
there’s a pathos and you’re transforming how people look at that”.49
For Wearing, 10–16 (1993) becomes an ongoing process that could be described as a
form of communication which highlights a personal transaction between herself, an
imagined self as a subject and the viewer. While discussing a similar video work by
49 “Gillian Wearing, OBE 10–16 1997”, TATE, Modern, Accessed June 2016. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wearing-10–16-t07415/text-summary.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 34
Wearing, 2 into 1 (1997)50 writer and curator Juliana Engberg notes how the intersubjective strategies, fictitious narratives and personas deployed by Wearing are
strategies that indirectly investigate the self or attempts to extend the self in relation to
the other. She writes:
As compared with 10–16, the unpractised performing bodies of the participants
in 2 into 1 create multiple communications. As viewers we must manage the
reception of the disjuncture of visual and aural information. We recognise too,
the transference and projection taking place, both psychoanalytically and
actually. Through the unstable creation of portraiture (of a mother and her two
sons), the work can be interpreted as a form of introspection and self51
examination in dual process with extroversion and existentialism.
In other video works that situate her subjects in public spaces (the street, schoolyards,
playgrounds, and newspaper adverts52) Wearing engages in the tactic of locating and
re-presenting material based on the observation of her subjects in the public realm.
Such tactics arguably emulate ethnographic practices similar to an ethnographer. In
his publication The Return of the Real (1996), art critic Hal Foster examines the
practices and ambitions of the neo-avant-garde movements and the early modernist
movements such as Surrealism, Dadaism and Constructivism. In discussing these
historical developments, Foster not only engages in a reordering of the relations,
“between the pre-war and post-war avant-garde, he also posits his retroactive model
against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today”.53
Foster identifies this turn, the neo-avant-garde’s re-inscription of institutionalised
50 Gillian Wearing, 2 into 1, video, colour, sound, 4:30 min, 1997. The video shows a mother and her two twin sons lip-syncing each other’s voices. The video
pictures, through the transferred audios, a number of acts that signal, paradoxically, a method of both self-debasement and identity formation for both mother
and her sons. By revealing emotional truths through confession, the work underscores their triangulated co-dependencies not only between the confessants, but
also between the artists and the viewer.
51 Engberg, Juliana, Gillian Wearing: Living Proof, (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2006), 6.
52 Examples here include: Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say. 33 c-type prints mounted on
aluminium 41.9 × 30.5cm, 1992–93, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, colour video projection with sound, 1:49 min, 1995; My Favourite Track, fivemonitor installation with sound, 90 min, 1994; Snapshot, 7 DVDs for framed plasma screens with sound, 6 min 55 sec lopped, 2005; Drunk, three-screen black
and white DVD projection with sound, 23 min, 1999.
53 Engberg, Gillian, 19.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 35
representations which resulted in a new paradigm as the ‘ethnographic turn’.
However, contrary to ethnographic practices, Wearing, in her video work, relates with
her subjects in a much more interactive mode in order to destabilise the relation
between the confessor, the confessant, the audience and the artist.54 Wearing’s video
work often fragments the apprehension of the self so as to create the need for a
positive progression towards the reformation of the self. As Wearing affirms:
I become, in my work, another in order to become myself. It’s a way
complicated self-portrait from observing other’s and their impact and
relationship to me through my own judgement, interpretations and evaluations.
55
The observation of others is an attempt to understand the self.
As mentioned above, in confessional art practice, the confessions are often inspired
by faded and therefore questionable autobiographical memories, rather than a detailed
allegiance to facts. This establishes confessional art or, more specifically, the
confessional act as a performative act in which numerous aspects of self and selfsubjectivity can potentially be explored via the construction of provisional identities,
fictitious realities and personas that attempt to deviate from traditional notions and
expectations of self-representation. Through emphasis on the multifarious modes of
communication via the use and act of confession in confessional art, the audience,
whether by interpreting the confession as real or not, manages to personalise and
decipher the confession structured around the viewer’s own idiosyncratic lived
experiences. This confessional act, or disclosure in confessional art practice, may then
create for the viewer an uncomfortable dilemma of being both an invited receiver of
the confession and also a voyeur 56This contemporary framework of confession, as
explored through a variety of contemporary confessional forms employed by Gillian
54 Ibid., 6.
55 Ibid., 7.
56 Remes, “The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth century British Art,” 23.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 36
Wearing, differs considerably in both essence and definition to previous historically
ritualised models of confession.
Self-Disclosure or Verbalisation within Historical Confessional
Frameworks
Discussing a revised conceptualisation of confession as initially outlined by Foucault
in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), Butler explains that “Foucault
can be seen to read confession as an act of speech in which the subject ‘publishes
himself,’ gives himself in words, engages in an extended act of verbalisation as a way
of making the self appear for another”.57 In this revised consideration of confession,
Foucault moves away from defining confession as a strictly oppressive act—in which
the subject is forced to reveal the (mostly sexual) truths framed institutionally by a
regulatory discourse—to conceiving confession as an act through which the ontology
of the subject is formed through its participation in the act of confession. In this sense,
the subject participates in the act of becoming, of transformation, which is potentially
unopposed by disciplinary or authoritarian discourses. For Butler, the stories we tell,
and the stories we ask others to tell, must be allowed to change with each telling or, in
Foucault’s terms, to be ongoing productions of the self as works of art through
continued confessional acts. In Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation
(1977), historian Thomas N. Tentler outlines how, during the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, confession was initially constructed as a cathartic practice with the aim
of easing psychological distress, not dissimilar to the function of more secularised
forms of contemporary psychoanalysis.58 Disclosure or verbalisation as examined in
historical confessional discourse is framed primarily as a speech act that is analogous
57 Butler, Giving,112–113.
58 Tentler, Thomas N, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (USA: Princeton University Press, 1977, 125.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 37
with penance and absolution. In the opening lines of The Psychology of Confession
(1975), Erik Berggren writes:
Talking about painful and disturbing memories or experiences which have lain
on our minds unburdens us of them and affords a sense of relief. This means
such recollections or experiences may be felt as a weight. The pressure, as if by
its own force, impels a release; the process may take the form of a powerful need
to make disclosures, to speak openly about oppressive secrets. This need finds
expression in two ways: either in personal confidents to a trusted friend or as a
written description. In the latter case, the memories involved have perhaps left
59
the writer no peace until it is out of their system.
The cathartic element involved in this type of historical confessional exchange is of
importance in understanding the genesis of all literary confessions since St Augustine
of Hippo’s Confessions (circa ACE 397 and 400).60 As writer and philosopher Chloë
Taylor reveals, Berggren discusses: “The transhistorically cathartic or
psychologically-curative aim and effect of confession is made for Christian
confession from the time of Augustine to today, as well as for psychiatric confession,
confidences of friends, and all literary confessions from a few centuries after Christ to
today”.61 Concluding that Berggren’s position is unmaintainable, Tentler takes a
different approach. The gradual institutionalisation of confession through Christian
confessional rituals, Tentler argues that through its veiled desire to control and
discipline, it paradoxically heightened anxiety as much as it aimed to cure it. Also
acknowledging the punitive effects in historical frameworks of ritualised Christian
confession, Foucault defines confession as a self-referential utterance which implied a
relationship with another. Foucault describes this pre-modern framework of
confession as:
59 Berggren, Erik, The Psychology of Confession, (Leiden, Belgium: E.J. Brill, 1975), 3.
60 Ibid., 4.
61 Taylor, Chloë. The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the “Confessing Animal”, Routledge, New York, NY, 2010, p. 1.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 38
A ritual discourse where the individual corresponds with the subject of the
statement. It is also a ritual which unfolds in a relation of power, since one
doesn’t confess without the presence, at least a virtual presence, of a partner who
is not simply an interlocutor but the agency that requires the confession, imposes
62
it, weighs it, and intervenes to judge, punish, pardon, console, reconcile.
As a result of such inquiries into antiquity, Foucault outlines how the subsequent
process of subjectification that occurred through a number of religious confessional
practices across Europe during the early Middle Ages came to form an inescapable
politic of subject. For instance, such confessional practices centred on eliciting from
confessants their private internal thoughts and experiences in exchange for
exoneration and redemption. New mechanisms of power influenced how populations
could be controlled and manipulated. The confessional turn in postmodernity, the
present research argues, requires less of an emphasis on pre-modern frameworks of
ritualised Christian confessional discourses. Taking into account the ubiquity of
contemporary confessional forms, as is discussed in greater detail later in the chapter,
such historical terms of ritualised confession and its association to power appear
almost archaic today. Given its frequency and intensity of use in our everyday lives,
the interpretation of contemporary confession can now be conceptualised as a
pleasure and/or a desire for increased autonomy surrounding self-representation, thus
moving contemporary confessional acts towards a method in which the exploration of
potential formations of identity take precedence over a need for forgiveness and
penance found in previous confessional frameworks.
Abandoning Privacy as a Transformative Mechanism
If one of the primary impulses to motivate contemporary confessional art practices is
the deliberate revelation of the private, intimate self from a purely self-referential
62 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1, (Penguin books, England, 1976), 61–62.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 39
position, then the act of intentionally abandoning privacy needs to be explored to
further comprehend the potentially transformative mechanisms inherent in
contemporary confessional video art. Returning briefly to the sentiments of Malamud
Smith and Bloustein outlined in the introduction, the research will examine
definitions of privacy and how the disclosure of private narratives in public spaces
and spheres does not necessary violate individual selfhood or equate to a loss of
individual sovereignty, as both Malamud Smith and Bloustein predominately
maintain. Exceptions from Malamud Smith do exist, however. For instance, in
referencing a live performance by the late American beat poet and writer Allen
Ginsberg, Malamud Smith concedes that sometimes, in deliberate and unapologetic
moments of intimate self-disclosure (both physical and emotional), a specific personal
dignity can be located. When Ginsberg (a self-confessed gay confessional Jew) once
performed naked onstage, Malamud Smith witnessed that:
By simple measures Ginsberg should not have dignity but he does. The
performance is a perfect reminder that revelation, confession, and physical
nakedness is not inherently undignified. Ginsberg’s dignity resides ultimately in
his unapologetic presentation of his life. This is who I am. Take it or leave it.
Such a loyalty is not easy when one embodies what convention disavows. We
Allen Ginsberg grant dignity because he refuses to disown his life, and as
audience we hold the private knowledge of how we have sought to make him do
so, how we have forced shame upon him. We are relieved that he has resisted.63
Malamud Smith’s and Bloustein’s predominately fixed position around public selfdisclosure creates an unexamined space, my research maintains, for the possibility of
exploring the potential links between personal disclosure in public space and the
politics surrounding subjectivity. The conscious abandonment of privacy in many
contemporary confessional forms reflects how such forms can not only be seen to
play an important function in the construction of identity, but also to open up potential
63 Malamud Smith, Private, 197–198.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 40
spaces through a more conscious self-formation and self-representation. What can be
seen through the increased visibility and/or widespread use of confession (or selfdisclosure) in public spaces and spheres today is that confession has become a
ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary culture. Observing the pervasiveness of
contemporary confessional forms in and beyond media constructed arenas of
entertainment, and following on from Foucault, adult education researchers Andreas
Fejes and Magnus Dahlstedt 64 maintain that individuals in contemporary Western
culture have become a “confessing animal”.65 Confession is so embedded in our
institutions and everyday life that, as noted by Renshaw “we no longer see or feel the
disciplinary bite of regulatory power”.66 This seeming invisibility of regulatory power
is reflected in how we are now participating in a reframing of privacy in
contemporary society with our greater ease of endless self-disclosure in public spaces
and spheres.
How we currently think about privacy is significantly influenced by the development
and dominance of mass media throughout the twentieth century and the popularising
and acceptance of popular psychological thinking.67 As academic Alex Lambert
observes that in this environment we have seen “a set of valued ideologies and
practices emerge”.68 For example, as selfhood and subject formation are now
indistinguishably linked to intimacy (that is, the tendency for self-reflective self64 Fejes, Andreas and Magnus Dahlstedt, The Confessing Society: Foucault, Confession and the Practices of Lifelong Learning (Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN:
Routledge Publishing, 2013, 142.
65 For an analysis on how Foucault’s concepts surrounding confession and governmentality operate in a number pedagogical practices or lifelong learning
please refer to The Confessing Society: Foucault, Confession, and Practices Lifelong Learning (2013). By initiating a critical stance towards the relentless
desire for self-disclosure (or verbalisation) evident today in a number of contemporary confessional forms, Dahlstedt and Fejes successfully establish how
contemporary confession operates in a more coercive and indirect manner to form activated and responsible citizens. This approach to Foucault’s later works
provides an intriguing counterexample of how the same concepts can be applied to reach opposed conclusions in pedagogy and the social sciences.
66 Renshaw, “The Culture”, 2.
67 Malamud Smith, Private, 197–198.
68 Lambert, A, Intimacy and Friendship on Facebook, (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 20.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 41
formation through self-disclosure in public online social platforms), new processes
have significantly altered the parameters of private and public life. At a functional
base level, this supposedly convergent technology can be seen as a mechanism of
self-disclosure in which the self can be formulated and articulated through a variety of
interface functions. The continued intimate self-disclosure online creates a forum for
intimacy to be established that when external encouragement and legitimisation has
been secured (that is, someone ‘likes’ the disclosure), a sense of self is formed.
Lambert writes, “These discourses valorise the need for a specific kind of intimacy
based on voluntary relationships, emotional self-disclosure, mutual knowledge, love,
support and commitment, in order to gain psychological well-being and a sense of
self”.69
Maintaining such online exchanges around a system of intimate disclosure, Lambert
asserts that such systems can be found in historical procedures such as
psychoanalytical discourses and dynamics which, by emphasising the importance of
self-disclosure in intimate relationships, privilege the individualisation of selfconcepts or self-formation. Apart from cultural causes (namely, the nature of late
capitalism), why do people publicly disclose intimate and private self-aspects of
themselves? Perhaps, as Lambert observes, a possible answer might point to
surveillance and its revised contextualisation in online environments. Referring to
Foucault, Lambert notes: “The diagrammatic power relations of the panopticon
illustrates how a subject’s internalisation of an invisible watchers gaze produces
his/her subjectivity through a process of normative self-discipline”.70 It is here that the
subject or online user is in fact welcoming of this self-surveillance of themselves and
69 Ibid., 19.
70 Lambert, Intimacy and Friendship, 17.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 42
others (mostly peers); an opportunity is presented to not only engage in a form of
empowered, self-directed representation, but also in a form of identity construction.
Here, the dynamics of interpersonal affection, emotion, and play can be located in the
online exchange.71 By adhering to less punitive norms, this environment of selfconscious monitoring potentially avoids the disciplinary framework of ‘docile
bodies’. As newly developed technologies become increasingly available, new
opportunities are forged for the visibly and ongoing online aestheticising of the self.
In these online environments, apart from their influence on everyday social
relationships and identities, we can see the everyday reading, watching and judging of
other people’s private narratives and experiences in public spaces becoming
increasingly normalised.72 The confessional-style modes of mass entertainment that
overtly encourage participants to reveal personal and intimate details about their lives
seems far removed from the historical confessional discourses that Foucault began to
deconstruct more than 30 years ago. From Foucault’s analysis of ancient care-of-theself practices and their relation to ethical notions of the self through to the nineteenth
century, and the subsequent scientification of biopolitical discourses, what can be
witnessed from the eventual multiplication of confessional forms and the subsequent
internalisation of the coercion to confess, is that confession is experienced today in a
variety of confessional forms, and can be considered as a type of pleasure and desire.
For Foucault, although this transformation of confession from a regulatory discourse
into one of pleasure and desire potentially inverts our intuitions about the structure of
power relations, he unwaveringly asserts that each institutional discourse employed
71 Lambert, Intimacy and Friendship, 21.; Mallan, Kerry, “Look at Me! Look at Me! Self-Representation and Self-Esteem Through Online Networks,”
Digital Culture and Education, 1:1 (2009).
72Remes, “The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth century British Art”; Dean, “The Antisocial”; Renshaw, “The Culture”; Andreas, and Dahlstedt, The
Confessing,
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 43
confession as a primary strategy to the working of power. Here, Foucault is concerned
with the manner in which the external and internalised compulsion to confess
gradually left pre-modern frameworks of confessional discourse and entered, not only
into the fabric of our everyday lives, but also into politics, economics, the sciences,
law, philosophical discourse, literature and the arts – and eventually into the desires
and institutions of the modern soul.73 We can see how this transformation of
confession as an act of pleasure and desire has been embraced by both the confessant
(a reality TV participant) and confessor (the audience). In these mediated
environments of self-disclosure, the parameters of how and where the disclosure of
private narratives and experiences now take place have become apparent. In such
contemporary confessional forms, we may see that confession now reflects a need—
or perhaps an aspiration—to tell another who we are, as opposed to a speech act that
is seen purely as an expression of regret or guilt over what we have done. A
commonly recognisable online visual method for this is the ‘selfie’ on social media.
Arguably it has become the defining visual genre of our confessional age; the ‘selfie’
is a reproduced photograph of oneself taken by oneself with a smartphone or webcam,
uploaded and shared over any number of social media platforms. Such acts of online
visibility can be interpreted not only as a mandate for our behaviours, but also as a
platform to confess the truth of our inner existence or, as Renshaw writes, an
opportunity to “speak ourselves incessantly into being”.74
Observing social media platforms and their influence of self-representation, art
historian and critic Amelia Jones suggests—a few years prior to Sal Renshaw—that
an individual’s online visibility engages in a kind of semi self-delusional state which
73 Foucault, Michel,
New Press, 1997.
“Self -Writing,” in In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, eds. Paul Rabinow (UK: The
74 Renshaw, “The Culture”, 175.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 44
ultimately aims, but never succeeds, in locating a complete product of the self.
Referring to this phenomenon as ‘self-imagery’, or the rendering of the self in and
through technologies of representation, she goes on to, somewhat dramatically, assert
that “we don’t know how to exist anymore without imaging ourselves as a picture”.75
This contemporary confessional drive to utilise technologies of visual selfrepresentation to engage in a confessional and/or confirmation of the self is, of course,
not without its paradoxes. By narrating and asserting the visual existence of the self as
a subject, Jones maintains we are also objectifying the self by simultaneously
exposing a failure of such technologies of representation to reveal or make attainable
an intelligible knowable being.76 Since the emergence of modern imaging
technologies in the early nineteenth century, the ability to critique and redefine the
parameters of subjectivity and visual theory are only now, Jones asserts:77
Recognizing the often damaging fore of the oppositional models of self and other
underpinning our navigation of the world and motivating our weird,
counterproductive imagining of ourselves from the outside, as we are seen by
78
others, or our projections of negativity onto others.
As the ongoing production and viewing of the pictorial self in online environments
shifts the meaning and value of the picture—and by extension, self-portraiture—so
does our dependence on it. As evolving repositories for storing and increasing our
visibility, online social environments (and the internet in general) have emerged,
Groys asserts ,“as an egalitarian immortality machine, wherein even the most
mundane detail of our lives will be preserved for some future net-archaeologist to
75 Jones, Amelia. Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject, (Routledge, New York, NY, 2006), xvii.
76 Jones, Amelia. Self/Image.
77 With the release of the first smartphone (2000) and the subsequent release of the iPhone (2007), combined with the advent of Facebook (2004), Jone’s
observations should be contextualised before considerable changes and technological advances in self-image production via social media began to emerge
since 2006.
78 Jones, Self/Image, xvii.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 45
uncover”.79 Groys, in Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2009), establishes
a link between the digital and the religious through the principle of repetition and
reproduction, and contends that the, “best substitute modernity has found to replace
the immortal soul is its permanent archive”.80 For Groys, an aspect of secular society
that has struggled to provide the individual is the desire for immortality. He observes:
The modern age has not been the age in which the sacred has been abolished but
rather its dissemination in profane space, its democratization, its globalization.
Ritual, repetition, and reproduction were hitherto matters of religion; they were
practiced in isolated, sacred places. In the modern age, ritual, repetition, and
reproduction have become the fate of culture. Everything reproduces itself –
capital, commodities, technology, and art. Religion operates through media
channels that are, from the outset, products of the extension and secularization of
81
religious practices.
Such online archival attempts at immortality, Groys argues, have become our only
way of replacing the loss of theological ritual and belief relating to the immortal soul
and the self. In his essay “Self-Design and Public Space” (2014) Groys describes
how, since the late nineteenth century when concepts of the soul transformed from a
theologically constructed condition to an entirely self-constructed one –– it has
entered a new era of mass production, one that has evolved to include the internet.
While outlining how the individual is now situated in a firmly globalised postmodern
landscape, Groys references the utopian intent expressed by Joseph Beuys during the
1960s,82 to affirm that in many social media environments individuals can potentially
79 Sidorkin, “Strategies for”, 9.
80 Groys, Boris, “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction”, in e-flux, #4, (March 2009). http://www.e-flux.com/journal/04/68569/religion-in-the-age-ofdigital-reproduction/
81 Ibid.
82 Echoing the social ideas of anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner, Joseph Beuys maintains the belief that every human being is an artist and, by extension, that
art is the only “evolutionary-revolutionary power” maintained by people. Beuys formulated the concept “social sculpture” around this belief and, through it,
believed that every aspect of life could be approached creatively to create a utopian society that all individuals help to shape. Rojas, Laurie. “Beuys’ Concept
of Social Sculpture and Relational Art Practices Today”, Chicago Art Magazine, (Nov 2010). http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/11/beuys%E2%80%99concept-of-social-sculpture-and-relational-art-practices-today/
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 46
become the creator of their own public persona or proactively engage in its formation
in what Groys describes as “autopoetic self-design”.83
Referring to the ubiquity offered by this type of cultural online conceptualisation of
the self, Groys notes that such a post-Duchampian method of self-design in public
spaces can be traced back to the pioneering efforts of avant-garde artists at the
beginning of the twentieth century. By engaging with a more self-directed
construction of the self-formation online, individuals participate in a reframing of a
pre-modern, taxonomic confessional discourse, one that potentially evades traditional
institutions of censorship. Art historian Claire Bishop interprets this type of online
self-formation through a performative lens. Bishop observes how the everyday
performances of the self in online environments challenge established parameters
relating to performer and audience. The impact of self-disclosure in online public
spaces and spheres—something Bishop refers to as acts of ‘personal expressions of
identity’—can be observed as virtual performances which necessitate a reframing of
traditional performer/audience dynamics. She writes:
Self-disclosure… is a performance not for an audience as conventionally
understood as fixed in a particular time and space. It is an endless exhibition for
an intermediate audience whose only register of paying attention is “liking” and
commenting … we perpetually self-perform for this gaze, by taking selfies and
84
posting updates on social media.
