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David Jhave Johnston 1 / 22 Confession in Contemporary Contexts: Video Art, Poetry and Secular Impulses to Disclosure David Jhave Johnston Submitted to: PK Langshaw For HUMA 875H Concordia Fall 2008 This essay examines how art (specifically video art) explores confessional motifs. Illustration 1: The Confessions of Saint Disgustine. David Jhave Johnston. 2008. 2 / 22 I will say a few things in advance. This essay catalogs inspirations that I encountered while creating a short series of surreal videos entitled “The Confessions of Saint Disgustine”. The inspirations emerge from high and low culture, advertising and elite art, online, paper and video media, glitch and gloss, mind and body, and post-modern and ancient sources. As such the essay is also the confession of a cultural junk-food artist-intellectual who snacks voraciously across the culture continuum, while also munching on the higher proteins: the protean fiber of philosophy. * Confession is associated in religion with the church, in secular culture with scandal, and in psychoanalytic contexts with repression. It refers to a moment when communication and emotional redemption fuse in forgiveness or punishment. Confessions involve complex biochemical vortices that intersect with social risk and provoke transformation. Independently of any institution (the church, the popular press, or medical establishment) humans confess. Shame seem as inherent as hunger; confession is it's inevitable by-product, a form of communicative pressure release. Confessional state-changes, mysterious and indelible, permeate sexuality, politics, spirituality, culture and most of all people. * Media art and internet video may seem to be an unlikely space in which to discover the abstract rays of transcendence, yet, anything with a consciousness of itself as sentient experiences dark nights of the soul; darkness requires transcendence. The entire spectrum of culture displays concerns with confessions. * 3 / 22 Let's begin at the bottom, in the brutally rude humor of a patois cult comedy phenomena: Têtes à claques1 ( www.tetesaclaques.tv/ ). Têtes à claques are internet celebrities in Quebec: short animated films with human eyes and mouths masked inside doll heads that feature Illustration 2: Illustration 2: Têtes à claques. http://www.tetesaclaques.tv/video.php?vid=1171 slang humor. The series began in 2006 by accident when an ad-exec began messing around with the idea of creating educational animations of frogs, his interest swiftly devolved into fart jokes. Three months after sending the first invite to view videos to 50 friends, the site had over 3 million visitors; currently it receives 8 million visits per month. The technique was extremely simple: film the face, tell bad jokes, insert into doll. This form of comedy ridicules human hypocrisy. It leverages the gap between ideals and selfish and vain motivations. * At the other end of the cultural spectrum, the philosopher Nietzsche alludes to a similar gap between appearances and reality: “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir...” (Nietzsche. BGE, pg.8). If Nietzsche is correct, even philosophy is confession, and the origin of those confessions reside in instinct2. Drives competing for supremacy disguise self-disclosure as metaphysics. Nietzsche's skepticism suggests that confession is not simply truth-telling; confessions are sometimes self-centered attempts to get attention or manipulate sympathy. Each confessor is the site of a massive 1 I am indebted to PK Langshaw for pointing out how similar my own Saint Disgustine work was to Têtes à Claques 2 “... the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to instinctive activity” (Nietzsche. ibid. 6-7) 4 / 22 particle system of potential truths, possible stories, fragments and apparatuses of concealment. Redemption becomes a wish; wishes becomes whispers; and written philosophies spawn (often unsuccessfully) toward authenticity. It is in this context of partial truth that secular truth operates, aware of itself as an imperfect morsel in an immense universe. Comics and philosophers agree on this point. * Migrating upward through the magma of culture or downward through the tectonic plates to the core, at some point one encounters music videos. Chris Milk directs music videos. In Gnarls Barkley's 'Save my Soul'3 a very normal scene occurs, a girl is breaking up Illustration 3: 'Save my Soul' (2008) Director: Chris Milk. with a guy; she does it with a calm candor and naturalism; confessing: “I need space, I need the time to figure out who I am, you know? and it's totally not you, it's me, and it's the timing of it. I'm trying to find out who I am...”