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'Bob Flanagan, a performance artist and poet whose writing and sadomasochistic performances centered on his lifelong battle with an incurable illness, died on Thursday at Long Beach Memorial Hospital in Long Beach. He was 43 and lived in Los Angeles. The cause was cystic fibrosis, said his companion and collaborator, Sheree Rose. Mr. Flanagan was said by doctors to be one of the longest-living survivors of cystic fibrosis, which is genetic and usually kills before adulthood. An older sister, Patricia, died of cystic fibrosis in 1979 at the age of 21.
'A former cystic fibrosis poster boy, Mr. Flanagan recalled that he grew up being told that he had only a few years to live. And he attributed his longevity in part to his ability to "fight pain with pain," by which he meant that he took control of his suffering through the ritualized pain of sadomasochism. In time, he made his art out of this proclivity. His work related to the often painful performances of such early 1970's body artists as Chris Burden, Arnold Schwarzkogler and Carolee Schneemann. Mr. Flanagan's work was the subject of a disturbing exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo in the fall of 1994.
'Mr. Flanagan was born in New York City on Dec. 26, 1952, and grew up in Glendora, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. He had little formal art training but began painting as a teen-ager and then switched to poetry. He studied literature at California State University, Long Beach, and at the University of California at Irvine. After moving to Los Angeles in 1976, he became involved with Beyond Baroque, an alternative literary center in Los Angeles, where he gave readings of autobiographical poems about his illness and his sex life.
'In 1978 he published the first of five books of poetry and prose, The Kid Is a Man. He also worked as a stand-up comic with the Groundlings, an improvisational theater group that included Pee-wee Herman. His readings and comedy routines gradually evolved into performances involving masochistic acts in which Ms. Rose, a video artist and dominatrix with whom he worked for the last 15 years, participated. The New Museum show, first organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art, was Mr. Flanagan's only exhibition and it generated widespread debate about its claim to be art. In it, he displayed sculptures, videos and also spent time in a hospital bed in the middle of the gallery, talking to visitors.'-- Roberta Smith, NY Times, January 6, 1996
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Further
Excerpts from Bob Flanagan's 'Pain Journal'
'Bob Flanagan’s Body: Ecstasy and/or Self-Annihilation'
Philippe Liotard 'Bob Flanagan: ça fait du bien là où ça fait mal'
Interview w/ Bob Flanagan
Lisa Carver on Bob Flanagan @ nerve
Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose @ WESTERN PROJECTS
Transcript of the film 'Sick: The Life And Death Of Bob Flanagan Supermasochist'
Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose Collection @ ONE
'Ode to Bob Flanagan'
'Masochism for Masses'
Bob Flanagan's 'The Kid is the Man'
Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose 'The Wedding of Everything'
'Sheree Rose: A Legend of Los Angeles Performance Art'
Bill Mohr 'Bob Flanagan’s Birthday Bash'
'Listening to Sheree Rose'
2 poems by Bob Flanagan & David Trinidad
Book: 'Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist'
Book: Bob Flanagan 'Pain Journal'
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Extras
Why? by Bob Flanagan
Bob Flanagan: Visiting Hours
Bob Flanagan 'Smart Ass Masochists'
Bob Flanagan 'Fuck Sonnet'
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FLANAGAN’S WAKE: RIP Bob Flanagan
by Dennis Cooper
Bob Flanagan and I met in the late ‘70s. At the time he’d published one thin book of gentle, Charles Bukowski—influenced poetry entitled The Kid Is the Man (Bombshelter Press, 1978). We were both in our mid 20s, born less than a month apart. I was sporting a modified punk/bohemian look and hated all things hippieesque. Bob looked like one of the Allman Brothers: thin, junkie pale, with shoulder-length hair, a handlebar mustache, and an ever-present acoustic guitar that he’d occasionally strum while belting out parodies of Bob Dylan songs. His style put me off initially, as mine did him, but I found his poetry amusing, edgy, and odd, and his clownish, sarcastic personality belied a deeply submissive nature.
