Interlude

As each art form turned confessional, the first artists to attempt it had unusual amounts of social privilege—e.g., among poets, Robert Lowell, a Boston Brahmin. That, perhaps, is why confessional artists have tended to be white, at least in early, pivotal moments in each art form. And yet, over and over, these white, confessional artists have adopted the voices of ethnic and racial others, credentialing their angst through appropriation. Not only is confessionalism unbearably white as a movement, but confessional artists tend to find their own whiteness unbearable. Nonwhite confessional artists, though, do something similar—e.g., in comedy, Richard Pryor—blending personal expression with persona performance, fostering identifications across identitarian boundaries.

Coda

Social media platforms have made confessional speech both ubiquitous and mundane. What, you might ask, is the value of a solo voice amid all this aggregated clamor? This coda begins by comparing several examples of new media art, all of which take others’ social media output as the raw material for art: Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s data-visualization site We Feel Fine (2005), Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (2006–present), and Natalie Bookchin’s Testament (2009–present). All of these projects use social media to think through contemporary relations between the individual and the social or political. And so I end by considering what they might have to tell us about confessional politics as they’re practiced in the age of social media: e.g., Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” meme, the “mattress protests” against campus sexual assault started by Emma Sulkowicz of Columbia University, and a public forum held at Amherst College during the antiracist Uprising of 2015. All of these protests began as local acts, but then reached the world via the Internet. What happens when confessions like these travel through channels that have made confession so mundane?

Self-Consciousness Raising

Two narratives dominate existing accounts of feminist art in America in the 1970s. One says that this art was politically and aesthetically naïve, based too firmly in consciousness raising. The other selects a few artists or works to rescue from this decade and celebrate as precociously deconstructive. In feminist theory of the 1980s and 1990s, the favored model for such anti-confessional, ironic performance is drag. This chapter focuses on the work of two performance and conceptual artists of the 1970s who fit neatly into neither of these stories. Linda Montano and Eleanor Antin each blended self-revelation and roleplay, confession and drag into a single practice, which they insisted was basically “autobiographical.” Placing these two artists in their West Coast feminist context (e.g., in relation to the Feminist Art Program), and rereading the history of drag performance itself, this chapter theorizes “camp sincerity” as, in fact, the signature style of self-performance in the 1970s.

Introduction

In Cold War America, “confession” captured the public imagination. The growing popularity of psychoanalysis had something to do with it, as did legal controversies about criminal confession; but, as this introduction argues, there also arose in this period a broader desire for authentic, personal expression—and especially for art that took its time rising from the level of the personal to that of the social, the political, or the universal. Comparing trends in poetry and comedy of the 1950s and 1960s, this introduction argues that a new aesthetic was born at this time, a newly personal approach to art called “confessionalism.” Whatever the medium of the art in question, performance was essential to confessionalism. In performance, artists could play with and against mediation. They could enact their containment, then stage a breakthrough back into life.

Broadcast Yourself

This chapter argues that reality TV is inherently confessional—and quite aware of being so. Against a scholarly tradition of seeing fly-on-the-wall “surveillance” footage as the genre’s defining feature, this chapter shows how direct-to-camera “confession booth” monologues form the true backbone of the genre. The argument centers around a deep study of the debut season of MTV’s The Real World (1992), but it also places this program in the context of later American reality TV and in a TV tradition that stretches back to PBS’s “drama-documentary” An American Family (1973). In order to illuminate the cultural mythos that surrounded The Real World and to capture elusive qualities of its affect and aesthetic, this chapter also treats the film Reality Bites (1994) and Dave Eggers’s memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) as works of criticism with something important to say about reality TV. In the course of exploring the complex nature of confession on The Real World, special attention is paid to The Real World’s editing aesthetic and to its troubled attempts to define what its cast members do as something other than performance, other than labor.

Interlude

Confessional performers may seem on intimate terms with their audience, but this relationship can often, in fact, be complicated or thorny. In part, this is because true intimacy is impossible under the circumstances. After all, for whatever reason, confessional performers have consistently relied on touring as a business model—each night, a new audience; each week, a new town. Exploring Sexton’s ambivalent relationship to her fans and Spalding Gray’s interactive theater piece Interviewing the Audience, this essay asks how confessional performers have constructed a public from the various audiences they encounter on their travels. This public, when it’s conjured, is defined by an ambivalent affect, which this essay names “broadcast intimacy.”

Interlude

This essay centers around two queer British men who came to New York to perform the story of their lives in a confessional mode: Quentin Crisp in 1979 with his show An Evening with Quentin Crisp, and Bette Bourne in 2010 with his performance A Life in Three Acts. Both shows posed as evenings of plain, immediate chat, but both, in fact, were complex, remediated things. This essay argues that such complex media schemes are, in fact, a crucial characteristic of confessional monologue, which has pervaded American theater since the 1980s.

The Breath of a Poem

Today, we may know confessional poetry as a set of texts that are printed in books, but in its time it was also a performance genre. This chapter demonstrates how the performance of poems—in the privacy of the poet’s study, at public poetry readings, and in the studios of recorded literature companies—shaped this genre, determined its tactics, and influenced its style. An extended comparison of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg shows that breath was a key medium for confessional poets, and a study of Anne Sexton’s career—both on the page and at the podium—shows how she “breathed back” dead poems in live performance. Throughout, this chapter focuses on the feelings of embarrassment confessional poetry raised, and the uses to which poets could put such feelings. It also highlights contemporary trends in “performance” and their impact on confessional poets—e.g., Anne Sexton’s debt to the acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky and to Method acting as theorized by American director Lee Strasberg.

Just Talk

This chapter focuses on the solo career of Spalding Gray, who helped popularize confessional monologue in the American theater. Received at first as someone who “talks for a living,” Spalding Gray was rebranded after his death as, in fact, a writer. This simple binary—talk vs. writing—does a disservice to Gray’s monologues, or, as he sometimes called them, his “talking novels.” Placing Gray in his context—as a member of the multimedia experimental theater ensemble the Wooster Group, as an artist poised between theater and performance art, and as a man frankly puzzled by the relationship between theatrical performance and literary authorship—this chapter argues that the tension between writing and talking (and not a choice between the two) defines confessional monologue as a form. Special attention is paid to the way Gray’s monologues have been published, as well as to Gray’s debt to the confessional poet Robert Lowell.

Interlude

When second-wave feminism spread across America in the 1970s, it left some women with an acute identity crisis. How did their new, liberated self relate to the one they had left behind? Comparing two performances from 1974—a reading by Anne Sexton of her poem “Self in 1958” and a performance art piece by Eleanor Antin called Eleanor of 1954—this essay shows how two women struggled to span the distance between their pre- and post-feminist selves. These performances (and many like them) questioned the promise of transformation held out by feminist consciousness raising. In consciousness-raising groups, women would confess the truth of their lives and, so they hoped, purge themselves of old pre-feminist identities. Artists like Sexton and Antin instead used art to fathom the gap (and the ongoing connection) between past and present, oppression and liberation.