. The scene swiftly mutates into surrealism when the boy calmly extracts his heart; a heart which begins to sing. The video uses technology from the Institute for Creative Technologies Graphics Lab4 to scan and apply the vocalist's (Cee-Lo Green's) face onto a heart. The digital technique is much more sophisticated than Têtes à claques or The Confessions of Saint Disgustine, but the impulse is the same: anthropomorphism. Human features, specifically the face (which witnesses and guards our emotions), mapped onto the world. What is inside is brought out. Open heart surgery 3 Chris Milk. http://chrismilk.com/savemysoul 4 Institute for Creative Technologies Graphics Lab http://gl.ict.usc.edu/ 5 / 22 manga. Soul-spit merger. * In 1971, Bas Jan Ader made I'm too sad to tell you, a 16mm film of 3 minutes 34 seconds duration. It a black & white closeup of Bas crying. One shot, one take. No sound (as far as I know). A primal confession of authentic pain, a formal manifesto on the nature of intimacy and male feeling, and a document that is remarkably intimate yet nihillistic: is Ader questioning the roots of shame? Is he playing with privacy? Is he genuinely miserable? If so, why? Is it love? The world situation? A Illustration 4: I'm too sad to tell you. Bas Jan Ader. 1971. spiritual unfulfilled longing? Or 16mm film. 3:34 min. simply a fit of tears as innocent of intent or motivation as a spring shower? Or perhaps it's fake, he is doing it for a camera after all, so maybe he's just method acting? But then why bother? No it looks as if he's really anguished, genuinely anguished, and simply unashamedly, crying. What does it mean? Bas Jan Ader is an enigmatic artist who disappeared in 1975 in the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic ocean, -- the sailboat made it across, Bas Jan did not, his death formed a resonant end to a project he had dubbed “In Search of the Miraculous”. Wikipedia refers to him as a “Dutch conceptual artist, performance artist, photographer and filmmaker.” This brief description disguises a peculiar marginalized oddball who made only 7 films, all of them single shots, most lasting less than 4 minutes (4m16secs for Nightfall). Most of the films are simple falls or physical performances. To describe them is to describe boredom5. 5 A documentary on Bas Jan Ader's life: Here is Always Somewhere Else: The Disappearance of Bas Jan Ader (2007, Renee Daalder) 6 / 22 * Intimacy leverages empathic energy and evoke questions; the inquiry is recursive; it cascades in the viewer oscillating between concern for the other and investigation of the self. Is my own conscience clean? How do I feel now under the mask of civilized fineness? Confessions are one way the universe keeps itself from congealing into concealment. Words fall out of us, tears fall out of us, Ader falls into a river, stories are suspended above the water of life, bodies like stones fall into the water of regret or misery, insight splashes out. * Each generation makes its own claim to authenticity by reacting against the ideals of previous generations. “Within this idea of progression we have a paradoxical storm that we are simultaneously attempting to avoid. We all want to be new; newness is what perpetuates all new ideas. ... Can you successfully adopt the golden light, the dreams and visions of the harmonious few, abort their attempts at justice and impartiality, integrate your tiny mind to encompass a true vision of the egalitarian landscape.” (Laukemper & Warman. Script for ProgRock. 2007.6) In Kelly Warman and Tobias Laukemper's ProgRock, confession take on an artificial self-reflexive style in an ironic yet intimate video exploring contemporary creation and design culture. Here advertising is the inspirational fulcrum. Their subject is the paradigms Illustration 5: ProgRock. Kelly Warman & Tobias Laukemper. that guide creative design 2007. DVD 5:17 consultants, theoreticians and 6 http://www.tobiaslaukemper.de/storage/en/laukemper_warman.pdf . 7 / 22 artists. ProgRock concocts a strange thick blend of buzzwords, a cocktail of keywords, and a chain of elaborate axioms deftly set within a Bauhaus universe of fake tans, empty atriums and elevators that lead to stairs. Honesty becomes tainted by an incestuous network of PDAs copulating with art-school diplomas. The personal is politicized inside a parody that takes its intention seriously. As ProgRock exhumes the incestuous conceptual idioms within which contemporary creation occurs, it documents the implicit subliminal paradigms guiding the actions of an elite-culture. With the candidness of a viral video and the confidence of an industrial video-brochure, it deftly outlines the contours of the language landscapes and attitude habitats that sculpt cultural production. Confession in this case is collective and social. Instead of the intimate (Ader's I'm too sad to tell you or Crumley & Buce's Four-Eyed Monsters) or the procedural investigation of materiality and genre (Abigail Child's Mayhem), Prog Rock offers a manifesto proclamation on the 'we', the redundancy mechanism of identity, the replication of ideological motivations and stereotypes that cultural executives perform in an effort to be accepted by peers.
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