There was a new, upstart literary community forming around Los Angeles’ Beyond Baroque Center, where Bob was leading a poetry workshop. I had met the poet Amy Gerstler in college, and she and I began to hang out at Beyond Baroque in hopes of meeting other young writers. After a few months of hunting and pecking through the crowds, a small, tight gang of us had begun to form, including, in addition to Bob, Amy, and myself, the poets Jack Skelley, David Trinidad, Kim Rosenfield, and Ed Smith, artist/fiction writer Benjamin Weissman, and a number of other artists, filmmakers, and the like. We partied together, showed one another our works-in-progress, and generally caused a ruckus in the then-dormant local arts scene.
Very early on, Bob told us he had cystic fibrosis, and that it was an incurable disease that would probably kill him in his early 30s—if he were lucky. But apart from his scrawniness, his persistent and terrible cough, and the high-protein liquids he constantly drank to keep his weight up, he was, if anything, the most energetic and pointedly reckless of us all. At that stage, Bob’s poetry only obliquely described his illness, and barely touched on his masochistic sexual tendencies. In fact, it took him a while to reveal the details of his sex life to his new chums. I think the fact that my work dealt explicitly with my own rather dark sexual fantasies made it relatively easy in my case, and I remember his surprise and relief when I responded to his confession with wide-eyed fascination.
Bob was working on the densely lyrical, mock-humanist poems that would later be collected in his second book, The Wedding of Everything (Sherwood Press, 1983). He began to encode within his poetry little clues and carefully offhand references to S/M practices, and gradually, as his vocabulary became more direct, the sex, and in particular his unabashed enjoyment of submission, humiliation, and pain, were revealed as the true subjects of his work.
Writing was difficult for Bob. One, he was a perfectionist. Two, with his sexual preferences finally out in the open, he was more interested in talking about and enacting fantasies that had already played themselves out in daydreams and in private autoerotic practices. It was around this time that Bob met Sheree Levin, aka Sheree Rose, a housewife turned punk scenester with a master’s degree in psychology. They fell in love, and, profoundly influenced both by her feminism and her interest in Wilhelm Reich’s notions of “body therapy,” Bob changed his work instantaneously and radically. For the rest of his life, Bob, usually working in collaboration with Sheree, used his writing, art, video, and performance works to chronicle their relationship with Rimbaudian lyricism and abandon.
Bob began to live part-time at Sheree’s house in West Los Angeles, along with her two kids, Matthew and Jennifer. Bob was an exhibitionist, and Sheree loved to shock people, so their rampant sexual experimentation became very much a public spectacle. It wasn’t unusual to drop by and find the place full of writers, artists, and people from the S/M community, all flying on acid and/or speed, Bob naked and happily enacting orders from the leather-clad Sheree. During this period Bob published two books, Slave Sonnets (Cold Calm Press, 1986) and the notorious Fuck Journal (Hanuman Books, 1987). He also began an ambitious book-length prose poem called The Book of Medicine, which he hoped would explore the relationship between his illness and his fascination with pain. At his death, the work remained incomplete, though sections had been used in his performances and have appeared in anthologies.
I was programming events at Beyond Baroque in those days and, as we were all interested in performance art, I organized a night called “Poets in Performance,” in which we tried our hands at the medium. Bob and Sheree’s piece involved Bob, clad only in a leather mask, improvising poetry while Sheree pelted him with every imaginable food item. It was such a hit, and Bob was so thrilled by this successful merging of his fetishes, his art, and his exhibitionist tendencies, that he and Sheree began doing similar, increasingly extreme performances around town. Perhaps the most famous and influential of thee works, Nailed, 1989, began with a gory slide show by Rose and concluded, after various, highly stylized S/M acts, with Bob nailing his penis to a wooden board. The performance made Bob infamous, and he was subsequently asked to perform in rock videos by Nine Inch Nails, Danzig, and Godflesh, as well as being offered a role in Michael Tolkin’s film The New Age. Nailed also interested Mike Kelley, who later used Bob and Sheree as models in one of his pieces and wound up doing several collaborations with the duo.
