Art historian and artist Dr Jaye Early addresses themes arising from his new book, Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private Experiences in Public Spaces (2025).
If the 1990s saw what Outi Remes has identified as ‘the confessional turn’ in contemporary art, more recent practices have sought to further deconstruct coercive mechanisms of ritual and shame. Michel Foucault’s late examination of the confessional and its potentiality to form ‘the technologies of the self’ that break the bonds of confessor and confessant marks out confessional practices as the establishment of power structures that lends itself to its own subversion. More recently the ubiquity of confessional forms in culture and its structural relation to institutions of power have taken on different sets of values than earlier art examined. As Boris Groys has attested in a set of essays (2009–2019), there exists an anxiety of self-image and the consumption of that image that marks out a different set of conditions from that explored by Foucault. The shift – from the ‘zero-design’ confessional of Rousseau to the ‘self-design’ confessional of Shia LaBeouf – has been widely embraced by a new generation of video artist. This presentation suggests that the previous oppositions – zero-design = truth, sincerity, shame vs. self-design = mistrust, insincerity, power – demand a deconstruction. This presentation argues for the capacity of contemporary confessional video art practices to occupy these slippages.
Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts, and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
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Jaye Early
Dr Jaye Early’s recent book publication, Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private Experiences in Public Spaces, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2025. This book is a monograph of his practise-led PhD that was completed at the Victorian College of the arts, the University of Melbourne in 2018. Early’s painting and video-based performance work appear in several private and public collections including, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Victorian University. Early has exhibited both nationally and internationally since 2015. Additionally, Early’s painting work have been included in several prestigious national art awards, including: the Archibald prize, John Sulman Prize, the Leicester prize, Moran National Portrait Prize, Victorian Indigenous Art Awards, Redlands Art Award, Darebin Art award, Koorie Art Prize, Bayside Acquisitive Prize, and the Waverley Art Prize.