Despite the challenges that intriguingly problematise the parameters of social media
as an ambiguous region that falls somewhere between a kind of mass media public
space, a private one and also as a space of a realised utopia (of sorts), Groys further
compounds Beuys’ sentiment by suggesting that online spaces of self-design are
83 Sidorkin, “Strategies For Surviving”, 2.
84 Bishop, Claire, “Out of the Body” Skulptur Projekte Muenster 2017, Spring issue, (2016): 1–12,. http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/50431/out-ofbody-out-of-time-out-of-place/
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 47
simultaneously experienced as a radical dystopia. If individuals choose not to
participate in what Groys describes as the expectation that emerge from an invisible
social contract implicit in online participation, then implicit social isolation and silent
punishment ensues. Noting the shift from an ‘aesthetic utopia’ (the increased visibility
or the aestheticisation of the self) to an ‘aesthetic dystopia’ (the obligatory increased
visibility or the aestheticisation of the self) in online platforms, Groys writes that:
Utopia always turns to dystopia when rights that were fought for become
duties… under a regime of compulsive self-design and compulsive selfstimulation we do not only have the right to create our public persona by artistic
means, we (also) have an obligation. Thus, liberation in the name of democratic
85
aesthetic rights turns into the terror of ubiquitous aesthetic duties.
How we currently think about contemporary confessional forms; their duplicity in
redefining public and private spaces; their ability to augment or condense notions of
the self and self-subjectivity; and their inadvertent restructuring of definitions relating
to performer and audience varies considerably. Despite this, one aspect that cannot be
easily disregarded is the considerable shift in how confession is now interpreted and
employed. The modern confessing individual, having little in common with more
historical confessing individuals, now rigorously participates in contemporary
confessional forms with a kind of pleasure and a desire that can be observed as
automatic, entirely public and unapologetic. Through their participation and
expectation of the current dynamics of contemporary confessional forms, individuals
are now, more than ever, presented with the potentiality of circumventing previous
traditional institutions of control and creating greater levels of autonomy in relation to
the management of identity.
85 Groys, Boris, “Self-Design and Public Space” The Avery Review, No. 2, (October 2014), 1. http://averyreview.com/issues/2/self-design-and-public-space.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 48
In Hatred and Forgiveness (1992), Julia Kristeva’s assessment of confession and
forgiveness describes both the Judeo-Christian model and a calm psychoanalytic
environment as ideal private spheres for the contemplation and construction of
identity, subjectivity and self, as opposed to a more public one, in which forgiveness
can be more fully realised. Such spheres, Kristeva argues, are intimate spaces of
recognition and exchange that encourage the possibility for individual transformation
and self-care without judgment. In contrast, Kristeva maintains that public spaces and
spheres are often unforgiving, condemning and generally less accepting spaces, where
forgiveness and understanding seem elusive. Given, as this research maintains, that
self-disclosure is entirely normalised and ubiquitous across a variety of contemporary
confessional platforms, the need for forgiveness and understanding in such
contemporary frameworks of confession now seems mostly inconsequential for the
contemporary ‘confessing animal’. In fact, Foucault’s notion of the confessing animal
could not have been actualised in postmodernity if forgiveness and understanding
were primary objectives for contemporary individuals in public spaces and spheres.
In a postmodern environment, the use of confession in public space is conceptualised
less as an authoritative space where understanding and forgiveness is sought. Rather,
the relevance of public space—now a public confessing space—is useful in order to
engage in an act of increasing the visibility of the self on various levels. Given the
seemingly automated pleasure and desire individuals now take in participating in the
aestheticisation of the self, a new set of possibilities for confession has been realised
which, in relation to the chronology of confessional art, expands on the political and
social conditions visible in pre-millennial cultural politics, specifically those that
dictated the mid-90s.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 49
The Relationship Between Confessional Forms and Confessional Art
in Late-Twentieth Century British Culture
In her doctoral thesis, The Role of Confession in Late-Twentieth Century British Art
(2005), Remes situates confession as a key feature in late twentieth century Western
culture and identifies confession as a source of inspiration for a number of prominent
British confessional artists during the early to mid-1990s. Remes outlines the
relationship between confessional forms and confessional art practice, and the
potential therein for confessional art, in all its guises, to enact, through the artist’s
intimate and often explicit self-disclosure, the politics of the self; a politics that, at
times, inadvertently speaks to wider social and political issues. As Remes observes,
confessional art is art that: “Proposes to share the subjects (oftentimes the artist’s)
most intimate emotions with the spectator […] Confessional art departs from the
conventional values of avant-garde rebellion that is traditionally considered superior
to the common experience”.86
Many confessional artists working during this period developed an engaged and
analytical approach to working with confession and confessional forms, while reexamining the capriciousness and complexity in the everyday dynamics of confession.
Such a re-examination can be seen in the video work of Tracey Emin. Emin’s work
operates from the premise of situating new forms of subjectivity through selfdisclosure to examine confession and its complexities. Using confession as a platform
to extend the boundaries of self-disclosure and self-representation, Emin transforms
private narratives in public spaces into works of art that externalise her fears, personal
triumphs and disappointments. Emin successfully reconsiders confession as a
narrative to both examine and recreate herself in public spaces, albeit a carefully
86 Remes, “The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth century British Art,” 186.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 50
constructed self, sometimes with and sometimes without elements of fabrication and
fiction. This methodically edited public version of herself that Emin employs adheres
to the more considered and autonomously self-crafted intent found in Groys’ notion
of self-design. This manoeuvre adjudicates questions of authenticity, especially
notions of authenticity that are equated with ‘truth’, and relegates them as
inconsequential. Through reframing traditional concepts relating to self-disclosure
and authenticity in confessional discourse, Emin’s often explicit exhibitionism
becomes less embarrassing, and more stimulating and constructive. For example,
Emin’s first feature film, Top Spot (2004), as well as a number of earlier works, such
as How it Feels (1996) and Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), can be considered
examples of how confession, in video, can be used as a forum not only as an attempt
to locate and clarify self-validation and subjectivity through self-disclosure and
personal exploration, but also as a method to provoke questions about the structure
and purpose of wider social confessional forms. Additionally, and perhaps more
crucially, visible in this process of the politicisation of her own self-disclosure in
these video works is her subsequent reclamation post-confession. By intentionally
exonerating her humiliation and suffering from sexual abuse, her experience with
abortion and her destructive relationships with alcohol, Emin was able to transform
such experiences, in a public space, into something self-empowering, constructive
and, at times, playful.
A more direct example of this process of reclamation can be seen in Emin’s more
publicly recognised work Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995). The work opens
with a series of vignettes of her hometown Margate, a seaside town in East Kent, in
the United Kingdom. The cinematography is jagged and includes significant
landmarks of Emin’s childhood and adolescence: her old school, local parks and
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 51
shops, and the beach. The vignettes are overlapped with a narration by the artist as she
relays her experiences of leaving school at the age of 13, experimenting with sex and
her experiences of chronic boredom. One day, she comes across a dance competition
and, seeing it as a ticket out of Margate, decides to enter the competition. However,
while performing her entry, she is verbally humiliated by a group of ex-sexual
partners. They repeatedly shout at her, “Slag, slag, slag” as she performs for the
judging panel. In the video narration, Emin names and shames these men by
declaring, “Shane, Eddy, Doug, Richard… this one’s for you”.87 The video then
quickly cuts to a shot of the artist dancing with abandon, twirling triumphantly around
an empty dance studio to Sylvester’s 1978 track, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”,
before ending with a shot of a bird emblematically flying up out into an open blue
sky.
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 3. Emin, Tracey. Why I Never Became a Dancer, Super 8 mm film shown as a video projection, colour and sound,
6:32 mins, 1995.
87 Emin, Tracey, Why I Never Became a Dancer. Film, Super 8 mm (colour), 6:32 mins, 1995.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 52
Emin’s confessional approach in Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) could easily
be described as mawkish, oversentimental or even boringly self-pitying. However,
through her self-disclosures in which Emin uses a strategy to invite the viewer into
her world, a vulnerability emerges; a vulnerability that toughens her work with an
enviable strain of boldness and defiance. Both confessional and poetic, the work helps
Emin to reclaim or exonerate her humiliation. The transformation here is visible
through a kind of politicisation of her self-disclosure through video. This
politicisation is the key to her reclamation. Additionally, the artist’s transformation in
the work inadvertently provides sustenance to a central concern that preoccupied
Foucault during the last twenty years of his life: how do human beings constitute
themselves as subjects? This question is discussed in following chapter, along with a
consideration of how Foucault frames ethical self-constitution in his later studies of
antiquity—studies that demonstrate the significant importance of technologies of selfpractice. This examination identifies how such technologies-of-self practices can be
appropriated in contemporary confessional video art.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 53
Chapter 2: Technologies of the Self as Confessional
Art
The transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something
rather close to the aesthetic experience.
Michel Foucault
88
The Potential For the Self to Constitute Itself as a Subject
The significant research that Michel Foucault conducted in his 1982 lectures The
Hermeneutics of the Subject at the Collège de France solidified the philosopher and
historian’s insights into the ancient ethical obligation of caring for the self and,
ultimately, how he perceived such practices in relation to the history of philosophy.
These lectures (twenty four in total)89 constitute Foucault’s detailed examination of
the ancient ethical injunction of technologies of the self, and establish selfconstitution as a significant focus.90 These series of lectures form the basis of a
chapter titled “La Culture de soi” (The Cultivation of the Self) in The Care of the Self
(1984), Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, a publication that reflects a significant
intellectual shift in Foucault’s work.
In his previous work, Foucault considered how the subject is created through
regulatory forces present in various Western institutions, such as the asylum and penal
system, to establish a docile body through a process of discursive subjectification.91
88 Foucault, M, “An Interview with Stephen Riggins” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. edited by
Foubion, James. et al, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane,1982),131.
89 Foucault’s initial discussion of antiquity is revealed in a series of lectures delivered during his first year of teaching (1970 –71) at the Collège de France.
The lectures have since been published under the title Lectures on the Will to Know (2013). Foucault subsequently presented the Hermeneutics of the Subject
lectures at the Collège de France in 1981–82. These lectures were significant in that they provided an insight into the direction of Foucault’s later work
surrounding the genealogy of confession with his engagement with ancient philosophical thought. These lectures remain a benchmark for contemporary critical
inquiry, reaching across a range of disciplines.
90 Landry, “Confession, Obedience”; Rosenberg, Alan and Alan Milchman, “Michel Foucault. The Government of the Self and Others: Letters at the College
de France 1982-1983,” Foucault Studies, No.10 (2010): 155-179, https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/3127/3298
91 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (trans. Les Mots et les choses), New York: Vintage Books, 1994; Foucault,
Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: Archaeology of Medical Perception (trans. Alan Sheridan), University Press of France, 1963.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 54
This was revised during the early-mid 1980s with a re-examination of the relations
between such systems of power, knowledge and truth. In The Care of the Self (1984),
Foucault makes a number of significant observations relating to confession and its
analogues through an analysis of the relationship between knowledge, power and
sexuality in several prevalent philosophical reflections in antiquity. Here, Foucault
digresses from his earlier political commitments to a more ethical thematic of
technologies of the self. Foucault observes a variety of care-of-the-self practices by
detailing the evolution of the hermeneutics of the self in the first and second centuries
ACE
of Greco-Roman philosophies and fifth-century Christian spirituality, in
particular, the monastic principles developed in the late Roman Empire. Foucault’s
multifarious conception of disciplinary power opens up new perspectives regarding
the socio-historical conditions that mediate power, knowledge, truth and their effects
on the individual. Resolutely political, Foucault turns to antiquity to locate the
formation of the modern concept of the self and determine the foundations of
obedience of the Western subject. By mapping how we see ourselves through history
as well as our relationship to ourselves, Foucault—in his genealogy of confession—
helps to shape a historical ontology of ourselves in order to discover a more complex
and multidimensional framework for the possibilities of self-subjectivity and the
potential for the self to constitute itself as a subject.
In The Care of the Self (1984), Foucault attempts to determine the individual or the
subject as “no longer [as] constituted [by]” but rather as “constituting itself through
well-ordered practices”92 (italics in the original). As anthropologist and academic
Jean-Michel Landry explains, Foucault’s intent was not only to help us to further
92 Gros, Frédéric, Arnold. I. Davidson, and Francois Ewald Foucault, Michel, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982,
(trans by Graham. Burchell). (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 513.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 55
consider how we came to be as beings, but more importantly, to understand the
contingency of this being. This, Foucault, informs us, is undertaken by politicising the
relationship to the self in terms other than those of knowledge imposed by
institutional discourses. Landry writes:
Foucault emphasised the urgency of politicising the relationship to the self. He
considered one political task a priority: inventing techniques of the self that
could define our self-relationship in terms other than those of self- knowledge. In
short, he strove to find ways to cease viewing ourselves as an identity to uncover
or as a psychology to decipher. This task, Foucault said, is a matter of rethinking
93
“the politics of ourselves”.
Foucault’s examination of ancient texts presents alternative readings of the ancient
world readings that should not necessarily be interpreted as a move away from a
myriad of concerns present in modernity.94 A central focus of Foucault’s work into
antiquity is to unravel the political and philosophical interpretations of parrhêsia.95
Foucault contrasts parrhêsia in his studies in antiquity as being in opposition to
ancient Christian confessional rituals. He describes parrhêsia as a form of free speech,
or a confrontational and bold speech acted out in public spaces to reveal “the
inconvenient truths of daily life”.96 Additionally, as Rosenberg and Milchman reveal,
“Foucault outlined how the concept of parrhêsia migrated from philosophy to
theology in the Middle Ages, in the form of Christian pastoral, only to then reappear
in the modern political theory and philosophy”.97 Regarded as an act of existential
93 Landry, “Confession and Obedience,” 123.
94 Rosenberg, “Michel.”
95 The word “parrhêsia ” appears for the first time in Greek literature in Euripides (c.484–407 BCE], and occurs throughout the ancient Greek world of letters
from the end of the fifth century BCE. It can also still be found in the patristic texts written at the end of the fourth and during the fifth century ACE, for instance,
in Jean Chrisostome (ACE 345–407) “Parrhêsia ” is ordinarily translated into English by “free speech”. “Parrhesiazomai” is to use parrhêsia, and the
parrhesiastes is the one who uses parrhêsia, i.e., is the one who speaks the truth. Foucault, Michel. “The Meaning and Evolution of the Word Parrhesia” in
Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhêsia, edited by Joseph Pearson, (Digital Archive: Foucault.info), 1999.
https://foucault.info/doc/documents/parrhesia/foucault-dt1-wordparrhesia-en-html
96 Iftode, Foucault’s idea, 77.
97 Milchman, Allan, et al., Michel Foucault,156.
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defiance on behalf of the individual to their spiritual master, parrhêsia, in Foucault’s
view, was embodied by Cynical philosophers who often transformed their life and
physical form into a “theatre of the scandal of truth”.98 Parrhêsia encouraged
individuals to radically challenge and oppose preconceived institutional opinions and
shared values. In doing so, the individual or subject’s relation to truth is no longer
situated in a framework of passive obedience to a spiritual master as in the case of the
Stoics and Epicureans; it is regarded as a truth task which, as Iftode notes:
Challenges the subject to the very limit of its being. Forcing him into
“experimenting” on his body the rejection of social conventions, worrying his
fellows by his subversive discourse, irritating them by his explosions of
99
honesty.
By engaging with the complex reading of ancient texts, in particular, a re-functioning
of truth-telling, or ‘frank speech’, Foucault establishes parrhêsia as significant for
contemporary political theory and philosophy. This reading, together with the
potentiality of new modes of subjectivity, become Foucault’s central concern. The
relationship to the self, and the experiences therein relating to care-of-the-self
practices with antiquity (examined later in the chapter) become the central theme in
which Foucault’s ethical politics of the self is situated. During this ‘ethical turn’
outlined in Foucault’s final work, a more autonomous realisation of the self was
produced. In particular, the self and its relation to others (or government of self) is
established. Foucault’s interpretation of ancient texts and philosophy100 are examined
to further elucidate his intellectual preoccupations with the exigencies of the
98 Iftode, “Foucault’s idea”, 78.
99 Ibid., 79.
100 For example, “Euripides’ Ion, Thucydides’ account of Pericless’ call to arms against Sparta before the Athenian assembly, the figure of Socrates in
Platonic dialogues such as Apology, and Plato’s recounting of Diogenes’ dialogue with Alexander the Great”, Rosenberg, Alan, Allan Milchman, and Arnold
I. Davidson (essay review). Foucault, Michel, The Government of the Self and Others: Letters at the College de France 1982–1983, (trans. Graham Burchell),
in Foucault Studies , No. 10, November 2010, edited by Alan Rosenberg, 155-159, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 57
present.101 In other words, this discussion is used to clarify the variety of philosophical
and political issues relevant to postmodernity.
Outline and Definition of Technologies of the Self
Foucault here is concerned with the ethical practices of self-formation. His analysis of
how subjects are created and dominated by purely social forces starts to recede as he
prioritises the concentration of freedom, politics, corporeality and their historicosocial contexts. Foucault establishes self-reflexive discourse in his study of
technologies of domination as in the studies of technologies of the self—speaking the
truth about the self as a privileged form of subject formation. Such discourse becomes
a crucial technology both of domination and of self-care, and becomes a significant
theme in both the genealogical writings and also the final writings of Foucault.
Foucault’s overall intellectual focus was the history of how humans obtain knowledge
about themselves. In particular, he historicises how, in Western culture, specific truth
games in the social sciences (such as medicine, psychiatry and penology)102 have
established knowledge and techniques that permit individuals to comprehend
themselves further. Foucault explores the prospects of extricating ourselves “from our
‘self-incurred’ tutelage and our historical mode of subjectivity through which we exist
under the authority of others”.103 In doing so, Foucault outlines four main types of
technologies through which humans obtain and construct knowledge.104 These
technologies are subtly interwoven and powerfully impact on individuals through the
101 Rosenberg, “Michel.”
102 Presumably, such disciplines would be reluctant to be described as social sciences, but this, I believe, is precisely Foucault’s point about how knowledge
is socially constructed.
103 Milchman, “Michel Foucault”, 155.
104 He does this by extending a Habermasian conception of three models techniques related to the social and political construction of the self; namely:
techniques of production; techniques of signification; and techniques of domination. This Habermasian triangle was a significant influence in Foucault’s earlier
work.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 58
production of knowledge. These four technologies are described by Martin et al. as
follows:
Technologies of production, which allows humans to manufacture, transform
and manipulate; Technologies of sign systems, which allow humans to establish
meaning through signs, symbols and signification; Technologies of power (or
domination) which contribute to the discipline, control and subjectification of
individuals and populations; and Technologies of the self, which refer to the
practices and strategies by which individuals represent to themselves their own
105
self-understanding.
Foucault emphasises how each technology is infused with a method for domination
directed by its intention to manipulate individuals. Instead of adopting an instrumental
understanding of technology, Foucault engages ‘technology’ in the Heideggerian
sense106 as a way of revealing truth; this later helped to focus his attention on
technologies of power and technologies of the self. Technologies of power, Foucault
notes, “determine the conduct of individuals and submits them to certain ends or
domination, an objectivising of the subject”.107 Conversely, technologies of the self,
he reveals, relate to the:
Various operations individuals make on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and ways of being that people make either by themselves or with the
help of others in order to transform themselves to reach a state of happiness,
108
purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.
As previously discussed, Foucault’s earlier work emphasises the application of
technologies of domination through processes of normalisation in the human sciences.
What is seen in Foucault’s later work is that his views relating to games of truth
105 Foucault, Michel, “Technologies of the self” in Technologies of the Self, eds , Luther H Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.
.
106 For both Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger, it is the practices of the modern world and modern technology that produce a different kind of subject – a
subject who does not simply objectify and dominate the world through technology, but who is constituted by this technology. Godzinki, Jr, Ronald (ed.)
“Framing Heidegger’s Philosophy of technology” Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 6, Issue 1, Article 9, (2005), 23–27.
107 Martin et al. Technologies, 22.
108 Ibid.
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become an ascetic practice of the self-formation. In his re-examination, Foucault
defines ascetic as the subject’s attainment of a particular style or way of being, and
the varying and ongoing transformations that the subject must undertake to
accomplish this. As a method to question the subject’s transformation or becoming,
Foucault outlines a genealogy of the technologies of the self. In this genealogy, it is
important to note the relationship between the Delphic statement ‘know yourself’ and
the Greek practice of care for the self. During the Greco-Roman period the former
statement was viewed as a consequence of the latter. However, in ancient Christianity,
the Delphic statement ‘know yourself’ successfully obscured the Greek practice of
technologies of the self, given that self-renunciation came to be a condition for
salvation109. As Foucault identifies, in order to renounce oneself one has to know
oneself:
“Know yourself” has obscured “take care of the self” because our morality, a
morality of asceticism, insists that the self is that which one can reject. From
Descartes to Husserl, the subject of thinking is the first step in the theory of
knowledge. Therefore, in the modern world knowledge of the self becomes the
110
fundamental principle in a theory of knowledge.
Foucault defends the ‘determinist’ emphasis in Discipline and Punish (1975) by
suggesting that little examination was undertaken around agency, therefore a
subsequent redefinition of the dynamics of power is needed to reframe agency as selfregulation.111 Thus, Foucault underscores that individuals are participating in an
ongoing process, through technologies of the self, of constituting themselves as
ethical subjects away from the traditional framework of power which is defined as a
purely coercive or repressive force. At this conjunction, Foucault, as Lois McNay
109 Martin et al. Technologies.
110 Andreas and Dahlstedt, The Confessing 14.
111 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,trans. Alan Sheridan ( New York: Vintage Books, 1995); McNay, Lois, Foucault and
Feminism: Power, Gender and Self, (Northeastern University Press, 1992).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 60
notes, views individuals “as self-determining agents capable of challenging and
resisting the structures of domination”.112 Contextualising this structural realignment
of power in postmodernity for the individual, McNay states that “individuals, rather
than needing the expertise of the priest or therapist to ethically constitute the self, are
now potentially able to do it for themselves”.113
With this process of autonomously constituting the self, expertise becomes a
significant component. Relating to technologies of the self, expertise consists of three
crucial aspects. The first is expertise’s grounding to scientifically and objectively
establish distance between self-regulation and the state. Second, expertise, as Nikolas
Rose explains, can “mobilise and be mobilised in political argument in distinctive
ways, producing a new relationship between knowledge and government. Expertise
comes to be accorded a particular role in the formulation of programs of government
and in the technologies that seek to give them effect”.114 Additionally, through the
availability of choice, expertise is constructed in relation to the self-regulating and
self-forming abilities of individuals. By describing confession as subject-forming,
Foucault recognises the contingency available when understanding the manner of
self-formation and the historical alternatives that exist that can be mobilised when
doing so. How do we do this? The ancient Greeks and Romans with their
technologies-of-the-self practices provide some examples—not only for other ways of
being, but for ways of changing the being that one is. Foucault thus explores ancient
aesthetics of the self as possible resources for re-discovering models of selfconstitution in contrast with the subjectification that occurs under disciplinary power.