Coincidentally, interest in S/M and body modification was growing in youth culture, especially after the publication of Modern Primitives (RE/Search), which profiled Sheree’s life as a dominatrix. Bob was a hero and model to the denizens of this subculture, even as he found much of their interest to be superficial and trendy. Bob was always and only an artist. He never cloaked his masochism in pretentious symbolism, nor did he use his work to perpetuate the fashionable idea that S/M is a new, pagan religious practice. His performances, while exceedingly graphic and visceral, involved a highly estheticized, personal, pragmatic challenge to accepted notions of violence, illness, and death. For all the obsessive specificity of his interests, Bob was a complex man who wanted simultaneously to be Andy Kaufman, Houdini, David Letterman, John Keats, and a character out of a de Sade novel. So his performances were as wacky and endearing as they were disturbing and moving. For example, at the same time he was making a name for himself as a shockmeister, he was performing on Sundays with improvisational comedy troupe The Groundlings, in hopes of fulfilling his lifelong ambition to be a stand-up comedian.
By the early ‘90s, Bob’s physical condition was worsening. He was having to hospitalize himself before and after performances just to get through them. He and Sheree proposed a performance/ installation piece to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which was accepted and became Visiting Hours, a multimedia presentation comprising sculpture, video, photography, text, and Bob himself poised in a hospital bed acting as the work’s amiable host and information center. Visiting Hours was popular and critically well-received, eventually traveling to the New Museum in new York and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1993, RE/Search published Supermasochist, a book entirely devoted to Bob’s life and work. Also that year, filmmaker Kirby Dick began to shoot a feature-length documentary film about Bob and Sheree entitled Sick, which will be released this fall.
There was some hope during this period that Bob might be able to have a lifesaving heart and lung transplant, but, after months of tests it was determined that his lungs has deteriorated too much to allow him to survive the operation, and he began to accept that he had maybe a year yet to live. He and Sheree concentrated on visual art pieces, some of which were exhibited at Galerie Analix in Geneva and at NGBK Gallery in Berlin. The duo collaborated on a last installation work, Dust to Dust, which Sheree is currently completing, and Bob kept a year-long diary of his physical deterioration, Pain Journal, which will be published in the future. Even as most of Bob’s life began to be taken up with stints in the hospital and painful physical therapy, he was still on the scene, frail but good-natured, using his omnipresent oxygen tank as a comical prop just as he had once used his acoustic guitar. Right after Christmas, Bob went into the hospital one final time and died on January 4, 1996. In the 15 years I knew him, Bob grew from a minor poet into a unique and profoundly original artist who accomplished more than he ever imagined he could, and whose loss, predictable or not, is one of the greatest difficulties those of us who knew and loved him have ever had to face.
