Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity
Authors: Early Jaye 
Published: February 2025

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

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

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

Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private experiences in public spaces 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 video art practice that utilises video-based performance. The book examines how Michel Foucault’s philosophical notions of the self can be appropriated and mobilised in a contemporary confessional video art practice. Additionally, the book will also discuss 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 technologies of the self. By turning to antiquity, Foucault demonstrates how the discourse surrounding Greco-Roman 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, Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private experiences in public spaces frames contemporary confessional discourse as a less coercive 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 (Instagram, the blogosphere and Facebook), Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private experiences in public spaces posits that contemporary confessional video art gives a voice to displaced subjectivities while presenting a more complex politics of self.