112 McNay, Lois, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and Self, (Northeastern University Press, 1992), 4.
113 Ibid., 4.
114 Rose, Nikolas, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 156.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 61
How Pre-modern Confessional Frameworks Became Re-Inscribed
within Modern Practices via Specific Rituals of Confession
It is necessary here to elaborate on technologies-of-the-self practices in antiquity to
highlight how such practices evolved and became reinscribed in modern practices via
specific rituals of truth-telling (or confession) in the gradual institutionalisation of
Christianity during the eighteenth century. A new accentuation of ancient ethical
thought in the first two centuries of the Common Era reveal an attitude of growing
severity concerning sexual pleasures which ultimately, Foucault observes, created an
intense problematisation of aphrodisiac.115 During this period, a growing attitude of
suspicion towards sexual pleasures was encouraged, along with the imagining that
such pleasures be interpreted as potentially abusive for the body and soul. Foucault
maintains that increasing problematisation of aphrodisiac can be traced to the
authoritarian efforts of Emperor Augustus (63 BCE to 14 ACE) and his intention to
increase morality in the Roman Empire. For example, under the principle of
Augustus, the efforts to increase widespread morality were reflected in a number of
political measures that Augustus enacted, including increasing the support and
protection of the institution of marriage and family, to regulating concubine use, and
subsequently, heavily condemning the immorality surrounding adultery.116 Despite
the regulatory connotations implied in such political measures, they were generally
received by citizens of the Roman Empire not as purely coercive strategies, but
rather as opportunities for the recognition and development of self-exploration and
115 In the context of this discussion relating to antiquity, Foucault underscores three elements in the know-how of one’s ideal relationship to aphrodisiac
pleasures: need, timeliness and status. Although emphasising there should be no shame in sex, Foucault maintains there is shame in overindulgence. One
should be guided by one’s sexual relations, as in one’s culinary activities and one’s consumption of wine, by need. Where the need is not urgent, one should
refrain. That way, control remains with the subject of pleasures – the individual – and not with the pleasures themselves.
116 Foucault, Michel, “Self-Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, eds. Paul Rabinow (UK: The
New Press, 1997).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 62
more conscious self-governance.117 For instance, Foucault notes that the emphasis on
sexual austerity under Emperor Augustus was not interpreted as a purely rigid
legislation of moralistic sexual behaviours, but rather as an urge for individuals to
become more cognisant of the consequences of their behaviours in order to better
constitute themselves.118 In determining this position, Foucault turns to the work of a
number of prominent ancient philosophers and physicians; namely: Rufus of
Ephesus, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and reveals that any
references to overtly punitive disciplinary measures under Emperor Augustus were
minimalised or absent.
What stands out for Foucault in the texts of these philosophers and physicians is the
insistence that individuals bear on themselves; an intensification of how, through the
relationship of the self by the self, the subject constitutes itself.119 The general
populace in the Hellenistic and Roman world subsequently began to focus on the
more private areas of their existence. This revealed a general ethical and philosophical
shift towards a more dedicated preoccupation with the values and consequences of
personal conduct, thus giving rise to a period Foucault refers to as individualism or
‘cultivation of the self’. What Foucault attributes to this development of a more
rigorous accentuation of ethical thought was, essentially, a weakening of the existing
political and social frameworks. Through his genealogy of confession, Foucault
indicates that in antiquity, ethics is the conscious work of an individual on
themselves in order to form a less totalising set of principles that can be implemented
as a guide for living in modernity. While Foucault is disinclined to advocate a return
117 Foucault, Michel, “Nietzche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, eds. D.F. Bouchard
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1977; McNay, Foucault;
118 Martin et al. Technologies.
119 Ibid.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 63
to ancient Greek ethics as a salvation to contemporary social issues, he nonetheless
suggests that an aesthetics of existence adequately reformulated to postmodernity
could in fact be worthy of consideration. However, in the end, Foucault supplies only
intersecting, sometimes contradictory, and non-concrete suggestions on how to
achieve this. Foucault’s conceptualisation of ethics is defined as a relationship of the
self to the self in terms of its moral agency. This is a significant focus in his studies
of antiquity, specifically, ancient sexual ethics. The examination of ancient
technologies-of-the-self practices here helps to more succinctly articulate Foucault’s
re-conceptualisation of ethics as a suggested code of conduct for self-formation.
An examination of antiquity’s most significant philosophical concept, epimeleia
heautou, is prioritised in Foucault’s 1982 lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject.
First revealed in Plato’s Alcibiades I, a text featuring the prominent statesman,
general and orator Alcibiades (c. 450 BCE – c.403 BCE) documented conversation with
Socrates, ‘epimeleia heautou’ was established as a significant principle throughout
Greek, Hellenistic and Roman culture, which lead to the accentuation of ethical
thought. This concept was pivotal to Platonic, Socratic and later Stoic and Cynic
philosophical practices.120 Beginning from the third century BCE, ‘epimeleia heautou’
was concerned with working on or being concerned with something; implying an
action or practice, attention, knowledge and/or technique that was performed on the
self by the self.121 Although gnōthi seauton played a critical role in ancient care-of-
120 Hroch, Petra, “Encountering “Ecopolis: Foucault’s Epimelia Heautou and Environmental Relations,” Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (2010): 5,
http://www.yorku.ca/etopia/docs/intersections2010/Hroch.pdf ; Harcourt, Bernard E, “Introduction to the Hermeneutics of the Subject (1982),” Foucault
13/13, http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/2016/03/05/introduction-to-the-hermeneutics-of-the-subject-1982/
121 The Delphic statement: ‘know yourself’ is often related to the principle of having to take care of yourself, and through the need to take care of the self
oneself this established the Delphic adage ‘gnothi seauton’ (know yourself, or knowledge of the self) into operation. The Delphic principle was technical
advice which primarily related to the question an individual would present to the Oracle. When ‘gnothi seauton’, through Socrates, became part of
philosophical teachings, ‘know yourself’ equated to the recognition of the divine rational soul without any form of self-contemplation or endless introspection,
and was established as only one aspect in technologies-of-the-self practices. Foucault emphasises the significant moral shift in this development, specifically,
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 64
the-self practices, the philosophical cultures that employed ‘epimeleia heautou’
performed care-of-the-self practices that extended vastly beyond simple selfknowledge practices. For instance, the intention of uncovering the knowledge and
self-truth in individual subjects that posited the soul as an activity and not a substance
can be found in the various care-of-the-self practices among the Stoics. Stoic care-ofthe-self practices incorporated more autonomous self-finalised practices and came to
combine, and run parallel with, tekhne tou biou.122
Stoicism, a philosophy initially practised among elite educated classes, then later
among the general populace in the Hellenistic world and Roman Empire during the
first and second centuries ACE, produced a group of philosophers known as the Stoics
who developed a regime of self-discipline based, essentially, around the purely
humanistic notion of self-analysis.123 For the Stoics, and also Foucault, the soul was
interpreted as an activity, rather than a pre-existing substance. This belief underscored
many Stoic care-of-the-self practices (‘epimeleia heautou’). Foucault maintained that
there are no essences, only the forging of an identity through the process (an activity)
of gaining knowledge which led, potentially, to an expanded ethical self-formation.124
Particular Stoic self-care practices included ritual purification (primarily through
meditation), self-writing exercises and lengthy periods of time in retreat in such
the eventual precedence of the Delphic moral principle ‘gnothi seauton’ over ‘epimeleia heautou’. Martin et al. Technologies; Foucault, “Self-Writing” ;
Menihan, “Care”.
122 This is a term used to describe an actual set of techniques performed by the self on the self. Throughout antiquity, in particular, among the Stoics,
Epicureans and the Cynics, self-knowledge that initiates a more developed self-subjectivity functions as a major premise of ‘tekhne tou biou’. Foucault, “SelfWriting”; Hroch, Petra, “Encountering”.
123 Foucault concluded that women did not practice technologies of the self practices in antiquity and thus sets aside the question of women’s self-care.
However, significant research can be found that disproves this conclusion. For a detailed history of both historical and contemporary examples of women’s
self-care practices see: Taylor, Chloë. “Alternatives to Confession”, In, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the
“Confessing Animal”, 191-236, New York: Routledge, 2010. Also, Richlin, A. “Foucault’s History of Sexuality: A useful theory for women?” In Rethinking
Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, edited by David H.J. Larmour, Paul Alan Miller and Charles Platter, Princeton: Princeton University Press,1998.
124 Foucault, “Self-Writing ”.
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environments outside of cities.125 It is important to note when examining ‘epimeleia
heautou’ that in order to purify, transform and transfigure oneself, a conscious and
ongoing relationship with the self primarily involved greater attention to the present
and the adherence to permanent self-vigilance—it was believed that this resulted in
greater levels of self-responsibility aimed at forming a determined ethical effect.126
This is what Foucault is essentially defining, in antiquity, as techniques of the self.
The most significant technique in self-care for the Stoics was self-writing. Foucault’s
essay titled “Self-writing” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of
Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol 1, 1997, epitomises the intent of Foucault’s later
work: the genealogy of the subject and subjectivities. By examining how individuals
reconstitute themselves, Foucault shifts away from analysing the individual through a
purely social construction or technologies of domination lens. Foucault’s attention
takes an ethico-aesthetic turn in corresponding self-subjectivity and reconstitution of
the self that presupposes the individual with rational and volitional capacities.127 He
does this through an examination of self-writing practices as a technology of the self
in antiquity as an alternative practice of subject-making. In antiquity, self-writing
exercises were undertaken in a type of notebook and was called hupomnēmata. A
method that was aimed at shaping the self, ‘hupomnēmata’ involved documenting
quotations and passages from other books, personal thoughts and reflections, and also
significant conversations. Employed by citizens as a guide or tool for living well,
Cynthia R. Nielson explains that ‘hupomnēmata’, “constituted a material record of
things heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for
125 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences, trans. Les Mots et les choses (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
126 Iftode, Foucault’s idea, 77.
127 Swonger, Matthais, “Foucault and the Hupomnemata: Self-Writing as an Art of Life,” Digital Commons@URL (2006),
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/18/
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subsequent rereading and meditation”128 for the purpose of better understanding and
overcoming personal struggles, frustrations and difficult emotions. Hupomnēmata
was not restricted to guiding one’s own life, but was utilised as a form of
correspondence to guide others. In explaining correspondence Menihan, reveals how:
Biographer essayist and philosopher Plutarch (c.45–50 CE – 120–125 CE) had
written himself a hupomnēmata on the tranquillity of the soul and when his
consul Minicius Fundamus asked Plutarch for advice on this subject, Plutarch
was simply able to send him the hupomnēmata he had already written about it.
Plutarch’s hupomnēmata on the tranquillity of the soul must have first been
129
written as a result of his own need for maintaining a tranquil soul.
Foucault insists that in ‘hupomnēmata’, we find early examples of the subjectification
of discourse, in which significant phases of an individual’s life are communicated and
documented via text. The writings of the ‘hupomnēmata’ aimed to produce a form of
self-unification, and represented a mode or exercise of reflective writing which, when
applied regularly, in everyday situations, helped to facilitate a reshaping and selftransformation for the individual going forward.130 As Foucault explains: “Writing as
a personal exercise done by and for oneself is an art of disparate truth – or, more
exactly, a purposeful way of combining the traditional authority of the already-said
with the singularity of the truth that is affirmed therein and the particularity of the
circumstances that determine its use”.131 A significant ethico-aesthetic premise in
‘hupomnēmata’ is that it was formed around the idea that through the act of writing
the individual should protect themselves from sin.132 Just as one (supposedly) would
128 Nielsen, C.R, “Unearthing Consonances in Foucault’s Account of Greco-Roman Self-Writing and Christian Technologies of the Self”, The Heythorp
Journal, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Vol. 55, No. 2, (2008): 4.
129 Menihan, Christopher J, “Care of the Self, Foucauldian Ethics, and Contemporary Subjectivity”, DigitalCommons@URI, (May, 2012).
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/263/
130 Nielsen, “Unearthing.”; Hroch, Petra, “Encountering”; Menihan, “Care”
131 Foucault, Michel, “Self Writing” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, eds. Paul Rabinow, (New York; The New Press, 1997), 212.
132 Nielsen, “Unearthing.”; Swonger, “Foucault,”
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not commit sinful acts in the presence of others, and would not say sinful thoughts out
aloud in public, a person is therefore less likely to commit sinful acts or pursue sinful
thoughts if such thoughts are recorded 133. In the first few centuries, self-writing was
conceived as a substitute for an external witness, replacing the surveillance of another
in moments of private solitude. Self-writing as a care of the practice is contrasted to
the panopticism described in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995).
While practices of self-writing involve a form of surveillance, imagined or real,
internalised through habitualisation into self-surveillance, in such cases the subject
chooses to submit their life, as told in their writings, to the surveillance of another,
and thus to internalise that surveillance. Self-writing therefore serves as an act of
writing that constitutes life, rather than being constituted by a self-aware and selfconstitutive practice. By vigorously documenting practical, predominately nonsubjective or overly emotive reflections, self-writing exercises served to examine and
enforce the impulses of rational thought and its role as a ‘truth test’. Hupomnēmata,
as it fits in an ancient framework of ethical self-responsibility, shifts the balance of
power away from discipline towards self-care. As a more contemporary, less
ethically-driven, philosophical resource in postmodernity, ‘hupomnēmata’ can
potentially be utilised and developed as part of a political and philosophical thought; a
methodology for thinking and living, and engaging in the aesthetics of self. This
particular type of self-analysis allows for the further possibility to develop a politics
of the self through its appropriation in confessional art practice. In this more
objective, yet introspective, form of writing, a new experience of the self emerges134
133 Nielsen, “Unearthing”; Swonger, “Foucault ”; Peters, Michael, “Writing the Self: Wittgenstein, Confession and Pedagogy,” Vol. 3, No. 2, (2000);
Foucault, The Care.
134 Foucault, Michel, Histoire de La Sexualite, tome 3 (Paris: Le Souci de Soi, 1984).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 68
and a relationship develops between writing and vigilance in which the self is
potentially strengthened by the virtue of writing.
An emphasis on ethical self-advancement in self-writing practices enabled the Stoics
to cultivate advanced morals surrounding the self in order to better cope with the
realities of life in a more harmonious and effective fashion.135 Foucault cites Seneca’s
daily letters of self-examination as an example in which the subject is able to
administrate a form of self-mastery.136 In the practice of self-writing, Seneca,
according to Stoic thought, by maintaining his self-writing practices, was better
positioned to more fully acknowledge his own errors and faults. Subsequently, this
provided further illumination as to certain actions and behaviours that may require
further ethical contemplation and possible correction.
Far from a solipsistic exercise in antiquity, care-of-the-self practices were
fundamentally relational.137 A conscious intention of locating a more developed selfsubjectivity in Stoic care-of-the-self practices involved establishing and solidifying
strong communal relationships of patronage and friendship, and generously
committing to one’s family obligations. Here, an emphasis was placed more on how
the individual could change themselves in order to live a better life in a collective. In
antiquity, the improvement of the subject was encouraged as a practice to improve the
society in which the subject constituted themselves. Apart from a substantial amount
of both private and social practices of intellectuality, certain care-of-the-self practices
focused on the preparation for individual suffering, deprivation and death in order to
establish, examine and prepare the subject for challenging life circumstances. Such
135 Foucault, Histoire; Nielsen, “Unearthing.”
136 Nielsen, “Unearthing.”; Swonger, “Foucault.”
137 Foucault, Histoire.
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exercises included abstinence, privation or physical resistance. For example,
prominent Stoics philosophers Seneca and Epictetus formulated a care-of-the-self
practice that involved limiting and sometimes temporarily denying basic necessities
such as food and water in preparation for difficult, mostly hypothetical, situations
such as imprisonment or exile.138 Encouraging philosophy as a way of life rather than
a theoretical discipline, both philosophers advocated that such care-of-the-self
practices served to enable and further encourage the subject to avoid becoming
overwhelmed by external circumstances through a conscious containment and control
of emotions, thoughts and feelings. For Foucault and for the Stoics, as Ladelle
McWhorter reveals, “philosophy is not primarily a body of knowledge or a collection
of skills; it is a way of living”.139 This way of life aimed to allow subjects to become
more responsible for their actions and overall wellbeing.
Foucault maintains that in antiquity this particular kind of progressive mastery over
oneself obtained through such practices is characterised by paraskeue, which means
‘to be prepared for’. Paraskeue provides a set of prescribed actions, practices and
eventual skills that will prepare the subject for any possible future adversity.
Paraskeue practices examine whether the subject is or is not prepared to face potential
challenging situations and environments with the truth they have acquired from
practising a number of care-of-the-self practices. Examples here include the Stoic
practices melete and gymnasia.140 Similar self-writing exercises subsequently
undertaken later in ancient Christian spiritual care-of-the-self practices placed a
greater emphasis on the emotionality of the soul; namely, those emotions pertaining to
138 Nielsen, “Unearthing”; Foucault, Michel, The Order.
139 McWhorter, Ladelle, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, USA: Indiana University Press, 1999, xix.
140 Malete is described as a type of preparedness meditation which, through a literal dialogue with one’s thoughts and imagined visual experiences, acts to
fully train thought and control emotion. Gymansia refers to the training of oneself through physical exercise. In the practice of gymnasia, discipline is the key,
as subjects undertake various physical challenges to improve endurance and appearance.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 70
temptation and sin. Thus, rather than being a modern trait extending from
Romanticism or the Reformation, such modes of self-writing can be traced back to
ancient Western traditions.141
Foucault begins this examination of ancient Western traditions by considering a text
of Athanasius of Alexandria’s titled Vita Antonii (c. 356 and 362 ACE) in his essay
“Self Writing” (1983). In conjunction with divine grace, in the Christian tradition,
Vita Antonii also underscores the restorative powers or positive self-transformation in
self-writing.142 As primarily an ascetic exercise or an act of confessional selfdisclosure, Vita Antonii is considered significant by Christian theologians in the
ancient tradition of the art of living, given its distinguishing emphasis on documenting
intimate thoughts or the ‘impulses of the soul’ over actions.143 This is apparent when
the early Christian theologian and philosopher, Augustine of Hippo (ACE 354–430)
started his largely autobiographical work consisting of nine books, titled, Confessions
(ACE 397–400). Confessions later proved to be an influential framework for
subsequent Christian writers through to the Middle Ages, and is considered the first
autobiographic themed text in the West.144 In “Self Writing” (1983) Foucault
identifies specific features in early Christian self-writing in order to establish a
genealogical redoing of the purpose of writing in technologies-of-the-self practices.145
Thus, Foucault reveals how although the disciplinary and self-transforming practices
from both the Christian tradition and the ancient Greco-Roman philosophical
traditions differ vastly, they also share many similarities. With the emergence of
141 Foucault, Histoire.
142 Nielsen, “Unearthing”; Swonger, “Foucault.”
143 Nielsen, “Unearthing”
144 Swonger, “Foucault”; Foucault, Histoire.
145 Swonger, “Foucault.”
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 71
Christianity in the third and fourth centuries ACE, the care of self was
reconceptualised. For instance, the practices surrounding technologies of the self were
no longer purely concentrated around forming the self as an art of existence. Rather,
individuals now had an obligation to know who they were and locate and
acknowledge faults and temptations, and then dutifully disclose such personal
information and experiences to either God or to another in the community (such as a
priest) and as a consequence, bear public or private witness against oneself. Foucault
writes: “The truth obligations for faith and the self are linked together. This link
permits a purification of the soul impossible without self-knowledge”.146 Although
there are many differences between the Catholic and the Reformist traditions, both, as
a condition for understanding the Holy Text, required that the cleansing or a
purification of the soul was to be undertaken as a consequence of self-knowledge.
For the Stoics, the problem of aesthetics concerned existence. When Christianity
emerged, issues surrounding aesthetics gradually become associated with the question
of purity. Given that technologies-of-the-self was now focused on maintaining a
purity of the self, a greater emphasis was placed on physical integrity rather than selfregulation. This meant that the self was something to be renounced and deciphered,
rather something to create through the art of living. In Christianity, writing became a
test that “brings into light the movements of thought, it dissipates the inner shadow
where the enemy’s plots are woven”.147 In other words, writing, with the emergence
of Christianity, was utilised in order to locate the truth about one’s self in order to
access the light which was achieved through the act of self-disclosure (confession). In
comparison, the purpose of writing for the Stoics, when undertaken regularly, was to
146 Foucault, “Technologies of,” 40.
147 Foucault, Michel, “On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress” in The essential Foucault: Selections from the essential works of
Foucault 1954–1984, eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas, Rose, (New York: The New Press, 2003), 121.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 72
constitute the self through not only the documentation of knowledge by masters, but
also the recording of daily events and deeds. Writing for the subject acted as a muchvalued source of meditation and guidance.
Foucault’s genealogical framework of confession in antiquity, discussed in in his
lectures at the Collège de France, reveal how a transformation of antiquity’s preChristian care-of-the-self practices developed into the first forms of Christian
asceticism. In these lectures, Foucault argues that care-of-the-self practices, although
different, with different effects in terms of shaping subjectivity, contributed alongside
the emergence of Christianity. What emerged during this time was a reconceptualisation of ancient care-of-the-self practices; a re-conceptualisation that
Foucault maintains forms the contemporary Western episteme of subjectivity.
Foucault observes how the Stoics constructed care-of-the-self practices as an attempt
to achieve self-mastery. This is also apparent in his study of care-of-the-self practices
that took place in ancient Christian spiritualty, particularly the monastic spiritual
principles developed in late Roman Empire. What differentiates Stoic care-of-the-self
practices from early Christian practices is that Christian practices were no longer
concerned with creating and developing self-subjectivity.148 In ancient Christianity,
verbal practices of self-disclosure, either to God or a community mentor, was
required. This confession, or public self-disclosure, enabled the individual to bear
witness against oneself, thus conjoining the truth obligations of faith and the self.149
The emergence of Christianity during this time reveals how the self was now
148 Swonger, “Foucault.”
149 Foucault, “On the genealogy,” 121.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 73
something to be renounced, deciphered and subjectified. This was in opposition to the
Stoics, who maintained that the self (or soul) was something that can be created.150
Exomologēsis and Exagoreusis
Foucault analysed the origins and processes of subjectification in a number of
confessional practices in ancient and modern Christian spirituality.151 Foucault
highlights the two main forms of self-disclosure and truth-telling that led to
subjectification in early Christian spirituality: exomologēsis and exagoreusis.
Exomologēsis (or a recognition of the fact) was an early Christian ritual employed to
publicly disclose or reveal oneself as a sinner and penitent.152 Interpreted more as a
status than an act, ‘exomologēsis’ involved the dramatic public recognition of one’s
status both as a Christian and a sinner. It was primarily a non-verbal activity which
aimed to reveal a number of public theatrical expressions that primarily centred on the
production of shame and ongoing punishment for the sinner, including the
enforcement of lengthy periods of fasting and sexual restrictions.153 Other, more
immediate and public ceremonial gestures, involved the sinner cutting their hair short
and wearing ashes over the face and body to mark their distinction from non-sinners.
This, somewhat paradoxically, was undertaken both to confirm and erase sins and
restore a purity bestowed at baptism.154 Making sense of this paradox, Christian
theologians of the first centuries,155 Foucault reveals, established three models: “the
medical model, where one must show his or her wounds to be healed; the tribunal
150 Andreas, The Confessing.
151 Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow
(USA: University of Chicago Press,1982).