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Gallery
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Slave Sonnets
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p.s. Hey. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Cool post and viewing combo there, yes. Ah, Copenhagen. Very nice. I'm sure you've been to the lovely Tivoli Gardens. If you have a car or transport, I so highly recommend the theme park BonBon Land -- scroll down to #2 -- which is just outside of Copenhagen. It's a crazy, bizarre, great place and easily in the top 2 of the theme parks Zac and I hit on our Scandinavian theme park field trip. ** Randomwater, Antarctica is kind of beyond surreal, like surreal and hyper real at the same time. You can visit it, but it's a lot of work to arrange, and the traveling involved to get to where you have to be to depart for it (Ushuaia, Argentina) is a lot in and of itself, but it's totally worth it. I do like Kobo Abe, yes. D.l. Jose did a post about him for the blog a while back. Let me see if I can find it. Hold on. It's here. 'You and the Night' does sound super intriguing, cool. I'll find it for sure. Thanks again. You and Gisele should meet up someday and talk dolls. Have a really swell Wednesday. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. ** Paul Curran, Thanks, Paul! Great to see you, duh. I read that hilarious interview with you a couple of days ago. It's fantastic! Everyone, you really, really want to read a wild, very funny, etc. interview with the one, the only Paul 'Left Hand' Curran over on the Entropy Mag site. It part of a new series called 'The Weird Interview', and Paul's 'grilling' is the second in the series after Scott McClanahan's (also recommended). Seriously, take the minutes to check it out. Really great, Paul! ** Tosh Berman, I was so happy to find your 'Tosh Talks' when searching out Dare Wright post stuff. You probably saw that your thought re: her work was addressed by the estate holder later in the comments, but, if you didn't ... You found 'Nicola, Milan' already. Pub. dates are so loosey-goose. Yeah, it's terrific, right? The prose is really delicious. ** Cobaltfram, Cool re: the finishing. Link us up to that sucker. Well, no surprise, I guess, that your writing goals as described in your first paragraph get heavy encouragement from me since my own goals are not dissimilar in my own weird fashion. Right, 'The Great Beauty': I need to get back on trying to see that. I will. Thanks re: my novel. I'm doing a big pour into it, and we'll see. The rape thing comes from the biography of her. Later, gator. ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom! I just yesterday got a copy of Marc's/your zine in the mail, and it's completely splendid. Thank you and Marc so much. Yeah, it's gorgeous. I hope you got through yesterday okay, Hugs, man. Great that you've glimpsed your novel! I'm obviously jonesing to read it. Yeah, my address is the same. Marc seems to have it, if you need a prompter. Wow, and more greatness about your poetry book, not to mention that it's free. I'll read it greedily as soon as this film prep work lets up for a minute, meaning tomorrow. Everyone, Dom Lyne, writer and guy and d.l. supreme, has just had issued a book of his poetry, and it's free with a click, and here he is to direct you there, and please follow his directions: 'Today I released a free poetry ebook entitled 'The Voice that Betrayed' which contains 80 poems written between 2011 and 2013, so the book charts my emotional life over two years. You can download it here. I hope you find some time to take a look at it, and hopefully enjoy.' Thanks a lot, Dom, and it's always really great to see you! Lots of love back to you. ** Sypha, He does sound interesting. Thanks for that fill-in. I'll try some form of him. Nice Pynchon epigraph. Definitely very magnetizing re: the novel in the way that epigraphs should always be. I do remember Lee, sure. That sounds really confusing, I'm sorry. The silent treatment is the worst. You can't help by try to decode someone's silence, and it's impossible to not take it personally, and it might be personal but it might also have only the most tangential things to do you with you personally, and you can't know, which is why going silent is so powerful and scary. Anyway, yeah, I'm sorry, James. I hope that gets resolved somehow and happily. ** Quentin S. Crisp, Hello, welcome, and thank you a lot for entering here. You wrote the lyrics to that song? Wow, it's a terrific song. Kudos. Do you run Chomu Press? It seems so from clicking into your profile. It's new to me, and it looks extremely interesting. I will investigate. Everyone, Quentin S. Crisp, who kindly graced the blog yesterday, seems to be behind quite an interesting seeming publishing venture called Chomu Press, and I urge you to take a look. Also, there's a youtube video of him speaking about Dare Wright and 'The Lonely Doll' that I urge you to watch in order to complete your Dare Wright experience of yesterday. It's here. Thank you again very much, sir. ** Lonely Doll, Hi, Brook! Well, I'm very honored that you not only saw my post but entered to say so and to say hello. I send great respect to you for your work and support for Dare Wright's work from a humble fan. Let me pass along your links. Everyone, in a real coup, Brook Ashley, who runs Dare Wright's estate, was kind enough to comment here yesterday, and she passed along links to Dare Wright's website and Dare Wright's Facebook page, both highly recommended stops on your day today. Oh, I will remove the image from the post that wasn't her work. I apologize for the mix-up. Thank you very, very much! ** White tiger, I know, right? Math! