Confessional Art

Definition and Time Frame

The term confessional art was first defined by Outi Remes in The Role of Confession in Late Twentieth Century British Art, which discusses confessional art as a serious, consistent mode for producing art that mimics, reconsiders, and departs from the traditional modes of confession used in the Roman Catholic tradition, autobiographical literature, and psychoanalysis.

In defining confessional art, autobiographical literature provides a helpful comparison. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, distinguish between life writing, life narrative, and autobiography. They define life writing as a general term for writing that takes a historical, novelist, or biographical life as a subject matter, while a self-referential life narrative is considered as a narrower term that includes the subcategories of autobiography and confessional writing. Smith and Watson discuss these categories in relation to literature but do not define confessional art in visual arts.

Like autobiographical forms of art, confessional art draws on the past and borrows and amends real life. It is based on a selection of autobiographical memories, feelings, and events. While both autobiography and confessional art are self-referential, confessional art promises to reveal more. Characteristically, it proposes to share the subject's most intimate and private experiences, events, and emotions with the spectator.

Although confessional art often shocks and sensationalizes the spectator, it also feeds the spectator's ever-growing appetite for personal relations. It responds to a mode of consumption that is familiar from tabloids, reality television, docusoaps, and real-time Internet sites. The paradox of confessional art is that it reveals more than the spectator wants to know: more than the spectator experiences as “safe.” Confessional art reflects, mimics, parodies, and is inspired by Western popular culture, values, and its language and ways of confessing. It explores the relationship between art and society's obsessive voyeurism. Confessional art departs from the conventional values of avantgarde rebellion that is traditionally considered superior to the common experience.

Sometimes the popularity of confessional entertainment encourages the spectator to overemphasize the confessional aspects of the artist's work, while ignoring other potential readings to the work. Confessional art can be mistakenly reduced to an entertaining reality show. This link between popular culture and art has led to some hostile stereotyping by popular press and art critics, such as Julian Stallabrass in High Art Lite. Stallabrass emphasizes the theoretical “liteness” of confessional artists such as Tracey Emin and her generation of artists associated with YBA (Young British Art), arguing that they take advantage of the superficial, sensational, and commercial media obsessions of violence, sex, child abuse, celebrity, and gossip in order to respond to the recession in the art market. Similarly, Robert Garnett, in Occupational Hazard, suggests that British art is cynical, attention seeking, and approaches the everyday without serving to fetish the “low” and affirm the popular. Stallabrass and Garnett consider confession as a simple publicity trick.

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