152 Foucault, Histoire.
153 Andreas, The Confessing; Swonger, “Foucault.”
154 Ibid.
155 For example, Saul of Tarsus (or Apostle Paul c. 5–67 ACE), Ignatius of Antioch (35–107 ACE) and Apostle Simon Peter (30– c. 64–68 ACE).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 74
model of judgment where one always appeases one’s judge by confessing faults, and
last and most importantly, the model of death, of torture, or of martyrdom”.156 A
crucial paradigm informing these penitent rituals is the fact that the martyr would
choose death or torture rather than compromise their own faith. Public exposure or
voluntary ritual martyrdom for the relapsed sinner was required in antiquity in order
for the sinner to be reintegrated into the Church. Exomologēsis revealed that the
sinner was able to renounce life in order to confront and accept death. Foucault points
out that Christian penance involved the refusal or renunciation of self, so that selfrevelation was simultaneously self-destruction. 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. In more devoted, monastic environments, confessional
practices evolved from the principles and values of obedience, which quickly led to
the development of a self-examination that involved establishing a more lucid
connection between one’s hidden or unspoken thoughts and feelings for the purpose
of absolution or purity of soul. By concentrating on the detailed verbal disclosure of
the self in order to obtain renunciation, ‘exagoreusis’ established two significant
principles of Christian spirituality: obedience and contemplation.157 By imposing rigid
obligations of truth and dogma through its bourgeoning institutional authority,
Christianity now, more recognisably, begins to establish itself as both a salvation and
156 Foucault, Michel, “Technologies,” 244–5.
157 Foucault, Histoire.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 75
confessional religion.158 For example, exagoreusis was premised around the continued
act of verbalisation in a relation of obedience to another. By permanently obeying a
master (such as a monk or priest), such a relationship is structured around the
renunciation of one’s own will and one’s own self.159 Not dissimilar to the relationship
dynamics found in Greco-Roman master/disciple relationships, the connection or
mutual dependence between the master and confessant relationship varies slightly.
One key difference is that the mutual dependence between the master and the
confessant is permanent and total; thus, cementing the confessant’s continued
submission in all areas of their life. As Foucault explains:
Because undeviating contemplation of God is the goal of Christian monastic life,
one must scrutinise one’s thoughts to the utmost detail. In contrast, Seneca and
other Stoics focused their self-examinations on actions; that is, on conforming
particular actions to various rules and principles. This encapsulates the Christian
160
tradition as epitomised by John Cassian (ca. 359–435 A.D.) who was
concerned with deciphering one’s thoughts and desires to see whether they were
161
pure and thus facilitated a more intimate union with God.
Confessional procedures changed dramatically over time. Until the Council of
Trent,162 when new procedures were installed, primarily to re-establish and retain the
purity of church personnel, confession becomes a yearly event.163 Confession
underwent a radical transformation after the Reformation and consisted of renouncing
both the confessant’s acts and thoughts. As the act of confession evolved, it was
158 Foucault, Histoire; Swonger, “Foucault.”; Andreas, The Confessing.
159 Foucault, The Order.
160 Saint John Cassian was a Christian theologian and monk. His mystical writings are celebrated in Western and Eastern Churches.
161 Foucault, Michel, “The confession of the self” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, eds, Colin Gordon, (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980), 200.
162 The Council of Trent (or the 19th Ecumenical Council) of the Roman Catholic Church was established in three parts between 1545 and 1563. In response
to the reformation, the council made significant decrees on self-reform and dogmatic definitions that directly influenced subsequent doctrines opposed by the
Protestants. Such reform significantly altered the Catholic Church across much of Europe and becomes known as the Counter Reformation. Accessed 6 June
2016.http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-28/1545-council-of-trent-begins.html
163 Foucault, Michel, “The Confession.”
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 76
during the nineteenth century, Foucault suggests, that the refinement of the techniques
of confession took place, rather than any direct pressure to confess.164 It was during
this time that, Foucault asserts, “saw brutal medical techniques emerging, which
consist in simply demanding that the subject tells his or her story, or narrate it in
writing”.165 In Christian technologies of the self—whether through a dramatic,
publicly staged ritual or more intimate confessional exchange with a priest—selfdisclosure required self-renunciation throughout the seventeenth century. However, it
was during the institutionalisation of Christianity, in the nineteenth century, that the
act of verbalisation took precedence as self-denial expressed in Christian ascetical
practices started to fade.166 During this period the techniques associated with the
practice of confession were re-contextualised in large part due to the advancement of
human sciences. Here, for Foucault, the inherently contingent nature of subjectivities
were allowed to form. The emancipatory possibilities located in the availability of
personal choice becomes increasingly more apparent for those confronted by
oppressions of various sorts.167 Knowledge, Foucault reveals, played a different role in
the classical technologies of the self, compared with the self as a modern invention, in
that within these civilisations the technologies of the self were more significant and
autonomous before eventually being adapted as regulatory discourses. The perpetual
verbalisation once practised in ‘exagoreusis’ is appropriated and recalibrated in many
contemporary confessional forms, as discussed in Chapter one. For instance,
‘exagoreusis’ has been reinscribed in psychoanalysis without the need for a
164 Ibid.
165 Foucault, Michel, “Truth, power, self: an interview with Michel Foucault” in Technologies of the self, eds, Martin, LH, Gutman, H, Hutton, PH, USA:
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 215.
166 Foucault, Histoire.
167 Taylor, The Culture.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 77
renunciation of the self.168 Secular forms of confession since Freud have arguably
been ‘scientised’ through new techniques of normalisation and individualisation
which include clinical codifications, case study techniques, the general documentation
and collection of personal data, and the development of a whole host of therapeutic
techniques for ‘normalisation.’169 Psychoanalysis is a disciplinary and confessional
method which Foucault, in his later work, refers to, as the most definitive activity that
best describes the modern individual as a ‘confessing animal’. However, as many
critics of Foucault argue, Foucault largely avoids a weighty critique of psychoanalysis
throughout his career and treats psychoanalysis rather abstractly.170 Nonetheless,
Foucault initially conceptualises psychiatry as a coercive force in normalising
subjectivity, but later views psychoanalysis as a decisive break in confessional
discourse 171. For instance, Foucault argues that psychoanalysis can simultaneously
function as a practice of discipline and self-governance, or perhaps as an adaptation
that is potentially conceived by the modern subject less as a disciplinary practice and
more as an aesthetic expression of self-care. While pointing out similarities between
Christian confession and contemporary psychoanalysis, Foucault’s genealogy of
confession demonstrates the novelty of modern Christian confession: its difference
from ancient and medieval penitential practices; the resistances it encountered; the
violence with which confession was inoculated in Christian theology; the additional
novelties of psychiatry and psychoanalysis; and the transmutations which occurred
over confession’s history between antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity.172 In his
genealogy of confession, Foucault stresses diversity rather than continuity,
168 Hymer, Sharon, Confessions in Psychotherapy (New York: Garnder Press Inc.,1998).
169 Taylor, The Culture. Hymer, Confessions.
170 Taylor, The Culture.
171 Bersani, Erik, The Psychology of Confession (Belgium, Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1975).
172 Foucault, The Subject.”; Andreas, The Confessing.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 78
contingency rather than trans-history, and the possibility of resistance as well as the
production of docility.173 Similarly, as outlined in Chapter one, Tentler affirms the link
between psychoanalytic practices and Christian confession, while recognising that
this link is one of developing and unpredictable disciplinary power, and not one of
continual and unshifting discipline, nor an ahistorical response to an innate
psychological need.174 If what modern subjects seek through psychoanalysis is the
same as what confessors in antiquity sought previously—not self-knowledge but a
technique of self-care—then perhaps an intention in Foucault’s genealogy of
confession is not to deny the value and importance of history, but rather to change our
contemporary perspective on that endeavour.
By maintaining the ability to situate one’s self in society, individuals who participated
in care-of-the-self practices in antiquity utilised an available method through which to
better explore a greater level of personal freedom and self-understanding, either
through self-mastery or self-renunciation. Not unlike Foucault, political theorist
Hannah Arendt was highly critical of the normalising impact of social scientific
rationality on modern subjectivity, but also drew attention to the human capacity to
take their ethical and political life into their own hands.175 The classical concept of
technologies of the self in many Stoic societies was not, in the majority of situations,
arbitrarily imposed or part of any external compulsory indoctrination through civil
law or religious obligation; rather, it was a voluntary choice made by individuals who
wished to care for the self and in the process, give their life certain values in public
communal settings. This was related to the fact that the self was already
173 Besley, Tina, “Foucault, Truth Telling and Technologies of the Self.” Journal of Educational Enquiry, Vol. 6, No.1 (2005), 77.
174 Foucault, Michel, “The Confession.”
175 Boven, Frederik, “Caring for the Soul; with Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault,” Academia.edu, (2007),
https://www.academia.edu/6913858/Caring_for_the_soul_with_Hannah_Arendt_and_Michel_Foucault
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 79
conceptualised as autonomous in pre-Christian antiquity, and thus could freely
become other than what one was.176 A critical position that Foucault highlights in
these concepts is that ‘truth’ was a pragmatic philosophical principle about how all
individuals wanting to live a better life should act, rather than a hidden or secret truth
specific to the individual. In contrast, ancient Christian care-of-the-self practices held
an alternate relationship to the self, because the intended aim for the Christian sinner
was complete detachment from the world.177 The objective for the individual in
ancient Christian practices of self-disclosure (private or public) was to achieve a
purity of body and soul through a renunciation in preparation for an eternal afterlife.178
By maintaining the ability to choose where to situate one’s self in ancient society,
individuals who participated in care-of-the-self practices were utilising a method
through which to help explore a greater level of personal freedom, either through selfmastery or self-renunciation. Any substantial exploration of the more abstract and
nuanced concepts surrounding subjectivity and ethics themselves as such is
foregrounded in Foucault’s genealogy of confession with a conscious concern for the
understanding of the historical material of confession. Foucault drew from the Greek
and Hellenistic philosophers; however, this was not necessarily a direct affirmation of
the possibility of mimesis or advocating Seneca or Epictetus as exemplum to guide us
in the present. Rather, my research maintains, Foucault was indicating both the
impossibility of a direct return as well as a possible problematisation, building on the
awareness of the historical distance and altered perspective of these philosophers so
as to make possible (but not certain) the assemblage of new lines of enquiry—or at
least the plausibility and worth of attempting to do so. Foucault conceptualises
176 Foucault, Histoire
177 Ibid.
178 Menihan, “Care”.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 80
technologies of the self as being implicitly integrated into the social fabric through its
use as a political tool, initially to enhance the self and subjectivity. Furthermore, he
maintains that it is the only point of resistance to contemporary biopolitical
normalisation. The philosophy surrounding technologies of the self becomes a central
manoeuvre in establishing subjectivity in postmodernity.
The Self in Performance Art from the 1960s to the 1990s
Performance art during the 1960s and 1970s employed mechanisms of performance as
a means of examining a freedom of body and self that was arguably initiated by both
the Dadaist and Futurists movements at the start of the twentieth century.179 Not
unlike these early twentieth century movements, performance art of the 1960s
challenged the formality of how art was perceived by the audience, particularly
audience involvement in a public context. Performance art during the 1960s and
1970s was, for many artists and audiences, a process of corporeal reaffirmation and
also, perhaps more centrally for many artists, a reformation of the self. The presence
of detachment, personal narratives and, at times, mutilation present in the
performance work produced during this period became a critical component that
enabled the process of restructuring a greater consciousness or sense of self.
Historically, the link between video and performance is a strong one. Taking place
some thirty years before Emin’s Why I Never Become a Dancer (1995), a similar selfreclamation was examined in performance art as an increasingly more democratic
alliance between the artist and audience was used to challenge the material and
institutional traditions of visual art. Using a ‘ritual-in-performance’ approach in their
179 Ultan, Deborah K, “From the Personal to the Transpersonal: Self-Reclamation Through Ritual in Performance,” Journal of the Arts Libraries Society of
North America, Vol.20. No. 2 (2001).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 81
work, Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono and Ana Mendieta utilise both subjective
narratives and constructed performative and transpersonal spaces that enable selfreclamation to be both personally and collectively shared in public space. Through
performance, both artists explore myths and multiple realities of identity in an attempt
to further understand and develop their self-subjectivity. For instance, in her 1964
performance Cut Piece, Ono demonstrates a transpersonal moment that was, for her,
inadvertently self-empowering through a process of self-loss. Slowly and
ritualistically stripped by having her clothes cut off by a succession of random
audience members, Ono meditatively sits through the performance in an almost
liminal state—a sort of nexus where mind and body are taken out of the present
conscious state, thus eliminating, as Deborah Ultan recalls, “any possibility for any
anxiety or threat”.180
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 4. Ono, Yoko. Cut Piece, (composite live performance stills), performed at the Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto,
1964. The performance has subsequently been re-enacted a number of times by Ono. The most recent was performed in
September 2003, at the Theatre Le Ranelagh, Paris, France.
180 Ultan, “From,”
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Similarly, a decade later in 1974, Marina Abramović—motivated by widespread
dismissive perceptions of performance art by critics at the time—created a gruelling
six-hour work titled Rhythm O. Drawing on traditions of self-flagellation, catharsis
and mythology, Abramović presented the audience with a brief set of instructions and
an array of 72 objects at their disposal. Here, Abramović, not unlike Ono, enters a
type of liminal zone of physical and psychological detachment and relinquishes
herself to the mercies of the audience. By declaring herself as a passive object and
curious to examine how far the public would go in the situation, Abramović
completes the work feeling “violated”.181 Summarising her experience after the
performance, Abramović went on to state that “What I learnt was that […] if you
leave it up the audience, they will kill you”.182 Abramović also notes that it was not
until the work was over that a reclamation of her own perceived power was salvaged.
This, Abramović recalls, occurred after official announcements were made that the
work was over and she began to reassert her physical autonomy in the space as the
audience was leaving. During this time, Abramović observed how the, now reticent,
audience members were unable to face her as a person and how they were determined
to escape any actual confrontation with Abramović as a person and not a performance
artist. Through a consideration of ritual and gesture and its complex relation to
performative levels of consciousness (also apparent in both Rhythm 10 (1973) and
Rhythm 5, (1975)—or as Abramović frames it, ‘a performative state’—physical
limitations can be examined, challenged and oftentimes eliminated. The vulnerability
(or at least the initial vulnerability) in these performances invoked for Abramović an
affirmation of her own identity or perhaps even the potential extension of her self-
181 Ward, Frazer, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience, (USA: University Press of New England, 2012), 125.
182 Ibid.
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subjectivity which, ultimately, came from the perspective and participation of others
in a public space.
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 5. Abramović, Marina. Rhythm 0, (composite live performance stills), live performance with
table of 72 objects performed at the Studio Morra, Naples, Italy, duration: 6 hours (8pm- 2 am), 1974.
For Ana Mendieta, such a restructuring of self and consciousness was integral to her
‘ritual-in-performance’ work. Transgressing personal boundaries in ways different
from Ono and Abramović, Mendieta utilised rituals from Santeria, an African-Cuban
religious practice that combined West African animistic symbolism with Spanish
Catholicism, to create performances that merged her body with nature (Ultan, 2001).
An example of this sort of body, nature, and art fusion can be seen in the Silueta
series (1973–1980).183 Here, Mendieta carves and traces her body into rocks, sand
and the earth using fire, blood and flowers in a variety of sites that were of personal
and cultural significance. For instance, Imagen de Yagul (1973) in EI Yagul, Oaxaca,
183 Silueta Series (1973–1980). Spanning performance, drawing, film and photographs, the Silueta series, examined the connections between body, nature and
spirituality through the genres of land art, body art, and performance art.
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Mexico; and Untitled (Fetish Series, Iowa) (1977), in Iowa, USA. Through inscribing
her own body into figural symbolic formations Mendieta is able to reveal a level of
trans-identity that moved beyond constructions of nationality, gender, colour and
ethnicity. As Ultan observes, “Rather than attempt to define identity, Mendieta
playfully and ritualistically traversed its terrain, planting and un-planting, shaping and
re-shaping herself in implicit and explicit ways”.184
For Ono and Mendieta, identity can be viewed as implicitly a wholeness that is
integrated, reaffirmed and validated through ritualised performance. Through
providing an opening toward the transpersonal, rather than a narcissistic self-critique,
this process of self-affirmation demonstrates how vitally a sense of personal identity
or subjectivity can be reclaimed in the art-making process or aesthetic approach.
These works succeed in externalising the creative process by making the audience
(more visible in Ono and Abramović’s work) an intrinsic part of it. Here, and not
unlike the video work of Emin, a more visible attempt at working with a deeper
consciousness is revealed in its ability to construct the self and identity as a
ubiquitous phenomenon.185 For Emin, her reclamation is reached through her carefully
crafted self-disclosure—one that is not unlike Ono’s and Mendieta’s, but more
explicit and intimate in content.
184 Ultan, “From the Personal”, 31.
185 lIbid.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 85
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 6. Krystufek, Elke. Satisfaction, live with a massage brush, portable CD player, dildos, baseball
visor, TV, performance at a site specific space within the Kunsthalle, Vienna, duration unknown, 1994.
A number of seminal confessional performance art works during the early-mid 1990s
similarly examined the ritual opening of the personal. For instance, in 1996, in a
group exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, Elke Krystufek, produced her live
performance work Satisfaction. Allocated a specific performance space or viewing
room in the gallery, a space that included a mock set-up of her own bathroom,
Krystufek bathed and masturbated with a vibrator behind a glass window of
onlookers. Through a re-enactment of her private rituals in a public space, Krystufek
reveals an intimacy and authenticity that eludes automatic association with intended
sensationalism. If sensationalism exists, it is to force the viewer to confront their own
position as voyeur. In Satisfaction, Krystufek presents the female or feminine subject
glimpsed in her own space as a deliberate premeditated action in the sterile confirms
of a museum space, along with the self-conscious intention to explore the conventions
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 86
of not only what is socially permissible in such a space, but also to explore dynamics
of control associated with how her naked self is observed. This exploration is
examined through the agency and chosen autonomy in which Krystufek displays her
self-pleasure, and sets up a dynamic of looking that denies, rather than creates, a
personal intimacy with the body on display.
Through a ritualised performance of his own abused and bloody body in degrading,
violent activities, a different approach to self-disclosure in public can be seen in the
work of performance artist Franko B. In Mama, I Can’t Sing (1995), Franko B slices
into his skin to speak out against a court ruling that made it illegal for consenting gay
adults to document themselves engaging in sadomasochistic sex. The artist carves the
word ‘democracy’ onto his own skin and the word ‘freedom’ into his lover’s skin.
Subsequently, Franko B started to incorporate his own blood in his performances,
which were recorded and shown in video installations and photographs. He reappears
in these videos and photographs in different poses to create intense tableaus that stand
as symbols for a degraded life. His body is beaten and he is violently slapped around
the head and becomes covered in his own blood as result. Abject, naked and abused,
the artist presents himself as a physical liberation of what he deems the brutality,
perversity and isolation of contemporary life. The ritualised use of the body for
Franko B often becomes a metaphor for the violence done by the social body to those
who defy convention. Here a space of healing opens up for the artist in which a form
of invigorated subjectivity can take place.
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This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons .
Figure 7. Flanagan, Bob. Visiting Hours, live performance with mixed media, performed in
collaboration with Sheree Rose at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California, 1992. It was
subsequently performed the following year (1993) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, and
again at the Museum of the School of Fine Arts in Boston (1995).
An artist also wishing to explore his own similar masochistic sexual desires without
censorship is Bob Flanagan. Flanagan, a long-term suffer from cystic fibrosis, uses his
art to both examine his masochistic sexual desires and to combat his, at times, intense
physical pain associated with his medical condition. Flanagan openly talked about and
enacted the frequently painful S&M practices which, he maintains, provided release
from his physical pain. With his partner, Flanagan began to make public their private
sexual rituals. This is revealed in his performance Auto-Erotic SM (1989), which
begins with a series of intense series of slides of his medical condition, followed by
the couple enacting various highly stylised S&M acts and conclude with Flanagan
nailing his penis to a wooden board. In a live performance work titled Visiting Hours
(1992), consisting of a multimedia presentation of sculpture, video, photography and
text, the artist set up in the Santa Monica Museum of Art a scene in which Flanagan,
playing himself sitting in a hospital bed, receives the audience as if they were his
visitors in a real hospital.
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The Radical Origins of Early Video Art as Political Tool
From here, a discussion will focus on the work of pioneering video artists of the
1960s and 1970s. The positioning of ideas here is used as a prism through which to
establish a greater understanding of contemporary video art practice in highlighting
how differences, continuities and commonalities exist across generations of video
artists. In her publication Video Art: A Guided Tour (2004), Catherine Elwes states
that video art’s current status as a “default medium of contemporary art”186 can be
easily overlooked, given its radical origins and periodical use as a political tool during
its energetic iconoclasm during the mid-1960s and 1970s. During this period, video
art was as an unexplored medium predominately produced in the parameters of the
avant-garde in select and obscure artist-run gallery spaces. With a growing impatience
and anger from many young people towards prevailing cultural values, including an
encroaching global neoliberalism in the West,187 artists began to approach the
institution of art with a similar disdain. Among such counter-culture intentions, artists
began to examine and critique the accepted premise of art and art-making processes
with the intention to redefine its possibilities, its margins and also its very function.
Inadvertently, it is in these intentions that an attack on the prevailing gallery system
and its blind allegiance to the confines of commercialism and unethical capitalist
interests can be seen. Here, artists, particularly UK artists, started to engage with the
unknown but powerful forces of video, primarily as a reaction against television and
186 Elwes, Catherine, Video Art, A Guided Tour, (UK: I.B Tauris and Co. Ltd, 2005), 1.
187 Perhaps an apex example of this distain was reflected in the widespread civil unrest that took place in Paris during May 1968. Anti-communist, anticapitalist students comprising of revisionist socialists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists, Marxists and even Surrealists successfully managed to insight
nationwide strikes across France for two continuous weeks. The objectives were self-management by workers, a decentralisation of economic and political
power and participatory democracy at the grass roots.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 89
its institutional and moralising presence in society. Conversely, in the US, artists
became increasing preoccupied with video’s emerging technology. As Elwes
explains:
Broadly speaking, video art in the USA concentrated on a kind of pareddown, self-reflexive investigation of the technology and its functions. In
the UK artists were also embroiled in an examination of the specificities
of the apparatus, or the tools of their trade, but saw the monolith of
television as their main adversary… They concentrated on deconstructing
televisual narratives and conventions that were felt to produce a passive
cultural consumer.188
Accordingly, the history of video art is written at the intersection between television’s
phenomenal ability to be utilised as a medium of mass communication (particularly
after World War II), and the curious propulsion of artists to utilise and manipulate this
televisual technology for art-making. However generalised the approach to video-art
production was during this time, it is difficult to refute that the developing technology
surrounding video—namely, its televisual speed—meant that, for a number of artists,
video could be utilised as form of personal and social empowerment which propelled
visual art into a new sphere of operation. With an implicit intent of contributing to the
development of a new medium, the experimentation with video techniques was
mostly undertaken by artists who had a background in fine arts, music and
performance.189 In the chronology of video art practice from the 1960s to the early
twenty-first century, three major directions of aesthetic-technical work are visible, as
author and academic Yvonne Spielmann writes:
In the first, videotapes and installations that contrast the institution and format of
television and video with art; for the most part, these artists were interested in
the visual critique of media and art institutions (for example, Vito Acconci, Dara
188 Elwes, Video Art, p. 2.
189 Blom, Ina, The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 13.
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Birnbaum, Joan Jonas and Les Levine). Another direction is taken in video
works that structurally explore the relationship of image, sound, text, and music
and develop passages to hypermedia and interactive applications (here we find,
Robert Cohen, Pater Callas, and Bill Seaman). The third direction focuses on the
modulation of electronic image-sound expressions and seeks to expand
technological imagery to the limits of the possible (for example, the Vasulkas,
190
Nam June Paik, and Gary Hill).