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I saw your email in my box as I was awakening, and I'll go open it shortly. Thank you. Yes, patience plus diligence are the words. They'll be so worth it. ** Zach, Hi, Z. I'm surprised I didn't find that Cass McCombs tune in my post material hunting. Yes, I do in fact know Robert the Doll. I did a post about, hm, haunted dolls, I think, a long while back, and Robert was one of the stars. Wait, ... here it is: 'Gloomy is the house of woe, where tears are falling while the bell is knelling, with all the dark solemnities that show that Death is in the dwelling'. Fascinating story, for sure. I hope your day is great too.. Thanks about the actor. Unfortunately, it'll be a few or more days until we've hopefully got that figured out, but, you know, patience is golden or something and all that sort of blahblah. ** Torn porter, You leave for London ... now! Have fun, if you see this pre-voyage, and let me know when you're back so we can sort out a meet-up. I guess I should see that 'Tom à la ferme' film. Benevolence is quite an impressive effect. Yeah, the MK2 by the Pompidou. I guess that's where I'll see it. Auditions: They happen in three tiers. An initial visit with some reading and talking and filming. A second visit for the guys we're interested in with a bit dialogue testing, more filming, and, because our film involves a lot of nudity, them getting nude. Third and final tier is a more thorough audition. For instance, for the first scene we're about to shoot, we'll put whatever candidates we have for the un-filled role with the actor we have confirmed for the other role and then have them rough out the scene together in a limited, walk-through kind of way. No, I didn't notice that about Ratty. Yikes. But she seems to be as okay with it as it's possible to be, right? She's a shining creature. See you soon. ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. Cool, glad you liked the doll and her style. Me too. That's interesting about the pretentious writing. You mean overwritten, too stylized, too 'knowing', or ... ? ** Magick mike, Hi, Mike! Yeah, I thought the same thing about Antonio, I did. I think there would have been some genius-related riffing coming off that guy. Oh, you visited Bett! I love Bett! I miss Bett! I hope she's doing really great. 'A queered/ fantastique version of Mallarmé's Igitur': I mean wow, I mean yum. 'Nicola, Milan' is somewhat queered, that's a good way to put it. See what you think. I liked it a lot, obviously. ** Schoolboyerrors, Hi, D. Yeah, I think maybe half the reason I made that post was so I could send an email to Gisele, who's in Japan, and link her up to it because I know she'll go nuts. No, the logistics of sending the final draft of my novels to Amy while I'm over here seems daunting 'cos we always used to talk about the final drafts in person, so I don't, but her opinion is always the one I most crave and rely on. At the moment, I'm thinking of the novel I'm working on as possibly the first in a cycle, not sure of how many novels, and that, if so, the cycle will be my last novel collectively. I don't want to talk about this very much right now, but the novel is being written as an act of devotion to someone and something, and I like the idea of ending my work as a novelist by making my work an act of devotion for however many novels it takes to fulfill that goal. So, yeah, I think either it'll be my last or the first part of my last. Writing and/or receiving an email like the spam one you got is such a common fantasy. Or it seems like the belief that that mode of approach would magically bring a wannabe lover and intended beloved together is a big fantasy. Or it seems like it. I guess people do write and receive them. They must, right? Or maybe those kinds of emails are as mythical as snuff films. Anyway, yeah it's totally fascinating in precisely the way you described, I agree. With love back. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Yeah, I just stopped too. It was weird. I just felt it was time. I just felt like, maybe partly because of the knowledge that my body and brain were aging, that the damage would outweigh the enlightenment or interfere with it too much or something. Sad that your niece isn't coming. She's great. ** Steevee, Hi. I don't know if it's related but everyone I know over here is having weird symptoms right now, which makes it seem like it might be atmospheric and season change-oriented, but I don't know. I hope your version of all of that passes asap. ** Okay. D.l. Thomas Moronic alerted me to the existence online of the above scan of Bob Flanagan's rare chapbook 'Slave Sonnets', and I thought I would make a Day of it. And I have, clearly. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.