Bob Flanagan


Bob Flanagan was an American performance artist and writer known for his work on sadomasochism and cystic fibrosis.

Biography

Early life

Flanagan was born in New York City on December 26, 1952 and grew up in Costa Mesa, California, with his mother, Kathy; father, Robert; brothers John and Tim; and sister, Patricia. In childhood, Flanagan was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, from which his sister, Patricia, who died at age 21, and a second sister, who died soon after birth, also suffered. At age 14, in 1967, Flanagan was named the first poster child for the North Orange County chapter of the National Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation.
Flanagan graduated from Costa Mesa High School, and studied literature at California State University, Long Beach and the University of California, Irvine. He moved to Los Angeles in 1976.

Death

On January 4, 1996, Flanagan died from complications of cystic fibrosis at 43. He was survived by his wife and close artistic collaborator Sheree Rose.
The final years of Flanagan's life, including his death, are the subject of the Kirby Dick documentary . Flanagan's participation in the film was contingent upon his death being part of the completed project.

Career

Flanagan began reading his poems around Southern California in the mid-1970s, and was part of the poetry community at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. He published his first book, The Kid is the Man, with Bombshelter Press in 1978.
Flanagan met Sheree Rose in 1980, and collaborated closely with her for the rest of his life. Through the 1980s, Flanagan and Rose focused on BDSM community education and organizing, and were founding members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Janus. Their work in performance art began with the 1989 piece Nailed, presented in conjunction with the release of the RE/Search publication Modern Primitives. In Nailed, Flanagan nailed his penis and scrotum to a board while singing "If I Had a Hammer."
Visiting Hours, first shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1992, combined text, video, and live performance, and explored the convergence of illness and SM. It was Flanagan's most widely toured museum exhibition. In the center of the gallery, Flanagan lay in a hospital bed and interacted with museum visitors for the duration of the exhibit. According to curator Laura Trippi, "The installation is designed like a crazy stage set of a children's residential hospital, replete with a torture chamber lurking amidst the institutional cheer."
In 1996, Flanagan received the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work from the National Leather Association International.

Music videos

Flanagan is featured in the widely banned music video for the song "Happiness in Slavery" by Nine Inch Nails. In the video, he plays a slave who worships a machine. He offers a candle to an altar, before ceremonially undressing and washing. He then lies down on an intelligent torture machine that molests and ultimately kills him, with a mixture of pain and pleasure on his face.
In 1993, Flanagan appeared in the video for the Danzig song "". In the uncensored version of the video, Flanagan pierces his upper and lower lips together and then he hammers a nail through the head of his penis before bleeding on the lens of the camera recording him.
Flanagan also had a small role in Godflesh's "Crush My Soul" video, as an upside-down suspended Christ, hoisted on to the ceiling of a church by Sheree Rose.

Selected works