Experimental artists involved with the Fluxus and Happening events looking for new
creative platforms to transgress established institutional ideologies perpetrated and
upheld through television were drawn to the auto-visuality of video for its technical,
and more importantly, aesthetic difference from television and film. For many of
these artists (Vasulkas, Nam June Paik and Gary Hill), the performative and
interactive capacities of video proved difficult to resist. Such artists eagerly
experimented with the mechanics of this new media and presented a number of
pivotal works that combined both live and video performance. The immediacy and
urgency offered through the ‘signaletic’ and televisual technologies provided new
directions for art to be imbued with new levels of extemporaneity and interventionist
strategies.191 This meant that not only new forms of visual expression were
established, but new social surfaces became apparent through new modes of instant
editing, visual manipulation and new modes of production and dissemination. Since
the revitalisation of a number of historical avant-garde strategies during the 1960s,
Blom observes: “the creation or manipulation of social situations or contexts has
generally been seen as a prominent feature of contemporary art”.192
190 Spielmann, Yvonne, “Video: From Technology to Medium” Art Journal, 65, 3, (2006): 59–60.
191 Arguably one of the first artists to purchase a Sony portable recorder and camera in 1965, Nam June Paik documented the 1965 New York visit of Pope
Paul VI. Leaving the camera running for 60 minutes, Paik spontaneously recorded everything that unfolded before him. Later that same evening Paik screened
his unedited video on a monitor alongside the mediated commercial televised version. Although no portable editing devices were readily available at the time,
Paik’s work highlights a spontaneous interventionist approach to video art making during the mid-1960s, an approach that challenged the existing hegemony
of not only mainstream media representations, but also conventional social structures, including the high art establishment.
192 Blom, The Autobiography,13.
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The rapid development of video technology has seen a significant factor in this
development. Video art’s increasingly reflexive approach to the social in the 1960s
and 1970s where closed-circuit television became a general model for video art in
orchestrating social feedback situations. For instance, the relatively low production
costs (relative to film) and the ease of widespread dissemination. The availability of
simple assemble-editing technics made it possible for artists to experiment in
fractured, non-linear narratives in order to compress or extend time at will to produce
psychological and imaginative works.193 Furthermore, with the introduction of digital
editing technology, artists could experiment with rapid-fire cutting that tested the
edges of perceptual coherence.
Born from military technologies, television as an institution quickly established itself
through the dominating pressures not only of political ideologies in the West, but also
a bourgeoning consumerist culture to become the new so-called ‘opiate for the
people’. Early video artists, through their adoption of television’s technological
capabilities and aesthetics, repositioned not only how art could be produced, but also
seen. Thus, an evolution took place which subsequently situated a move away from
the traditions of a culturally driven preoccupation with object-based art, as Blom
writes: “No longer the passive objects of traditional art history, artworks now figure
as performative forces to which are attributed heightened capacities for critical action.
In other words, art is seen to gain a new kind of social employment from its
deployment of new media technologies – in this case, televisual speed”.194
Consequently, through such technical adaptations and processes, art and also the
artwork itself became radically strengthened in its ability to combine the disparate
193 Ibid.
194 Blom, The Autobiography, 13.
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elements of televisual technology and media to combine performance (including both
live and video-based performance), sound and durational components to produce a
variety of approaches to video art practice which saw art become mobilised as a
deconstructive strategy.195 This burgeoning contempt for object-art reflected in it
being viewed as a purely monetary pawn in the art market. As art historian Roselee
Goldberg reveals: “If the function of the art object was to be an economic one, the
argument went, then conceptual work could have no such use.”196 Although
undocumented performance art, in this context (specifically, during the late 1960s
early 1970s) neatly reflected conceptual art’s rejection of object-based art, with artists
now utilising their own bodies as art ‘material’. This ‘immateriality’ meant that,
during this period, such art could not be bought or sold. Performance art therefore
became an ideal medium to materialise the concepts and theories corresponding to
conceptual art’s intention in video art practice. For example, as Goldberg notes:
Ideas of space could just as well be interpreted in actual space as in the
conventional two-dimensional format of the painted canvas; time could be
suggested in the duration of a performance or with the aid of video monitors and
video feedback. Sensibilities attributed to sculpture – such as the texture of
197
material or objects in space –became even more tangible in live performance.
Additionally, deviating from the material and institutional traditions of high art,
performance and video art during this period helped transform the role of the audience
from passive viewer of creative ideas to an active accomplice in the formation of
aesthetic meaning.198 In the late 1960s, the experience of live performance was a
motivating factor for many artists who found that a purgative and transformative
195 Ibid.
196 Goldberg, Roselee, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, New York:Thames and Hudson Inc. 2011), 153.
197 Ibid.
198 Goldberg, Performance; Blom, The Autobiography, 13.
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potential could be mobilised in a live confrontation between artists and audience.
Such shifts between audience and artist suited the collective inspiration for the
investigation and ongoing questioning of the formation of art away from the historical
traditions of object-based art. Artists critiquing modernist’s conceptual frameworks of
object-based art—a model which exemplified a transcendental-like status (bestowed
on the object) and subsequent superiority over art forms—is what Roland Bathes in
Image, Music, Text (1978) refers to as ‘theological meaning’. Bathes suggests that the
definition and interpretation of the artist’s intent is not necessarily monopolised by the
artist whose creative expression is encapsulated in the (traditionally speaking) art
object. Rather, the audience, or perhaps the non-artist, actively participates in this
exchange through bringing to this communicative dynamic or creative exchange their
own interpretation and meaning. Subsequently, as Elwes observes, this repositioning
instituted a historically unique and cohesive social moment in which myriad
interpretations of the work was encouraged to take precedence over monopolised
meanings and interpretations. As Elwes affirms, during the mid-1960s and 1970s in
live performance and video art there:
Were as many ‘true’ interpretations of the work as there were witnesses and
participants. A non-hierarchical live event always contained the possibility that
an individual could override the artist’s intentions and directly influence the
199
direction and outcome of the performance.
Although in theory, performance artists during this time were consciously registering
the significance of audience involvement in their work while at the same time
voluntarily relinquishing their directorial powers in their work (Abramović comes to
mind here), artists remained the primary directors of their work, and laid claim to its
199 Elwes, Video Art, 135.
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authorship, mainly for the purposes of documentation.200 The bourgeoning
possibilities inherent in video technology provided an opportunity for many artists to
address a variety of socio-political changes taking place in society, often through
confessional and confessional-like video works. The body seemed like a natural
extension of political intent for a number of live and video-based performance
artists.201 Increasingly, since the artist’s body and its gestures constitute the artwork
itself or be presented as the material out of which the artwork was made, the artist’s
dual role as both subject and object developed new themes that, as Elwes writes:
Started to bridge the gulf between themselves and the viewer… the artist’s
gestures in public were in the 1960s often transformed into a particular form of
activism, which introduced a political dimension to the work. What is inflicted
on the artist’s body becomes a metaphor for what is inflicted on the social or
collective body: the artist’s body becomes a symbol. The artist body was used as
202
a site and surface that could both penetrate – and transform – social spaces.
What cannot be discounted is that live and video-based performance and its role as a
monitor to the avant-garde during the 1960s and 1970s helped to fill the gap left by
the temporary diminution of object-based practices such as painting and sculpture —
practices that were increasingly interpreted during this time as being devoid of
“subjectivity in a world of over-shifting identities.”203 A central premise of
performance art (and also video art) espoused during the mid-1960s and 1970s now
seen as working cliché of the form, was that it resisted an object-based premise of
high art production and thus, as a consequence, successfully sidestepped any form of
participation in the market force ideologies of capital and reproduction.
200 Ibid.
201 For instance, Peter Weibel and Valie Export, (Dogishness, 1968) Vito Acconci (Seedbed, 1972), Barbara Smith (Feed Me, 1973), Gina Pane (Lait Chaut
(Warm Milk) 1972),
202 Elwes, Video Art, 24.
203 Fisher, Jean, “Reflections on Echo – Sound by Women Artists in Britain” in Sign of the Times – A decade of Video, Film, and Slide-Tape Installation in
Britain 1980–1990, eds, Chrissie Iles, (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990), 62.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 95
Comparatively speaking, contemporary performance today art still does maintain
elements of resistance to easily recognisable definitions of commercialism and
reproduction that other forms of visual art trade on with their more visible objectbased considerations and practicalities. A long-time advocate of viewing and defining
performance art, especially contemporary performance art, as a medium that
intersects with other cultural fields and art-making process’s is Roselee Goldberg.
Goldberg as cited in Julie Baumgardner’s 2015 article, “How Performance Art
Entered the Mainstream” observes that a contemporary iteration of the medium is
“not catalogued as performance per se but scattered across departments… such as
drawing, photography”.204 Additionally, dance, sculptural installation and painting are
increasingly employed in contemporary performance practice.205 MoMA’s chief
curator of media and performance, Stuart Comer, echoing Goldberg’s sentiments,
posits performance art as “the medium of our time”. He adds, “now we are dealing
with a virtual world; people are looking for different kinds of experiences that can
root them more specifically in the present moment, which intersectional performance
definitely does”.206
As momentum grows for artists to adopt non-medium specific approaches to their
practice, which, for some, includes performance, a number of significant museums
have responded by including purpose build spaces for time-based works.207 Given
this, questions surrounding how to sell, commission, produce and document
204 Baumgardner, Julie, “How Performance Art Entered the Mainstream”, Artsy, (Nov, 2015). https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-how-performanceart-entered-the-mainstream
205 Donna Huanca is a contemporary artist who utilises painting and elements of sculptural installation in her performative assemblages to examine
topological restrictions in corporeal gestures and movements as internal psychic narratives and its representations in externalised knowledge systems.
206 Baumgardner, “How Performance”.
207 For instance, the Witney Museum of American Art’s 50,000 square feet exhibition expansion project in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The $422
million expansion includes a sculpture garden and multi-use theatres along with performance spaces. Also in 2015, the Tate Modern in the UK opened a $400
million 10–storey expansion dedicated to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art alongside a dedicated performance space in the power plant’s former oil
tanks.
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performance art (that includes video) have become increasingly problematised. Given
that contemporary collectors still overwhelmingly favour objects or ‘things’, how
does contemporary performance that incorporates video now intersect with the
broader aspects of the market?
Galleries, museums and artists have all responded with equal concern and ingenuity to
these issues. For example, in 2014, The Walker Art Center in the US commissioned
artist Ralph Lemon for his performance titled Scaffold Room (2014). Part gallery
installation, part theatre-video piece, Lemon’s Scaffold Room—conceived and
directed by Lemon and performed by Okwui Okpokwasili, April Matthis and Edna
Carter—examines the margins of presentation and form in linking live and videobased performance, text and music to review manufactured images of female pop
artists in America in the culture of contemporary art. As the Walker Center’s curator
of performing arts, Philip Bither explains, in this instance the museum paid Lemon
with what he calls ‘memory acquisition’ or their iteration of the work. Lemon has
subsequently gone on to perform a reimaged version of his 2014 work as Scaffold
Room: (Memory) refraction #1, in which he created new material for the work.
In response to this type of approach to commissioning contemporary performance,
Bither, as cited in Julie Baumgardner’s article, states that “This approach to
commissioning and acquisition is unique and is often only negotiated in multidisciplinary institutions such as the Walker Center for the Arts or MCA Chicago
where curatorial approaches to stewardship and collaboration are always being
tested”.208 In this context, however, failed attempts have been made by contemporary
artists to withdraw entirely from the market. Forbidding any form of documentation
208 Baumgardner, “How Performance”.
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(although iPhone footage of his work can be viewed on YouTube), Tino Sehgal’s
predominantly ephemeral one-off performances, which consist of live meetings
between people in mostly museum environments, or what he refers to as ‘constructed
encounters’, embrace raw materials of voice, language and movement. Sehgal’s 2003
work The Kiss, a durational performance work lasting several hours which includes a
couple (professional dancers) enacting famous kisses from art history, establishes
everyday performative situations that rework conventional art/audience relationships.
Comprising of moving, fluid dance-like tableaus, The Kiss focuses on the performers’
transitory choreographed gestures of intimate, mostly private experiences in a public
space.
The Museum of Modern art acquired The Kiss in 2008 for $US70,000 for its
collection, but again, not in the traditional way. First, Sehgal verbally communicated
the work’s blueprint to a museum staff member, which was then revealed (again
verbally) to the museum’s purchasing collector. Such an acquisition process means
that MoMA can only present the The Kiss (2003) with Sehgal or one of Sehgal’s team
member’s guidance. This kind of acquisition process establishes that artist’s legal
rights are securely bound, but once the artist dies or perhaps decides to leave the art
world, so too does the work. Technology and its role in challenging traditional habits
and methods of collecting, documenting, commissioning, and producing performance
and video art cannot be underestimated. A number of social media platforms,
including Instagram, has meant that formal documentation of artworks now becomes
easily accessible and available for mass consumption without necessarily involving
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the gallery or museum. This means that, as Julie Baumgardner observes, “memory no
longer has exclusive rights over a performance’s domain.”209
How we engage with images has dramatically altered. Comer contends in Julie
Baumgardner’s article, that as a result museums and galleries need to create, “new
methodologies to document histories that otherwise are not even there”.210
Institutions, galleries, collectors and also audiences are starting to shift their previous
assumptions relating to performance and video art; however, this cross-disciplinary
experimentation, Bither writes, has “long been the domain of the artist. Attempting to
carve new paths where worlds can talk to each other, it’s not us (collectors) at work—
it’s what the artists are doing. Artists are being trained without these separations and
barriers between disciplines”.211 Despite the adventurous ways in which contemporary
collectors now invest in performance art and the pioneering attempts of earlier video
and performance art at resisting participation in market forces through a
disengagement with object-based mediums, what prevails is that no cultural discourse
can really be positioned outside of late capitalism and its ideologies of consumerism
and reproduction.
Not unlike the live ‘ritual-in-performance’ work of Ono, Abramović, and Mendieta,
pioneering video-based performance artists of the mid-1960s and 1970s212 were also
attempting to adopt video to re-mobilise notions of self and subjectivity through both
directly confessional and confessional-like performances. More specifically, what
artists were able to locate in video technology was its potential to be co-opted as both
209 Baumgardner, “How Performance”.
210 Ibid.
211 Baumgardner, “How Performance”.
212 Including Martha Rosler, Bruce Nauman, Peter Campus, Doris Totten Chase, Shigeko Kubota and Hannah Wilkie.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 99
a personal and political tool through an aestheticisation of the self to further consider
and dismantle a variety of socio-political issues. Challenged by the technologies
presented through video to establish a balance of new personalised political visual
language or, as art historian and theorist David Joselit describes, “an equivalence
between the personal and the political”.213 Author and video artist Chris MeighAndrews explains that this new visual language enabled artists the ability to navigate,
document their subjectivities in order to “forge new encounters between themselves,
their work, and their audiences… it provided a greater urgency in documenting
ideas”.214 Artists who found themselves outside of normative subjectivities –
heterosexual, white and male – started to exploit video’s closed-circuit system as a
mirror-confessor in self-directed autobiographical works. These works helped
facilitate for such artists a platform to develop new approaches in legitimising and
representing themselves. This quickly became apparent in the work of feminist artists,
many of whom were sidelined in conventional high art arenas.215
Feminist video artists during the early mid-1960s and 1970s, as a result, began to
formulate new approaches to their subjectivity in the intimacy and domestic nature
that video production provided. This is reflected in feminist video and performance
artists and how, during this period, predominately male-produced images of violence
against women became a subject for many feminist artists to politicise their personal
experience through socially performed bodily experiences. Responding to the notion
of ‘the personal is political’, in this context Amelia Jones observes that it, “can be
seen as recognition by feminists artists that all bodily experiences carries an
213 Joselit, David, “Touching Pictures: Toward a Political Science of Video” in Art of Projection, eds, Christpher Eamon, Bal, Mike, Colomina, Beatriz, and
Stan Douglas, USA: Distributed by Art Pub Incorporated, 2009), 113.
214 Meigh-Andrews, Chris, A History of Video Art: The Development of Form And Function, (USA; UK Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 23.
215 Examples of these feminist artists include Martha Rosler, Doris Totten Chase, Shigeko Kubota, and Hannah Wilkie and Lynda Benglis.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 100
inescapably social aspect, and that all political engagement has an unavoidably bodily
component”.216
What Jones is saying here is that all female feminist artists, who include their body in
their practice can be said to enact the ‘personal is political’ approach to their practice.
While certainly adhering to a position that the use of an artist’s body in their own art
situates the body (and the self) as a mode of communication, particularly in less
private spaces, this hasn’t always been the reality in more recent visual art practices.
Contemporary artists, regardless of their feminist or non-feminist self-identification,
who include their body in their work are not necessarily intending to engage with
personal politics; politics perhaps, but not exclusively, a personal politics.217
An earlier artist who demonstrates Jones’ position – often through a confessional
lens—is Lynda Benglis. Benglis’ Female Sensibility (1973) depicts a lesbian liaison
between two women, one of them Benglis and other her friend Marilyn Lenknowsky.
Primarily a sculptor, Benglis executed a number of video works in the mid-1970s as
an extension of her ideas surrounding female sexuality and identity—two prominent
themes that are present in her abstract, process-orientated sculptural work. Through
her examination of video, Benglis transforms her interest in human form and its
representation into a more technologically investigative and self-reflexive platform to
engage with feminist sexual politics. Benglis’ unique technical approach to editing
and re-shooting footage on the monitor and heavily manipulating the image on the
screen enabled the artist to intimately explore the process and limitations of human
presence and form. Using her own body in her video work, and also incorporating the
use of multiple images of herself, Benglis was better positioned to convey a personal
216 Jones, Self/Imag, 24.
217 Examples here include, Janaina Tschäpe, Mariko Mori and Kimsooja.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 101
space for herself—a personal space that conveys an interface between her inner and
outer realities and the relation of the body to the self. In, and apart from, the use of her
own body as a site for art-making, Female Sensibility (1973) succeeded in opening up
a number of wider social-political questions. For instance, how should a female artist
represent herself in her work in relation to feminist politics? How should a female
audience respond to sexualised material made by a female artist?218 In the social
context of early-mid 1970s feminist film theory involving the gendered gaze and
theories of authorship, Benglis’ video work is situated. In Female Sensibility (1973),
Benglis, through staging a shared sexual desire through her own agency demonstrates
a form of viewing that attempts to question rather than produce a personal intimacy
with herself on public display. Similarly, this repositioning of the subjectivity in a
reworking of the dynamics of voyeurism is later reproduced in the live performance
work of Krystufek’s performance Satisfaction (1996), referred to previously.
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 8. Benglis, Lynda. Female Sensibility, single channel video, with colour and sound, duration 13:05 mins, 1973.
218 Richmond, Susan, “The Ins and Outs of Female Sexuality: A 1973 video by Lynda Benglis,” Camera Obscura, Vol.23.No.3. (2003): 81-108.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 102
Situated in a similar social-political context of the mid-1970s is a video work by Chris
Burden. The unambiguously titled The Confession (1974) employs a similar approach
to that of Benglis—the examination of self-legitimation through the aestheticisation
of the self. However, in Burden’s work, the raw, perhaps desperate, need for external
validation seems to have a greater emphasis. The work employs a pre-modern
confessional dynamic; one that alludes to an historical/religious environment in which
the confessant verbalises intimate narratives to a confessor with validation or
absolution as a desired and expected aim. Completed at the Contemporary Arts Center
in Cincinnati, Burden invited the first twenty-five people that he’d met (for the first
time) during the initial days of his arrival to witness his confessions. The Confession
(1974), showing only a close up of Burden’s face, was screened into an alternative
room where guests were seated in a semi-circle around a television monitor. Deeply
affected at the time by having to make a decision concerning whether or not to end a
psychical and emotional ménage à trois with two women, Burden expressed to the
group what he refers to as ‘disturbing knowledge’ which, he believed, incidentally
was needed to reconcile with the group his public (now famous) image as an artist
with the image they’d supposedly had (according to him) after their initial meeting.
Burden talked for approximately half an hour. Then, reportedly, without any
discussion, the guests left quickly left in silence. An example of somewhat early video
work, The Confession (1974), exemplifies how, in the performance-to-camera works
viewed in a square three-dimensional frame (or monitor) manages to heighten and
expose the artist’s vulnerability and openness.
Additionally, the single-screen, performance-to-camera approach to video art
production with its direct involvement and inauthentic sense of intimacy provided by
the artist is an obvious illusion. For many artists producing video art during the 1960s
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 103
and 1970s, Burden included, the fundamental illusionism of the moving image
became a source of self-scrutiny, fascination and political analysis for communicating
personal agendas and subjectivities. The contingences between video and reflexivity
has, since the 1970s, been a staple of critical analysis of video art production.
Arguably, the most referenced text on this subject is Rosalind Krauss’ essay, Video:
The Aesthetics of Narcissism (1978). A paradigm that Krauss presents with her essay
is Vito Aconci’s Centers (1971) as she focuses on a number of video works that
utilise the video camera as a reflective mirror that acts to demonstrate a real-time
interaction with the self in a live feedback situation. Video here, as Blom reveals, “is
understood to foreground a particular psychological model; a state of narcissistic selfencapsulation in which the body or psyche produces its own surround in a kind of
infinite regress”.219
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 9. Burden, Chris. The Confession, (video still), single channel video with a TV monitor in a nearby room, shown
at the Contemporary art Center in Cincinnati, duration 30 mins (approx), 1974.
