Tell Me About It: The Role of Confession in Contemporary Art

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the role of confession in recent artistic practices in the United States and United Kingdom, as a recurring motif and as a method for addressing questions of identity formation and institutional power. Although deeply historical, confession also saturates the western contemporary moment, from judicial proceedings to reality television. Its very ubiquity, however, masks the mechanisms of power that elicit and analyze confession, particularly within the twenty-first century American culture of surveillance. Further, confession’s significant role in constituting truths about individual and group identities means that it more dramatically affects minoritarian subjects than those in dominant groups. I bring together works from the United States and United Kingdom to consider the ways shared historical traditions of confession, in Protestant faiths and systems of justice, both persist and diverge in our contemporary moment. More specifically, these works are made and exhibited in a post-September 11th context in which the global consequences of the American political and military-industrial systems depend upon and are disseminated via confessional logic, including “enhanced interrogation,” military imaging techniques aimed at discovering hidden secrets, and news media analysis expressed through feeling. By intervening in ongoing discussions on contemporary confession from an art historical perspective, I argue that analysis of the sensory experiences offered by art contributes to our understanding of confession in a significant way, distinct from other disciplines. I demonstrate that close attention to the relational and embodied practices of contemporary new media art allows us to understand the operations of power that establish and authorize expressions of truth and identity. I offer a consideration of ways artists engage conventions of confession, but, more importantly, argue for the potential for artworks to reimagine social relationships.