219 Blom, The Autobiography, 19.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 104
Burden’s video Confession (1975) is not entirely dissimilar to Aconci’s Centers
(1971) with his use of real-time, close-up, performance-to-camera on a monitor as a
method of narcissistic self-encapsulation (his automatic assumption that total
strangers would be interested in sexual dilemmas of a famous, misinterpreted artist
attests to this), but perhaps without the infinite regress. Turning the camera on myself
within my video work enables me to not only engage in the deliberate, self-conscious,
act of self-exposure, it also subsequently facilitates the establishment of my own
autonomy and agency. The particular strategy of intentional self-exposure evokes less
the eternalising technicity of writing than the psychological structure of narcissism. In
her essay, “Narcissism and Feminism and Video Art: Some Solutions to the Problem
of Representation” (1981), Micki McGee notes that female artists are too readily
accused of narcissism if they use themselves as a site and surface of art-making in
front of the camera. If the female body is already the object of voyeurism, turning the
video or camera on themselves can be read simultaneously as both an exposure and a
strategic reversal of a key instrument of masculine power in the field of the visual.220
McGee seems above all haunted by the spectre of narcissism (or the authorial
performance-to-camera position) and its threat of serving up subjectivity as a
commodity, the product of a closed feedback loop or the, “critical relation to a non
self/image world is crucial”.221 Consequently, the self-monitoring video art of Lynda
Benglis (and other early feminist video artists) are denounced for allowing themselves
to, as McGee writes, “be bracketed by the technology, turned in on themselves,
220 McGee, Micki, “Narcissism, Feminism and Video Art: Some Solutions to a Problem of Representation”, Heresies, No. 12, (1981), 90.
221 McGee, “Narcissism,” 90.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 105
trapped between themselves and the image of themselves like all narcissists”.222 If the
questionable suppression of difference that speaks to and confirms a culture of hyperindividualism in a late capitalist environment, then agency or automatous acts of selfreflexivity in contemporary confessional video practice can be interpreted as an effect
of a technical-ideological device that examines the political possibilities of
subjectivity. This is reflected in film and video and how such media are centred on the
subject of autobiography—notably, the human subject and the way in which its autorepresentation on video modifies or problematises specific ideas about subjectivity
and identity. This issue, along with the examination of subject formation in public
space, is discussed in the following chapter.
222 Ibid.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 106
Chapter 3: Re-imaging Public Spaces, Subjectivity,
and Confessional Art
Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry.
I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful.
I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art. Felix
Gonzales-Torres 223
To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific
repercussions on the pre-invented world. David Wojnarowicz 224
Early Twenty-First Century Definitions of Public and Private Spaces
In the introduction, the views of Malamud Smith and Bloustein surrounding privacy
were discussed. Both their mutually complimentary positions around privacy
established the prominence of confession and private experiences or the voluntary
disclosure of personal information in public space (in any form) with shame or a
limiting shame-inducing discourse. Such a fixed position, I argue, leaves an
unexamined space for the possibility of exploring the potential links between selfdisclosure and resistance and politics in public space through video-based
confessional art. Mobilising my confessional art practice as a process of examining
ongoing subjectivity or subject formation in public spaces and spheres as an
appropriated technologies-of-the-self practice is a method in which the possibility of
self-subjectivity can be further examined and situated. However, if public spatial
agendas are directed by and constructed around various normative paradigms of
community and participation, then their influence on behaviour (including confession)
cannot be denied. A consideration of space is warranted here, in order to provide a
closer examination of how certain behaviours and emotions are often modified and, at
times, censored in public spaces by various forms of institutional ideologies –
223 Gonzales-Torres and Jan Avgikos, Felix, Felix Gonzales-Torres, (USA:A.R.T Press,1993), 23.
224 Laing, Olivia, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone Great Briton: Conogate Books Ltd, 214.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 107
ideologies that often encourage and/or enforce an adherence to normative and
heteronormative conduct and expression 225. Additionally, and perhaps most
importantly, in this examination of space and its relation to behaviour, the potentiality
for contemporary confessional video art, as site of resistance can be imagined.
Defining contemporary private and public spaces and spheres is complex. Given that
such spaces maintain an ongoing and symbiotic relationship with one another, their
definition remains multivalent and ever-changing 226. Adding to the complexity of
locating a fixed definition, such spaces maintain a variety of meanings and
descriptions when applied to different social and cultural settings 227. Logistically,
spatialised public spaces can be described as state-constructed physical sites which
are easily identifiable geographies of everyday movement at either a local, regional or
global level. Such sites include cities, public access areas in neighbourhoods,
shopping centres and public transport. Moreover, public space can also include less
spatialised arenas of institutional and electronic spaces and spheres, such as the
internet, the media, public opinion and government policies and procedures.228 Many
aspects of less spatialised public spheres are privately owned, such as television
networks. Privately owned public spheres are often regulated and managed by the
state and/or various organisations, businesses and multinational companies. Similarly,
there is significant state and/or institutional regulation over many aspects and uses of
private spaces. Most notably, these include the surveillance of personal activities in
public spaces and laws governing sexuality and reproduction. Private space, as
225 Butler, Giving,112; Gibson, (Dis)allowances; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public,”;
226 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public,”; Staeheli, A. Lyn and Don Mitchell, “ Spaces of Public and Private: Locating Politics in Spaces of Democracy:
Geographical Perspectives in Citizenship, Participation and Representation,” SAGE, (2004): 147.
227 Staeheli and Mitchell, “Spaces,”; Smith and Low, The Politics of Public Space (USA: Routledge, 2006); Benhabib, Models; Lefebvre, Henri, The
Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (UK: Cambridge, Mass; USA: Blackwell, 1991); Robbins, “Introduction”.
228 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public,”; Smith and Low, The Politics.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 108
opposed to public space, is often considered enclosed and delineated, and while far
from free of certain forms of regulation, is generally protected by state-regulated rules
relating to private property, such as residential dwellings, places of worship and
private gathering places 229. In their publication The Politics of Public Space (2006),
the authors Low and Smith maintain that some clear definitions of what public (and
some aspects of private space) is not, start to emerge when connections are made to
capitalism, in particular, late-capitalism. They propose that in an early twenty-first
century economic environment, it is difficult not to comprehend public space as a
fully developed product of a late capitalism. This interdependent relationship between
public space and an organised institution is a strategy of neoliberalism in controlling
public space. Low and Smith furthermore assert that the direct impact of the
deterioration of twentieth-century American liberalism—ignited by a variety of social
and cultural shifts—had on redefining the characterisations and politics of public
space in the United States and beyond is significant. Such social and cultural shifts,
they concede, include “the response against 1960s social politics; the collapse of
official communism after 1989; and the subsequent encroachment of widespread
neoliberalism during the 1980s”.230 These developments have seen a pervasive
redefinition and re-regulation of public space, including numerous closures and
conversions at the request of various corporate and state initiations and agendas. As a
result, public spaces, rather than being sites where equality, diversity and democracy
are embraced and tolerated, now emerge as sites of intense privatisation, commerce
and hyper-surveillance.231 In other words, public spaces have become highly regulated
sites of cultural and economic activity. By highlighting the significant connections
229 Smith and Low, The Politics; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public”; Robbins, “Introduction”; Staeheli and Mitchell, “Spaces,”
230 Smith, and Low, The Politics.
231 Smith, and Low, The Politics; Benhabib, Models; Harvey, Spaces.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 109
between the political and cultural economy and public space, Low and Smith reveal
how such a closely interwoven and symbiotic relationship can been viewed as a quite
forceful expression of social power, which can potentially shape social relations and
social realities in public spaces and spheres. Low and Smith outline the cultural,
historical and geographical specificity of privatised public space in order to suggest
the possibility of an alternative politics, thus leading to the possibility of a reimagined
public space. The authors maintain that despite the widespread repression as a result
of the increasing neoliberalism of public space and spheres, spontaneous, organised
and creative political actions can potentially transform these spaces of subjugation to
potential sites of democracy through spontaneous and organised political actions. This
can be seen in the potential political reframing of the self away from more coercive
models of subjugation. This is apparent in how individuals now utilise (and expand)
technology in online spaces of contemporary confessional discourse, as discussed in
Chapter one. While public space has been theorised as a space of politics, it is also a
space that is also constituted in and through privacy.232 Private spaces are sanctioned
spaces where civil liberties protect individuals in the formation of autonomous
political subjects, which then go on to potentially create new locations for democracy
and politics in public spaces and spheres.233
Institutionalised Heteronormativity in Public Spaces
Foucault observes that biopolitics in Western democracies contributes to the
construction of the idea of normative universality, against which particular acts of
political non-adherence by subjects can be both explicitly and implicitly judged,
232 Staeheli and Mitchell, “Spaces,”
233 Ibid.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 110
punished and often excluded.234 Additionally, Judith Butler explains how singular
lives are often routinely denied full participation and legitimacy in a capitalist heteropatriarchy, given their non-allegiance to the perceived natural and privileged sexual
norm.235 Heteronormativity in public space remains embedded at an institutional level,
and is manifested in a number of social policies that reinforce various political
ideologies 236. Further evidence of the prevalence of heteronormativity is made
apparent in various sociological studies that focus on the relationships between the
individual, citizenship, sexuality and space in which spatial agendas have been
directed by heteronormative paradigms of community.237 In such paradigms where
heteronormative behaviour (sexuality-related or otherwise) is often encouraged and
privileged, questions surface relating to what is and, more specifically, what is not
socially permissible in public spaces. Constructions and ideas of citizenship are
predominately based on assumptions relating to sexuality, specifically, hegemonic
heterosexuality.238 Low and Smith outline the cultural, historical and geographical
specificity of privatised and re-politicised public space. This approach is adopted in
order not only to articulate possible explanations for heteronormativity, but also
establish the possibility for a reimagined political public sphere. In this
heteronormative inscription of space, a negotiation over the control and dominance of
space can be seen as some groups in these spaces to possess more social status and
power and thus more ability to govern and dominate.239 As a result, such power results
in less heteronormative groups in society finding it difficult to inscribe their values in
234 Zylinska, Joanna, The Ethics of Cultural Studies (New York: Continuum, 2005).
235 Butler, Giving.
236 Harvey, Spaces; Dean, “The Antisocial”; Gibson, (Dis)allowances; Staeheli and Mitchell, “Spaces”.
237 Dean, “The Antisocial”; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public”; Harvey, Spaces.
238 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public”; Butler, Giving.
239 Dean, “The Antisocial”; Staeheli and Mitchell, “Spaces”; Harvey, Spaces.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 111
public spaces and spheres. For instance, my video, live performance, installation
work, titled These are patriarchal times. Private life is public business (2014) is an
attempt to externalise my own psychological realms that surface while living as a
non-heterosexual in a late capitalist landscape. An intention of the work was to
transform my personal dislocations into a visual strategy of disclosure in an attempt to
document, sometimes through symbolism, sensations of loneliness, agitation, anxiety
or a fragmented state of mind. By interrogating traditional modes of selfrepresentation in live and video-based performance, my confessional art practice often
becomes a form of implicit self-analysis of self-portraiture that echoes a similar
examination of self-representation present in confessional video art practices during
the 1990s. By examining available options to extend self-representation, These are
patriarchal times. Private life is public business (2014), oscillates between selfmockery, fantasy and sincerity, in order to construct a forum for my own artistic (and
non-artistic) failures, successes, self-delusions and disappointments or a mock selfaestheticisation. The processes of expanding self-representation through an opening
up of the transpersonal in a public space demonstrates how the possibility of selfformation can be situated and further reclaimed. This reclamation through a
confessional live performance, a performance which engages my own body, thus
becomes a creative and political instrument. By incorporating my own body as a site
and surface of art-making, opportunities become available to formulate a counterdiscourse to challenge heteronormatively constructed public spaces.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 112
Figure 10. Early, Jaye. These are patriarchal times. Private life is public business, (performance
still), PhD confirmation exhibition, video, performance, painting, mixed media, sound, 2014.
For both Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, heterosexuality is positioned as the
accepted and privileged sexual norm. By challenging the dominance of this
heteronormative position, they contend that heterosexuality and homosexuality are
historical and social constructs that are formed in a variety of institutional regulatory
regimes. Both argue that homosexuality as a category was developed in order to
maintain and reaffirm the hegemonic position of heterosexuality. In a scientific
process of categorisation, homosexuality was subsequently constructed and
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 113
maintained as a perverse, deviant or inauthentic other.240 Butler and Foucault criticise
structuralist notions of power in public and private spaces as repressive. In such
criticism, they adopt a post-structuralist deconstruction of power that focuses on
power as discursive and productive.241 In the constructed nature of both categories of
heterosexuality and homosexuality, according to Butler and Foucault, opportunities
for destabilisation can be located through various forms of resistance. In theorising
issues of power and the constitution of the subject, and its relation to sexuality and
gender, Butler and Foucault complement each other. However, on the issue of agency,
and more specifically, the power of agency relating to the materiality of the body,
Butler and Foucault start to diverge. For Butler, the materiality of the body gives a
false sense of identity, in that the individual is constituted through a materialisation of
the body by discursive practices. Butler contends that individuals are nothing more
than the carriers of language. They have little opportunity to challenge, resist or stand
outside of the dominant discourse. In contrast, in Foucault’s theorising, the individual
is not constituted through the materialisation of the body. Therefore, he believes that
by attempting to transcend such repressive confines of physical materiality, a mode of
resistance can be situated.242 Similarly, Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri
Lefebvre perceives the body as a productive force, and therefore a form of agency and
possible resistance. For Lefebvre, the body is an intrinsic part of the lived experience,
given that subjects engage their senses through bodily processes in order to perceive
space. He argues the importance of lived space as a potential place of resistance
through imagination and through the formulation of counter-discourses.243 Butler,
240 Foucault, “The Subject”.
241 Dean, “The Antisocial”; Staeheli and Mitchell, “Spaces”; Johnson, Carol, “Heteronormative Citizenship and the Politics of Passing, SAGE, Vol 5 (3).
(2002).
242 Bulkens, Maartje, “A Delicious Leisure Activity?: Spatial Resistance to Heteronormativity in Public Space,” PhD, Wageningen University, 2009.
243 Lefebvre, The Production.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 114
however, conceives gender as a reiterated social performance, and explains that a
form of resistance can be located when an individual, through parody and
performance, consciously confronts conventions around sexuality and gender. She
argues that when an individual speaks and acts in a gendered, socially prescribed way,
they reinforce what is normalised by creating a copy of it.
This form of resistance is related to Foucault’s idea of crossing-over and the
formation of counter-discourses. It is, however, human agency, that differentiates
Foucault and Butler. For Butler, the body does not have an ontological status.
Conversely, Foucault argues that the body is the primary site of control and therefore
a site of resistance, given its ontological status. If heterosexuality is structured in the
hegemonic position as the normal and natural sexuality, then public space, by
extension, is also produced around this position.244 This position is a digressional
formation, the result of a process of recitation in spatial (and social) terms, and
subsequently has visible and real effects on people whose lives are not structured
around the adherence to heteronormative codes and morals.245 Due to these spatial
processes, both heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals often find themselves locked in a
spatial web of heteronormativity. Subsequently, in such heteronormatively spatialised
public spaces, individuals are conditioned to closely monitor, limit and censor what
emotions and behaviours they can and cannot express in public spaces.246
244 Dean, “The Antisocial”; Harvey, Spaces.
245 Johnson, “Heteronormative”
246 Johnson, “Heteronormative”; Dean, “The Antisocial”; Harvey, Spaces.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 115
Re-imagining Public Spaces and Subjectivity as a Site of Politics and
Democratisation
Through technologies of the self, Foucault emphasises the possibility of politicising
the relationship to the self. Foucault’s work on confession is concerned with the
technologies for producing truth in the modern subject, and incorporates a whole
range of discursive practices other than those loosely called confession. My research
posits that this can be achieved by moving away from a single framework of
confession to a more creative utilisation via the adaptation of technologies of the self
in contemporary confessional video art to enhance subjectivity. While it cannot be
divorced from the interpersonal sphere, the act of confession in visual arts practice
constitutes a relatively safe platform for self-disclosure. Utilised as a direct or indirect
confessional medium, confessional art prescribes no axiomatic absolution and neither
does it provide a universal means to deal with the consequences of the confession.247
In my work, I rely on my own resources in the act of confession in an attempt to
locate a conscious need to relate to something other than myself, while at the same
time opening myself up to artistic and non-artistic critical scrutiny and narcissistic
vulnerabilities.
Video-based performance art practices that exist in public spaces function not just to
circumvent questions of commodity, but such practices also potentially act, in the
actual space, to confront ideological and regulatory institutions—both physically and
dynamically.248 By establishing public space (including gallery spaces) as a site of
politics and democracy, my own confessional video art reclaims a political power that
facilitates the possibility of my own de-subjugation as an individual in public space
247 Hymer, Confessions.
248 Thompson, Nato, Gregory Schalette and Nicolas Mirzoeff, The Interventionists: Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (USA: MASS
MoCA, 2004).
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 116
that is largely heteronormatively defined. The spatial potential of video-based
performance art for such an engaged disruption of heteronormative social spaces
stems in part from its resistance to the established norms of the art world, and
bringing video performance to a public space potentially highlights the proclivity of
contemporary confessional video art to create zones in which the social and the
artistic cannot be separated.249 In making porous such artificial boundaries,
contemporary video-based confessional art in public spaces insists on questioning all
such divisions of relations of power, including those that are thought to distinguish
artist from audience, although this relationship does not always result in positive
porosity or in moments of productive disruption. In this respect, when artists disrupt
public space (gallery or non-gallery spaces) by disclosing intimate narratives, they
inadvertently assert their own personalised subjectivity as a member of an amorphous
public, therefore extending the possibilities not just of resistance through artistic
means, but through their everyday (confessional) action in the world. Admittedly, as
mentioned previously, we can never really exist outside of power relations; we will
always be products of power to some degree. However, a level of self-developed
freedom in this dynamic is possible and available. Fejes and Dahlstedt reiterate that,
“if we were subjugated from and in dominating discourses, subjectivity would be
determined rather than elicited, and power would no longer be exercised; power
would then be supplemented by a situation of constraint”.250 If freedom is a
prerequisite to the exercise of power and is found in the ‘agonism’ of power relations,
then there will always be an incitement to act in a particular way in such power
relations. However, individuals can always wilfully act in disregard of this incitation.
Low and Smith raised the possibility of a different politics of public space and a re249 Ibid.
250 Andreas, and Dahlstedt, The Confessing, 22.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 117
imagined public sphere through spontaneous and organised political action.
Reimagined public spaces through art-making can be a productive tool to produce
sites that relate to the politics of the self. By ultimately engaging with a process of a
self-exploration through a kind of self-extension, via self-disclosure, confessional art
practices create opportunities to politicise public space. My own confessional art aims
to support and locate, through a process of acknowledgement, disavowed aspects of
myself. Such a heightening of self-engenders the emergence of a more consolidated
and elevated sense of self-subjectivity and creative potency. The subsequent
reimagined power that constitutes me as an individual or subject can be harnessed to
forge new ways of being and approaching the self. In light of political, technological
and social changes that influence the meanings and histories of self, subjectivity and
identity in a late capitalist landscape, questions relating to who we are and how the
individual is constructed become particularly problematised. For example, questions
such as whether there is a human ‘nature’ which precedes or endures beyond society;
whether historical situations regulate human emotional response; whether new forms
of technology and communication effect/affect self-knowledge; whether consumerism
commodifies identity; and whether our everyday social contracts and the subsequent
management of such interactions determine or obscure who we are251. It would be a
futile task to conclusively define what subjectivity is in the scope of this research.
Such a weighty project would best suit a more sociological-themed research project,
because the various approaches previously undertaken relating to the understandings
of the subject across a variety of disciplines tend to, as Mansfield observes,
251 Mansfeild, Nick, Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Hararway, (Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2000); Schneewind, Jerome B., The Invention
of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Korsgaard, Christine M, “Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity,
and Integrity,” Oxford Scholarship online (2009). http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199552795.001.0001/acprof9780199552795
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 118
“interpenetrate and complicate one another”.252 By adopting a Foucauldian discourse
analysis that relates to philosophical notions of the self, the present research aims to
posit any speculation of the subject and self-subjectivity and their development and
expression in confessional art practice as just that: speculative. Given the highly
personalised and idiosyncratic experiences that form its evolving, subjectivity is
primarily an experience that is forever open to irregularity and inconsistency. In other
words, subjectivity is a process, rather than a structure, and as such, falls outside
convenient and easily communicated frameworks of understanding.
The use of the term subjectivity, in addition to the above, is situated in an idea that the
subject or the legal/social/political subject is—in a variety of ways, in its
institutionalisation—formed in laws and constitutions that delineate the parameters of
its socialisation and social interactions in fixed codes and established power relations
prescribed by the state.253 This formation of subject and, in part, its formation of
subjectivity, requires of the subject ‘honest’ citizenship and a variety of social
obligations. In these expected social obligations, the subject agrees to what the
Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) refers to as a “social
contract”.254 In this social contract, the state demands certain responsibilities of the
subject, and in return pledges the subject certain freedoms and individual rights.
The aim, throughout my research, has been to examine my own subjectivity through a
confessional video art practice in an attempt to locate a space in which my own
subjectivity is able to autonomously reconstitute itself politically. The development of
252 Mansfeild, Subjectivity.
253 Korsgaard, “Self-Constitution”; Rose, Inventing; Richardson , “Claiming”.
254 Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) examines the question: how can humans live together and simultaneously remain free. Or, more specifically, how
humans can live together and remain free from the oppressive and coercive forces imposed by others. Rousseau’s social contract theory posits that we are
provided with freedom and equality by nature. However, Rousseau argues that our nature has been corrupted by our contingent social history. Given this, he
argues for pragmatic and rationale society under the authority of a despotic ruler who enforces and embodies popular will.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 119
my own subjectivity through expressing private experiences and narratives publicly
can be described as a purely idiosyncratic modality which, through its reflection of,
and situation in, wider external political and cultural dynamics, contributes to a
repositioning of myself politically. This development becomes a forum which,
through a reposition, reconstitutes myself outside of coercive institutional forces, even
if only temporarily. I intend that the politicisation of my own ongoing subjectivity be
viewed as a politicisation of my everyday life that takes place in the interface between
the individual and the collective in which I, the artist, am situated. If the subject
becomes political in its subjectivity, in the sense that the subject occupies a continued
sense of subjugating or conjugating the world into significant and temporal patterns,
then such engagement supports the subject as a social subject.255 Or, put another way,
the subject (or me, the artist) politically comes to be through the ongoing act of both
interpretation and being interpreted (from the audience). This locates and confirms the
politicisation of myself in the art-making process and, in turn, this act becomes the
confessional act which inadvertently reveals the process of where I make sense to
myself and where I am, ideally, made sense of by others or the audience. This builds
on Foucault’s later examination of power in relation to the self, in that power does not
function through the concession or through eliminating the truth; but rather, the
creating (or art-making) assigns truth. Here, I am creating a formation of power that,
through confessional video art, provides a more comprehensible understanding of
both myself and of the world around me.
255 Korsgaard, “Self-Constitution”; Mansfield, Subjectivity.
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Subjectivity in a Postmodern Landscape
Two main theories of subjectivity that have dominated the second half of the
twentieth century, are those that aim to express the structure of the subject (its
‘truth’), and those that see any explanation of subjectivity as the product of power.256
The former is associated with psychoanalysis and the work of Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan; the later with the work of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Despite the opposition, both positions agree in viewing this older theory of the
subject—the ‘individual’—as a mirage of language’s symbolic order or of power.257
Here, both approaches identify the vital instrument by which this context creates the
individual: language. To psychoanalysis, the Foucauldian tradition deliberately
neglects a comprehensive description of the nature of the subject.258 Initially, for
Foucault (this position is reviewed in later studies), the compulsion to derive a
conclusive understanding of the nature of the subject makes psychoanalysis a
totalitarian theory. A theory that directly engages and enforces institutional power
rather than frustrating or redirecting it. Foucault’s influential theory of the
relationship between the subject and power finds its premise in Marxist philosopher
Louis Althusser (1918–90). During the 1960s, when post-structuralist theories were
becoming increasingly popular, Althusser started to develop analysis of how the
subject is situated in capitalism.259 Althusser’s most prominent meditation on the
subject is reflected in his essay titled “On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1969–70). In this essay Althusser examines how
citizens become the passive workers and consumers that capitalism relies on. The
256 Schneewind, “The Invention”.
257 Ibid.
258 Hymer, Confessions.
259 Korsgaard, “Self-Constitution”.
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essay investigates how the structure of a capitalist society reproduces itself 260.
Althusser deliberates that such questions cannot easily be answered, because he
avoids associating the forces of capitalist state oppression, or what he refers to as
‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ (that is, the army, the police and the prison system) as
the obvious offenders. If what makes up our psychic experiences are our individual
perceptions, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that, through time, alter our relation to
space (both public and private), then the meaning of the subject constantly, through an
autonomously self-crafted subjectivity, generates re-information in terms of its
distinctive relation to and interpretation of the world. The interpretation of
subjectivity that the present research is aligned with is an approach that moves away
from Foucault’s initial anti-subjectivist position present in his earlier works, a
position greatly influenced by Nietzsche, and later implemented by Donna Haraway.
An anti-subjectivist position somewhat dogmatically situates the individual as an
externally constructed self through the coercive influences of power, science and
technology, or a legal/social/political subject. Therefore, as much as subjectivity is a
process of individualism, it is also a process of socialisation.
It is impossible for the individual to exist in isolation in a self-contained environment.
Through necessity, the individual is endlessly caught in a constant state of negotiation
and engagement with its surroundings. Therefore, subjectivity can be examined as a
social mode that comes about through contact with others in society.261 As a result, we
may speculate that subjectivity is shaped by and in turn subsequently shapes
economic realities, political institutions and communities, given that culture is a living
totality of the subjectivity of any given society constantly undergoing
260 Schneewind, “The Invention”; Korsgaard, “Self-Constitution”; Mansfield, Subjectivity.
261 Korsgaard, “Self-Constitution”
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transformation.262 Concerned with the methodologies surrounding how and when
individuals started to think politically in order to further comprehend themselves in
relations to others, ‘political subjectivity’—an emerging concept in social sciences
and humanities—refers to the embeddedness of subjectivity in socially intertwined
systems of meaning and power. Professor of medical anthropology, Sadeq Rahimi in
Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity: A Study of Schizophrenia in Turkey
(2015), asserts that the politicisation of the self and its expression is not an added
aspect of the subject, but indeed the mode of being of the subject and is certainly how
self-subjectivity is formed.
The politicisation of subjectivity through a confessional video art practice can be seen
as the politicisation of my everyday life. Reflecting essential psychoanalytical
theories, the majority of which, as Rahimi explains, “Can be understood as the
development theories all of which take place between the interface between the
individual and the collective. Lacanian psychoanalysis formulates the subject in
linguistic form and in doing so opens the way for the convergence of power to
interesting and important terms of analysis including power, meaning, and desire, and
of course resistance”.263
For Rahimi, resistance, like meaning, is never final and is always subject to slippage.
An implication of this is that in order to better understand the political, and much of
political resistance, Rahimi explains:
We need to focus our attention not just on the macro political world of social and
historical facts but also, if not more so, on the subject simultaneously thriving in
and struggling against the world. The reverse also holds, if we want to
262 Korsgaard, “Self-Constitution”; Sadeq, Rahimi, “Political Subjectivity in Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Work Today,”(video 12:42min), February
11, 2012, Accessed 11 March, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0OeHuBqtWM
263 Sadeq, “Political Subjectivity”.
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understand the process of subjectivity and inter-subject relations we no longer
afford to the macro political word inhabited by those subjects regardless of
where the subject is and what kinds of political histories and realities they have
264
to come to terms with in order to survive as social subjects.
Therefore, the self-sufficient model in which Rousseau employs in his publication
The Confessions (1782) becomes a workable model of subjectivity which my research
has attempted, to a small degree employ, but certainty to contemporise. This
contemporisation is not possible without implementing Foucault’s reconceptualisation
of the individual, the self and subjectivity present in his more recent scholarship
surrounding technologies of the self. Before this reframing, Foucault’s position
relating to the individual was very much opposed to that of Rousseau’s. Rousseau
sees the individual as self-sufficient, by focusing on the autonomy or governing
freedom of individual experience. In The Confessions (1782), Rousseau describes his
solitary walking in a secluded forest as a period in which a reanimation and
rediscovery of his individuality, his freedom, becomes a reality. Rousseau’s formation
of self-sufficiency is realised near the opening, where he writes:
I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once
complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in
every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray to myself. Simply myself. I
know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any
one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole
world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or
ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me, is a question that can only be
265
resolved after reading my book.
This model of the individual or model of individuality that triumphs over the
corruptions present in a contingent social history, a history that includes both a pre264 Ibid.
265 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Confessions, (UK Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,1953), 17.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 124
modern and postmodern state and institutional power, is an ode to personal power and
accomplishment.266 Accordingly, Rousseau’s model of the individual as self-contained
and complete becomes a framework of the individual which Foucault, initially,
disputed. In Rousseau’s model, oppression takes place after the subject has been made
complete by Nature. The individual comes first; its self-subjectivity is already present
but hidden, and external forms of power confuse and limit the individual. To recover
our self-sufficiency, Rousseau suggests that we must first become aware of external
powers, then through this awareness, resist them.
Foucault, however, initially maintained an opposing narrative. For Foucault, it is
institutional power that precedes the individual. Power determines how we construct
our identity and individuality, from our idiosyncratic gestures, our construction of
language, through to our own unique desires. They are all orchestrated for us, rather
than by us, through institutional power 267. As a result, however, individuals then
become, for Foucault, the very essence or material of power, rather than antagonists
of it. Individuals are the vehicle through which power finds its expression. What
makes individuals an effective vehicle for power is that we seek to see ourselves free
of it and be naturally occurring. For Foucault, Rousseau’s model of individuality is
one that enables power to conceal itself, and thus to operate so effectively. As
Rousseau resoundingly and subsequently makes clear, the self has become a silent but
also a compellingly urgent dilemma of modernity.268 Rousseau does not conceive his
own subjectivity as a complete whole in his intimate disclosures, given his
incompleteness and seemingly ongoing contradictions as a complete whole. As
266 Sadeq, “Political Subjectivity”; Mansfield, Subjectivity.
267 Mansfield, Subjectivity; Korsgaard, “Self-Constitution”
268 Mansfield, Subjectivity
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Mansfield observes, Rousseau: “conceived subjectivity in all its manifestations not
always consistent, not always admirable, and not always logical, but at all times
worthy of study and description. The sheer scale of individual experience entitles it to
be the basis of the starting point and ground of all meaning”.269
A number of contemporary artists have not deployed video to examine and
communicate modes of subjectivity in a vacuum; their situation in and contextual
relationship to the social/political conditions of late capitalism have subsequently
influenced their subject formation. As Jones reveals:
The shifting modes of subjectivity… the issues of aesthetics and the self are not
esoteric or limited exclusively to art history, but connect with the pressing
political questions of meaning and cultural value in industrial and post-industrial
270
global capitalism.
As discussed previously, if subjectivity is both shaped and in turn shapes the
economy, political institutions and even historical circumstances, then new forms of
technology and modes of communication enviably influence and impact subjectivity
and self-knowledge. Subjectivity and its formation can be influenced by the role of
consumerism and materialism and their impact on identity construction. For instance,
the influence of ideas that aim to determine human ‘nature’ and whether the roles we
adopt in everyday life, and the subsequent management of social interactions, produce
or conceal who we are. Therefore, as Mansfield concedes, the subject is always
connected to an external something outside of it, “one is always subject to or of
something”.271 The formation of subjectivity as determined through the
aestheticisation of self on social media is a particular phenomenon unique to an
269 Ibid.
270 Jones, Self/Image, 27.
271 Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories, 11.
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eternally confessing postmodern environment, a phenomenon that confirms the
subject’s dependence on the external something. As Mansfield states:
This focus of the self as the centre of both lived experience and of discernible
meaning has become one of the – if not the – defining issues of modern and
postmodern cultures. As many postmodern theorists have tried to point out, the
contemporary era is an era in which we must constantly confess our feelings: we
answer magazine questionaries about what we want, surveys about what
politicians we like, focus groups about how we react to advertising campaigns
272
and so on.
Throughout its history, video as a technical apparatus has been utilised for a variety of
purposes other than television; for instance, as a surveillance and security device, as
an entertainment device in the production of video games and more recently the
internet. In this respect, the social dimension of video art is always at play, however
aestheticised. Although many of the radical conceptual innovations of early video art,
have, as Elwes elaborates, “been absorbed by the mainstream or have been lost under
the mass amnesia of a contemporary commercialised art world, many of the
methodologies have survived and have been reinvented in a changing social, political
and technological landscape”.273 In an age of ubiquitous camera functions, video art,
now more than ever, presents itself as an autobiographical medium par excellence, a
technology at the service of subjects, continuously monitoring their existence across a
variety of digital devices big and small, cheap and expensive, stationary or mobile. As
the ubiquity of contemporary confessional forms today leads to them becoming
increasingly mobilised as platforms of self-disclosure, an opportunity to reconnoitre, a
new criteria for contemporary confessional art can be located. Here, opportunities
become available to remobilise traditional notions of subjectivity inherited by
previous video artists to forge a new set of possibilities for contemporary confessional
272 Ibid., 73.
273 Elwes, Video Art, 192.
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video art. In this remobilisation, an evaluation of previous power relations that
centred on a pre-modern framework of confession occurs and a new set of values
relating to the politics of the self is taken on by recent artists. For instance, a number
of contemporary artists, working with live and video-based performance, have
examined how new paradigms in confession and confessional-like art practices which
explore new lines of enquiry that has established a greater autonomy between
institutional discourse and the self. This autonomy has a less totalising effect on the
individual or, as Adam Isaiah Green notes, when analysing the complexities of postFoucauldian disciplinary power relating to the sexual and gendered self, an autonomy
that potentially positions the self as “an epochal project [that] conjoined with
reflexive scrutiny […] is subject to a heretofore deeper and novel self-fashioning”.274
While the narcissistic aestheticisation of the self was enthusiastically examined with
the development of video art in the 1960s and 1970s, the medium was taken up again
in the mid-1990s (and beyond) by a number of artists, to not only examine a new set
of possibilities for confession, but also under a new set of inherited social and
political conditions. If the micro-temporalities of video art during the 1960 and 1970s
are interpreted as pioneers in presenting experimental and reflective approaches to the
social, a new mode of experimentation and reflexivity relevant to a new age of a realtime technologies now takes on a variety of approaches and methods. Such
contemporary social-political approaches and methods that attest and reiterate
Foucault’s critical examination into the culture of the self, resonate with the presence
of a form of consumerist-driven hyper-individualism now situated in late capitalism.
Here, new forms of self-reflexivity in contemporary confessional video art can be
positioned as a “technical-ideological apparatus vested in the production of
274 Green, Adam Isaiah, “Remembering Foucault: Queer Theory and Disciplinary Power” Sexualities, Vol. 13, No. 3, June (2010): 317.
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subjectivity.”275 If earlier video practices worked in a pre-modern ritualistic and
historical framework of confessional discourse, a framework that posited confession
as an institutional force—coercive, shameful and authoritarian—contemporary video
practices are now concerned with a new paradigm of confession: liberated,
autonomous, and public. Examples of artists who use this practice are, Dani Marti,
Allan Currall, and Sadie Benning. While projecting and embracing confession and
confessional-like elements, the work of these artists concentrates on a style and
approach that navigates fictitious (often digital) realities, including the vicissitudes of
selfhood and identity, a critique of private and public space, personal and collective
trauma, and the merging of the political and the personal in various levels of selfreflexive states. Before going to examine, in greater detail, some of the work of these
video artists, it is worthwhile to situate, politically and socially, the emergence of
video art from the 1990s.
The Emergence of Video Art and Subjectivity from the 1990s and
Beyond
Establishing itself as a central medium during the 1990s, video art become
increasingly accepted in mainstream commercial galleries and large cultural
institutions. Often discredited as the medium of truth, video art during the 1990s, as
Elwes observes, “was more often discussed for what it couldn’t do than for what it
actually achieved”.276 For instance, Sam Taylor-Wood’s four screen projection work
Killing Time (1994) consists of four of Taylor-Wood’s friends as they indifferently
lip-sync Richard Strauss’ opera Electra. Brazenly uncommitted to performing any
275 Blom, The Autobiography, 19.
276 Elwes, Video Art. 24.
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convincing lip-syncing ability, the four protagonists, as Elwes describes,
“intermittently fidget, smoke, bite their nails or look around disconsolately”277
throughout the video while participating in a duplicitous exchange of self-exposure
and self-concealment. In Killing Time (1994), Taylor-Wood is concerned with what
Michael O’Pray calls the “leakages of the flaws in the performance that offer clues to
the authentic feelings of the performer” 278. Assuming that the non-performers in the
work will reveal something of the artists own subjectivities, Killing Time (1994), is
concerned with a mode of disclosing in which a kind of portrait of ‘truth’ is focused
on, however mediated, by profiling four friends killing time seemingly trapped in a
sense of hopelessness and banality experienced felt by the artist herself. In much of
Taylor-Wood’s work, the sense of widespread political impotence in England during
the 1990s is inadvertently portrayed. As the notion of performativity is examined
during the 1990s in both video and photography, a performativity that posited the
gestural self-revelation as a form of self-comprehension, the definition of meaning in
art began, as Elwes writes, “to move away from the ‘active’ viewer back to the
subject of the work who was seen to form the image with the complicity of the imagemaker, frequently one and the same person”.279
277 Ibid., 25.
278 O’Pray, Michael, The British Avant –Garde Film, 1926-1995: An Anthology of Writings (England: The University of Luton Press, 1996), 23.
279 Elwes, Video Art. 28.
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This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 11. Taylor Wood, Sam. Killing Time, (composite still video images), four-screen video
installation with colour and sound, first installed at The Showroom gallery, duration 48:30 mins, 1994.
In such shifts, the construction and presentation of identity is often depicted as a
hybridised shifting amalgam of everything and everyone. The performative, with its
implications of self-invention, seems to suggest a core quality that is not, in fact,
upheld by social or physical reality.280 Notions of difference once justified social
inequality as, Peter Gidel notes, “give one – and everyone equally – an identity that
isn’t oppressed because it’s all just a masquerade anyway. Sameness as a concept to
sell us yet again the lie of democracy in social and personal-psychological terms”.281
Unable or unwilling to declare a subjectivity or a social position separate from the
catalogue of pre-existing representations found in unceasing consumerism,
individuals now experience themselves as an amorphous cluster of disorientated,
aspirational, hyper-individualist and intensely self-focused subjects. As a result, in the
280 Elwes, Video Art. 31.
281 Gidel, Peter, “There is no other”, in Filmwaves, Issue 14, (2001), 23.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 131
social political production of video art, this internal fragmentation and symbiotic
relationship with popular culture has, Elwes maintains:
A strong parodic strain in video into the 1990s. In spite of the theoreticians
declaring the project doomed from the outset, the YBA generation were
committed to describing the chains that bind as were the antecedents. Perhaps
they were betraying an unconscious hope inherited from the previous generation
282
that naming the tyrant is the first step towards loosening its grip”.
As video technology became progressively more sophisticated during the 1980s,
1990s and 2000s, an increase in production values become apparent, particularly with
the introduction and use of digital video. Such developments introduced a renewal of
video art, as an art form, as a discursive area. As these developments emerged (such
as colour processing, digital editing and image laying), artists started to produce
increasingly innovative aesthetic and stylistic methods of video production that
contained a high-quality, polished feel, replete with sophisticated cinematic references
(for instance, Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002)). Advancements
in editing processes also meant that artists could more readily experiment with
fractured non-linear narratives, such as compressing and extending time. This helped
artists to more creatively and accurately reflect, examine and enhance their
subjectivities on video. However, as Elwes notes, despite these technological
advancements and widespread access to portable video equipment, certain artists
during the late 1980s and 1990s returned to the less sophisticated post-production
aesthetics. Armed with a Fisher Price PXL200, Sadie Benning combined an
outpouring of intimate confessions form her personal life with a mash-up blend of
audio-visual sound bites from popular culture, including television and mainstream
music. The simplicity of Benning’s Fisher Price camera provides a form of technical
282 Elwes, Video Art, 48.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 132
or televisual substantiation or validation for Benning, which, along with the combined
use of intimate self-disclosure and estrangement, are seen as a kind of trademark of
video autobiography. Benning’s (perhaps overtly conscious) lack of expensive
technical sophistication, patchy shooting style, poor editing and post-production
qualities seem to confirm, and appropriately reflect, a lazy or cynical non-self-mastery
of a teenager growing up during the early 1990s. Benning’s impulsively shot scenes
are hurried, fragmented and never ponder too long on one object or scene. The closeup of the artist’s body parts, journal writings and various objects in her room
accompany an ongoing narration of her confessions. Here, the confessional subject
(the artist herself) presents as a disorderly production which, as Ina Blom writes,
“mediates the connection between an outer world and an inner self, that from the
outset eschews any attempts at ‘imaging’ the self as a consistent entity”.283 The
fragmentary strategy Benning employs, combined with her narrated negotiations of
her sexuality, which in turn are a significant focus of her confessions, underscore the
sense that, for Benning, her subjectivity is similarly plural and ambiguous, since
autobiography tends to, at times, undo rather than reinforce the representational
stability of the subject and subjectivity.
283 Blom, The Autobiography, 38.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 133
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons .
Figure 12. Benning, Sadie. If Every Girl Had a Diary, single-channel Fisher-Price camera, black and
white, sound, duration 8:00 mins,1990.
Since its inception in the 1960s and 1970s, video artists have enthusiastically
exploited video’s technological advancements. As a result, many of the abstract,
aesthetic, political and philosophical ideas underpinning artist work were able to
materialise. Not unlike their predecessors, video artists during the 1990s and beyond
were also locating opportunities for subversion. Artists during this period
experimented with video’s default role or function as an apparatus of documentation
and instead examined its potential to be utilised as tool to invent imaginative realities,
realities that have more of an emotional impact. A number of video artists during the
1990s began to appropriate and deploy self-narratives and images along with their
curiosity and internal questioning as a deconstructive strategy for exposing the
distortions and inequities not only in society but also in the constructions of
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 134
mainstream media representations.284 The ambiguity of Gilliam Wearing’s Dancing in
Peckham (1994), which sees the artist unselfconsciously dancing solo seemingly to
music she can only hear in a crowed shopping centre – a public space which, Russell
Ferguson identifies as, “a space between the parameters that define our social
normality and the notional point of unmediated expression”,285 – reflects a certain
crisis of contemporary subjectivity. This is a crisis which, as represented in the
mimetic confines of a musical vernacular, connotes, in equal parts, both tension and
self-liberation.
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 13. Wearing, Gilliam. Dancing in Peckham, single-channel video, colour, sound, duration 25
mins, 1994.
While earlier video art of the 1960s and 1970s, specifically feminist video art,
employed the concealment of the essential self as a strategy waiting to be freed, selfidentified female feminist video artists during the 1990s externalised, in their work,
what was already part of them, namely those elements of culture which, as Elwes
284 Artists here include; Isaac Julien, Peter Savage, Duvet Brothers, Bill Viola, David Hall, Chris Meigh-Matthews, Stan Douglas, Catherine Elwes, Psychic
TV, Vera Frenkel, Louise Forshaw, Mick Hartney, Colin Campbell and British scratch video group Gorilla Tapes.
285 Ferguson, Russell, “Show your Emotions”, in Gillian Wearing, (UK: Phaidon Press, UK),145.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 135
recognises, “have come to embody their aspirations but which rub up against
unnamed energies and desires that call from the outside the perimeter fence of the
monoculture”.286 The work of early video artists of the 1960s and 1970s attempted to
dismantle the banal stereotypes produced and promoted by television, political
rhetoric, media discourse, institutional attitudes and, in parts, cinema. These
mainstream cultural forms, many artists maintained, established a definition of human
typology that espoused intense social prejudice. For instance, racism, homophobia
and misogyny. Moving forward into the 1980s and beyond, a number of video artists
have adopted methods of appropriation and manipulation to mimic those same
stereotypes as a destructive strategy for exposing the distortions and inequalities of
these same media representations.287 During the 1990s pop culture references started
to become increasingly integrated into video art practice in order not only to reflect
and represent the reality of popular culture and its influence on society, but also to
challenge superseded traditions and preoccupations relating to the moving image.288
They recycled the saturated and dominant images of 1990s popular culture along
with, at times, the repetitive performances of earlier video art and performance art
(Gina Pane, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci), along with established high-art practices
of painting and sculpture. Thus, a form of postmodern parody was utilised as a tool
for subversion for a number of video artists during the mid-1990s. These videos
embraced the abject and visceral to get their humour and subversion across.
In Michael Curran’s video work, Sentimental Journey (1995), the artist, with a
heavily bruised eye, quietly goes about shaving his face in front of a mirror to a his
286 Elwes, Video Art, 165.
287 Elwes, Video Art, 135;
288 Meigh-Andrews, A History; Elwes, Video Art.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 136
own version of Sentimental Journey written by Les Brown and Ben Horner in 1944.
The video reflects a phase of video art during the mid-1990s which saw a number of
artists defamiliarise popular music with satirical performance-to-camera work. In
Cheryl Donegan’s Make Dream (1993), the use of a parody is employed to challenge
and mimic the overt masculinity depicted not only in the high-art traditions of
painting but also the many films made about Jackon Pollock. By expressing her own
interpretation of Pollock’s action painting, Donegan attaches a number of paint-filled
bottles around her waist and with the sexual provocation of a go-go dancer uses her
body to paint onto a blank canvas. Without the use of her hands, Donegan catches the
bottle between her thighs and manages to squeeze splatters of paint onto the canvas. If
the view that any woman’s personal experience or subjective narratives expressed
publicly against patriarchy is by extension a political act, than the self-memorising
ability of video art facilitates an autonomous, self-directed, space for political selfrepresentation.
The tendency to seek out methods of personalised, often fragmented, subjectivities
through self-representation in the media age, David E. James asserts: “only in the
multiple, dispersed yet interconnected practices that constitute television can an
adequately extensive, flexible, and nuanced metaphor for the self now be found”.289
As Blom iterates, a more sophisticated examination of anti-specular dynamics of
video feedback might “substitute the concept of a fragmented subjectivity with that of
‘the fractal subject’, but the key perspective remains the same: video autobiography is
a technologically-driven opening up of the very question of the individual subject”.290
289 James, David E, “Lynn Hershman: The Subject of Autobiography” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, eds. Michael Renov and Erika
Suderburg, (Minneapolis: The University of Minneapolis Press, 1995), 145.
290 Blom, The Autobiography, 37.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 137
This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons.
Figure 14. Marti, Dani. time is the fire in which we burn, single-channel HD video, colour, sound,
installation with mixed media, duration 2 hours:35 mins, 2009.
Post-millennial confessional video art practice often reflects the artist’s own mistrust
of, not only their own image, but also their non-allegiance to a fixed subjectivity. The
overt contradictions present in a number of video works of by Dani Marti reveal a
number of paradoxes that cannot be easily reconciled through a reliance or adherence
to a pre-modern confessional framework. For instance, Marti’s 2009 multi-format
work made up of painting, installation and video, time is the fire in which we Burn
occupy a set of conditions of contemporary confessional practice that evidence the
inherent contradiction and deconstructions associated with Groys’ ‘self-design’. The
video component in particular – which can be viewed separately from the samemaned installation – demands discomforting disorientation of truth and lies. The twohour and thirty-five minute-long video documents a prolonged exchange that takes
place in an intimate setting (a bedroom) between the artist (Marti) and ‘John’, a
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 138
former (or present) substance-dependant gay porn actor and sex worker. In the video,
Marti and ‘John’ (or confessor and confessant) are unclothed. From this it is unclear
whether a monetary exchange has been taken place either for the interview or a sexual
exchange, as ‘John’ only reveals his sex worker status some way through the video.
The intermittent disappearances off-screen by Marti throughout the video establishes
additional uncertainty about who ‘John’ is actually confessing to. Given this, it
quickly becomes unclear if Marti or the camera, in his absence, is the confessor; are
‘John’s’ self-disclosures heard by Marti while he is off-screen? Is ‘John’ presenting
his narrative to Marti—a private confession between two lovers and friends—or us,
the absent viewer? As the narrative continues throughout the video it slowly becomes
apparent that ‘John’ may in fact be an alias. From this, questions start to surface that
potentially flip the entire dynamic of the video; the unreliability of who is the
confessor and who is the confessant and the authenticity surrounding what’s true and
what isn’t. Is ‘John’ revealing to ‘Marti the lover’ the whole truth about his identity
and his past? Or is ‘John’ telling ‘Marti the artist’ what he thinks he wants to hear, or
indeed what he has been scripted to say?
The work cleverly oscillates between the appearance of sincerity, insincerity and
deceit. This ambiguity and doubt surrounding ‘John’s’ – and by extension, Marti’s
sincerity—highlight the, at times, problematical navigation and nuanced
contradictions that often present in contemporary confessional discourse. The
playfully mediated oscillation between sincerity and deceit within time is the fire in
which we burn is hinged to a representational paradox; for on the one hand it
presupposes belief in the act of portrayal and on the other hand it tacitly admits
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 139
portraiture’s inevitable failure to accurately capture. 291The new aesthetic presentation
of the self, hinted at in the mechanisms of Groys’ ‘self-design’, helps to re-conceive
and also to recontextualise the dynamic between art and life. This has a particular
resonance with contemporary confessional video art practices in which the shift away
from traditional tactics of confession and politicalised self-disclosure present in
earlier video works, is replaced with an ambition to represent—through a deeper
consideration of subjectivity in a tele-visual apparatus—more autonomously
controlled and staged personalised realities, experiences and situations.
Scottish artist Alan Currall has used video and the ‘talking head’ delivery as the
primary mode of his practice since the 1990s. Traversing the Emin and Wearing
triumphant self-design of the mid-1990s through to the unreliable self-design of Dani
Marti in the post-millennium, Currall’s practice evidences the same deconstruction
through often subtle appearances of sincerity and insincerity. Not dissimilar to
Benning’s video works, Currall’s often low-fi videos, complete with shoddy lighting
and low-level post-production, cleverly explore the breakdown of sincerity and truth
through a series of stark narrative juxtapositions.
Consisting of a number of separately edited video works that are then made into one
work, Currall’s 2000 project Encyclopaedia begins as a curation of his talking heads
from the mid-late 1990s, presented first at in Stoke-on-Trent (his English town of
birth) and then at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. The videos
weave between the earnest and the silly, the appearance and sincere longing for
meaningful friendships and the clichés of their failure. Lying about myself in order to
appear more interesting (1999) we are presented with what appears to be a very
291 I acknowledge and thank my initial Ph.D., supervisor Dr Toby Juliff for the many discussions we had throughout 2015–16, during which we discussed
many contemporary confessional video art works, including Dani Marti and Alan Currall.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 140
genuine ‘show and tell’ of a personal archive of objects through which Currall
explains their considerable personal value whilst at the same time playfully lulling the
viewer into false sense of belief. In Jetsam, an earlier short talking head video work
from 1995, is indicative of this strained relationship between sincerity and insincerity
in Currall’s work. Wearing a nondescript t-shirt, Currall narrates straight to camera
his overtly fictitious autobiography: Currall is an alien whose ship has crash landed in
Scotland. The alien has taken on a human appearance and decided to become an artist
and work at the local art school. It makes for an easy allegory of strangeness – alien
meaning ‘other’, Currall is English–born but identifies as Scottish – but it also plays
out a discomforting relations of self-design. At one, Currall is being serious and
sincere when he wants to be, and silly and insincere when he wants to be. In so doing,
the artist reminds us that what is at stake with sincerity and truth is not its production
but the appearance of its production. The construction and display of the self through
at times, questionable, fictitious lens is a strategy for examining the ongoing process
of subject formation of the artist and also, conceivably, the viewer. Undoubtedly, as
this chapter has outlined, space, in particular heteronormatively spatialised public
space, and its relation to behaviour, is a significant component of this examination of
subjectivity. Through re-imagining public space as site of democratisation, this
chapter has established contemporary confessional video art as not only a form of
political resistance but also a public platform to consider and reconsider the
complexities of the self through a political reframing of the self and subjectivity away
from more coercive frameworks of subjugation.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 141
Conclusion
In 1983, a year before his death, Foucault presented a lecture at UC Berkley titled,
“The Culture of Self”. A central premise that Foucault considers within this lecture is
the question: How do human beings promote themselves as subjects? In addressing
this concern, Foucault reveals that the culture of self is inseparable from the prospect
of promoting new forms of subjectivity. Such considerations helped to redefine
Foucault’s later work. This promotion of subjectivity within his later work has
undoubtedly lead to important evaluations of political freedom and resistance. If we
are acted upon most effectively by power relations internal to our own sense of
ourselves, then the resistance to power must start from a revaluation of the
constitution of subjectivity. My research has situated contemporary confessional
video art as a contemporary technologies-of-the-self practice in order to examine the
relationship between contemporary confessional video art, power and subjectivity.
This iteration as a technologies-of-the-self practice leads, not only, to a political
freedom for me, but also to a more considered awareness of confessional art’s ability
to further reveal and comprehend the complexities and, at times, contradictions
surrounding contemporary subjectivity.
In Foucault’s lectures delivered at the Collège de France, he deliberated on the
historical ontology of ourselves. He did this by drawing on Kant’s concept of “man’s
emergence from his self-imposed nonage”, a term Kant defines as: “The inability to
use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance”.292 Elaborating on his
emergence, it is in Foucault’s broader consideration of the historical ontology of
292 Kant, Immanuel, “What is Enlightenment?” in Practical Philosophy: Immanuel Kant, eds. by Mary J. Gregor, (Cambridge, New York, Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 226.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 142
ourselves that he analyses three sets of relations: “our relation to truth, our relation to
obligation, and more significantly, our relations to ourselves”.293 Foucault’s analysis
of the historical ontology of ourselves beginning in antiquity and ending, at
approximately, the early part of the twentieth century, provides significant insight into
a predominant philosophical question facing contemporary society: the question of
self. In his posthumously published 1988 essay collection “Technologies of the Self”,
Foucault attempts to unpack questions that relate to the self and its formation.
Foucault situates this examination by turning his attention to ancient, pre-Christian,
Greek concepts of technologies of the self, and locates a subjectivity or self-formation
that is derived from a different tradition than those found in a pre-modern framework
of ritualised religious confession. Subsequently, Foucault’s self-reflective discourse in
his later work becomes a crucial technique of both being acted upon and of acting
upon oneself. In other words, how the self is subjectified by external, coercive, forces
of dominance or, alternatively how the ‘self’ automatously knows and creates itself.
Foucault’s self-reflective discourse, in his later work, overwhelmingly focuses on the
later. As a technique, the act of self-reflection within a technologies-of-the-self
practice is prioritised, for Foucault, as a form of subject formation. Self-reflective
discourse within technologies-of-the-self practices becomes a critical technology of
both domination and self-care, of being acted upon and of acting upon oneself.
Interpreted as a technology, Foucault insists that being acted upon and acting upon
oneself are always interwoven and overlapping. This form of interconnectedness is
what Foucault terms ‘govenmentality.’294 Foucault believed that the theory relating to
the governmentalisation of the self brings out the freedom of the subject, and also
(and this is certainly more apparent in antiquity) its relationship to others. The
293 Ibid.
294 Foucault, The Care.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 143
departure point and subtext in Foucault’s overall genealogy of confession—which the
study of the governmentalisation is part of—is to revoke established paradigms
surrounding how we think and formulate concepts about ourselves in the present; in
short, an ontology of ourselves in the here and now. As such, he wrote about care-ofthe-self practices in antiquity with the intent of directing us to think more critically
about contemporary forms of subjectivity and subsequently the ethical formation of
the self in relation to the public. The appropriation of Foucault’s philosophical notions
of the self, located within his examination of technologies of the self, is a significant
theoretical framework I have utilised to help facilitate a critical engagement with my
own subjectivity and the subsequent politicisation of myself within my contemporary
confessional video art practice as an act of resistance. A crucial element, for me, in
thinking more critically about the construction (and deconstruction) of subjectivity
within contemporary confessional video art, is the element of confession. My
confession, through video, becomes an antidote for dissolving the sense of difference
that comes when one believes one’s feelings or desires to be uniquely shameful. My
research has focused on the relation between confession, subjectivity and public space
in order to extend the boundaries of traditional self-representation found within
previous confessional and confessional-like video art practices. This has been
evidenced by establishing how Foucault recognised a specific category of historical
practices within antiquity in which individuals potentially constitute their own
automatous self-formation or transform themselves into a self-actualised subject. This
examination of Foucault’s later work has constituted productive ground to examine
the relations between subjectivity and confession as a specific strategy for rethinking
the politics of myself, or how my subjectivity is able to autonomously reconstitute
itself politically and publically. The development of my own subjectivity through the
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 144
confessional act is a specific modality which, through its relation to, and
contextualisation in, the wider social/political dynamics of a contemporary
confessional landscape, establishes an ongoing platform to reconstitute myself outside
of coercive institutional forces. This process of reconstitution reflects Foucault’s
examination of power in relation to the ethical formation of the self; a formation of
power and subjectivity that, through confessional art and the mechanism of video,
provides a more comprehensible understanding of myself. My own confessional video
art work becomes a medium through which to locate and utilise my own individual
freedom—through the act of confession—to examine and express a less coercive and
more self-governing framework of the self. This self-crafted framework situates my
confessional video art practice as a contemporary technology of the self-practice. A
technology of the self-practice that encourages and facilitates, through the mechanism
of video, a forum through which I am able to more directly engage with an
examination of my own subjectivity within a contemporary confessing landscape. As
the research states, the contemporary confessional landscape is no longer simply tied
to a pre-modern Christian framework of confession. As a result, contemporary
confessional discourse can be viewed as an impulse that asserts itself through
technology (predominately online technologies) to locate an inscription of the self, or
an ongoing creative self-expression. Given this, my contemporary confessional video
art practice can be described as a medium which enables my subjectivity to be
examined and processed ontologically through the first-person perspective of a
confessing subject.295 As a technology-of-the-self practice, my own contemporary
confessional video art enables a process of ontological reflexivity that reformulates
concepts of the self through the confessional act. This process, along within video’s
295 Blom, The Autobiography.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 145
unique ontological link to the first-person perspective, provides the creative selfexpression for me to dissect, elucidate and present my subjectivity. For instance,
within my video work, Brian (2016). The intentionally deceptive or unstable
presentation of myself is presented as a strategy to question how my perceived
identity is formulated and experienced. The dialogue comes from a radio story
produced by Jake Warga, a freelance radio editor from Stanford, California. In the
radio story, originally titled Brian’s Story, Warga interviews his old college friend
Brian about his experiences of dislocation, depression and subsequent suicide attempt.
The low-budget performance-to-camera aesthetic in the video aims to replicate an
amateurish online interview format. In the work, I am lip-syncing Brian’s lines from
Warga’s interview in a disjointed, almost dead-pan manner. But there is more to it
than this. The seemingly inconsistent and fabricated style of story-telling—heightened
through my decision to lip-sync Brian’s words—is a strategy that is utilised to
deliberately underscore, problematise and expand the frustrations and inadequacies
that I frequently experience when attempting to communicate complex emotional
psychological states. The audio’s switched-around technique serves to heighten the
emotional impact of my self-disclosure, via Brian’s, to reveal and examine my own
experiences of social isolation and to also navigate and comprehend my thoughts and
feelings related to social dislocation, depression and suicidal ideation. As a technical
apparatus, video has the unique capability to negotiate and manipulate
communication. It can distort ‘fictitious’ narratives in order to construct levels of selfdelusion that serves as a coping device for me. Along with the deliberate aestheticism
that video offers in communicating interior emotional and psychological states, the
mechanisms of video (and video art) also become, simultaneously, a form of
reclamation and resistance. The 1990s saw a ‘the confessional turn’ in contemporary
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 146
video art. More recent practices of confessional and confessional-like video art have
sought to further deconstruct coercive mechanisms of ritual and shame (within
confessional discourse). Michel Foucault’s later work on the confessional and its
radical 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. This shift has, the research
maintains, been widely embraced by a new generation of artists that have mobilised
the self-monitoring capabilities of video art to examine a new paradigm of
confessional video art. If the video practices of baby boomers examined the tortured
inheritance of older confessional forms—private and coercive—contemporary
confessional video art practice examines the public ubiquity and self-directed freedom
of contemporary confession. For instance, my own video, Private Life is Public
Business (2017) shot in the private interior spaces of my apartment (bathroom,
bedroom and lounge room) attempts to occupy the slippages between the previous
order of confessional practices and contemporary conditions of self-design. In
particular, the deconstructive manoeuvring of self-design that a technologies-of-theself practice allows. Through a repositioning of confessional elements, Private Life is
Public Business (2017) attempts to guide the viewer’s interpretation or perception by
positioning the confessional subject as the narrator. To facilitate this, the inclusion of
a number of post-editing quirks, such as disguise and the use of fictitious characters
and story-lines, becomes useful devices. The aesthetics of a large-scale, performanceto-camera approach and the appearance of sincerity, mark out the complicated
navigation and paradoxes inherent within contemporary subjectivity. By displaying
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 147
mostly close-ups of my face and upper body as a strategy to establish and heighten
my own vulnerability, the work evokes an intentionally intimate encounter as a study
into authenticity, self-awareness and exhibitionism. It is a study that presents a
platform for the contradictory set of behaviours and attitudes that relate to the
construction, deconstruction and then reconstruction of myself through a number of
embarrassing self-disclosures relating to self-doubt, contradiction, sincerity, fantasy,
and a blunt, at times, awkward honestly, that is mixed together with a clumsy attempt
at humour. The narrative is repetitious and the volume is intentionally sporadic
throughout; completely muted in some scenes, disjointed and time-delayed in others.
The volume ranges from whisper-quiet to annoyingly loud. Private Life is Public
Business (2017) is neither shameful nor coercive; instead it is public, liberated, and
unapologetic. The work attempts to pick up the subject reframed for the twenty-first
century confessing landscape to whom the confessional practices of the past are now
but a dim spectre for most.
My research has outlined Foucault’s genealogy of confessional practices—from its
theologisation through to its secularisation—to examine a new set of conditions for
the post-millennium. Confessional forms, and subsequently contemporary
confessional video art practices, are no longer ubiquitous with shame, co-dependency
and coercion but rather the construction and preservation of a more independent and
autonomously crafted self. Such a shift is undoubtedly political as much as it is
cultural and social. Foucault (and by extension, Groys) suggests that the pre-modern
Christian frameworks of confessional forms did not evidence truth, they produced it.
Conversely, as Private Life is Public Business (2017) suggests, the more designed the
confessional is, the less truth and sincerity is produced. New structures of
confessional practices, emerging in art since the 1990s, now seek to occupy the shifts
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 148
that have developed in the collapse of regulated structures of confessional discourse.
Private Life is Public Business (2017) locates a political framework to examine both
the ubiquitousness and unreliability of the self and subjectivity within contemporary
confessional discourse.
The crux of contemporary confession video art then is that it produces a media-age
version of the auto-monitoring subject that first received mass public attention in the
age of epistolary novel. However, it also exposes the centrality of this subject in a late
capitalist landscape, a landscape often described as an economy of excessive
consumerism and of hyper-individualism whose main goal is to reformulate and
extend subjectivity. The construction of self and subjectivity in language is often
complicated and multifarious historical confessional literary narratives were
satisfactory, but live signals, communicated through a screen or a projection,
infiltrates and subverts this historical construction of confession with a far greater
autonomy and visual presence. As this research has demonstrated, the potentially
open-ended properties of subjectivity are key in this context given that the
contemporary confessing subject (me, the artist) may present as a new kind of
experience-based commodity that is geared toward the self-formulated act of
becoming or evolving, that defies traditional assumptions of status and power296. The
ubiquity of contemporary confessional forms, now apparent within this unavoidable
consumerist-driven landscape of hyper-individualism, reveals that the socio-cultural
contingencies of confession remain unparalleled. During mid-1990s, when
bourgeoning confessional forms such as Reality TV programs and pioneering online
social media platforms were reimaging confessional discourse within the collective as
296 McGee, “Narcissism.”
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 149
a medium of mass entertainment, established boundaries between private and public
space started to diminish and become increasingly problematised. These ongoing
socio-cultural contingencies surrounding the mechanism of confession and the
confessional act within a post-millennial environment has, the research posits,
reflected—through technological advancements since the mid-1990s—an
environment where individuals publically present and (re)invent themselves more
readily through self-disclosure By attempting to eliminate socially constructed
boundaries relating to a pre-modern Christian framework of public confession,
privacy and selfhood, the process of self-transformation and self-invention translates,
for me, as a process of examining my own subjectivity. A subjectivity that takes place
within my video work through the politicisation of the confessional act. From this
politicisation, a form of resistance can be located and expressed. Additionally, within
this confessional act (also an act of proclamation), a kind of imaginative reportage of
both validation and agency occurs that aims to resist my own (perhaps imagined)
invisibility and silence. Increasing agency and resisting invisibility have been constant
within my purview as an artist that engages with the dynamics of confession. For me,
it is through the act of confession that I can situate a form of self-truth and selftransformation from regulatory disciplines. The self-directed subjectivity that results
from the confessional act within my video work also serves as a critical lens to assess
the social/political conditions and also the possibilities of our contemporary
confessional environment by subverting, appropriating, and personalising how this
type of confessional dynamic, within video, can be used to examine my own
subjectivity as a form resistance. For me, the confessional act is both a
communicative and expressive act, or a narrative in which I recreate myself by
presenting my own subjective narratives in a public space. The confessional act
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 150
within my video work, undertaken within our contemporary confessional landscape,
is modernised to recalibrate myself rather than negate myself. Our contemporary
confessional environment highlights a late nineteenth century shift in the confessional
enterprise as the desire for personal identity and subject formation within a more
secularised landscape replaces the need for religious absolution. No longer speaking
to God or a priest, the contemporary confessing subject has come to depend on the,
mostly invisible, online other. The popularity of utilising technology (a laptop or an
iPhone camera) as a method to construct, reconstruct and frequently present the self
over and over accurately reflects this as technology replaces God as a focus of
devotion or reverence. Despite the prevalence of confessional forms today, there
appears, as the research has identified, a significant lack of critical discourse
surrounding its relation to the visual arts, specifically, a contemporary confessional
video art practice that examines subjectivity and its relation space. My confessional
video work explores the structures of confessional practices that emerged in art since
the 1990s, and occupies the cracks that have developed in the seismic collapse of
regulated structures of confessional discourse since. By adding to the research of early
confessional forms emerging in late twentieth century British art and responding to an
early twenty-first confessing landscape and its impact on, and relationship to, the
visual arts, the research has re-contextualised the theoretical framework that situates
pre-Christian ancient care-of-the-self practices to demonstrate how such concepts
escape regulatory limitations on contemporary notions of subjectivity. By examining
subjectivity within my own video art practice through an analysis of Foucauldian
philosophical notions of the self, a new set of values and conditions for postmillennium confessional video art practice emerges that adds to the research into the
narrow and largely unexamined genre of confessional video art practice.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 151
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Appendices: Documentation of the PhD examination
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Figure 22. Early, Jaye. Untitled, iPhone camera, sound (video still), 18:11 min, 2017.
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Figure 23. Early, Jaye. Untitled, iPhone camera, sound (video still), 18:11 min, 2017.
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Figure 24. Early, Jaye. Untitled, iPhone camera, sound (video still), 18:11 min, 2017.
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Figure 25. Early, Jaye. Untitled, iPhone camera, sound (video still), 18:11 min, 2017.
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Figure 26. Early, Jaye. Untitled, iPhone camera, sound (video still), 18:11 min, 2017.
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Figure 27. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
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Figure 28. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
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Figure 29. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
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Figure 30. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
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Figure 31. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
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Figure 32. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
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Figure 33. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
http://www.jayeearly.com/video/private-life-is-public-business
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 181
Figure 34. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
http://www.jayeearly.com/video/private-life-is-public-business
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 182
Figure 35. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
http://www.jayeearly.com/video/private-life-is-public-business
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 183
Figure 36. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
http://www.jayeearly.com/video/private-life-is-public-business
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 184
Figure 37. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
http://www.jayeearly.com/video/private-life-is-public-business
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 185
Figure 38. Early, Jaye. Private Life is Public Business, HD video, sound (video still), 35:25 min, 2017.
http://www.jayeearly.com/video/private-life-is-public-business
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 186
Figure 39. Early, Jaye. BLACKFACEWHITEFACEBLACKFACE, iPhone camera, TV screen
(installation shot), 5:40 min, 2016.
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 187
Figure 40. Early, Jaye. BLACKFACEWHITEFACEBLACKFACE, iPhone camera, TV screen (video
still), 5:40 min, 2016.
http://www.jayeearly.com/video/blackfacewhitefaceblackface
Private Experiences in Public Spaces – page 188
Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne
Author/s:
Early, Jaye
Title:
Private experiences in public spaces: "Technologies of the self" within video-based
confessional art and its relationship to subjectivity
Date:
2018
Persistent Link:
http://hdl.handle.net/11343/214021
File Description:
Private experiences in public spaces: "Technologies of the self" within video-based
confessional art and its relationship to subjectivity
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