On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

The Pain Artist

• • • The Pain Artist W hen Bob Flanagan performed in New York in 1991, potential spectators were warned: "Not for the faint of heart." That was back in the golden age of transgression, when artists routinely presented the unspeakable to audiences of the imperturbable . But Flanagan went farther than most. As a self-described "hetero-masochist, in extremis," he was notorious for nailing his penis to a board. Flanagan happened to perform in a context that explained him, but that didn't make the work any easier to watch. In 1997, a publicist for Kirby Dick's documentary, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, groused that she was having a hard time even getting critics to screenings. As one put it to her: "Why do we have to see all that?"-an unexpected complaint in the age of the confessional, the sensational, and the hyperexplicit. Sheree Rose, who was Flanagan's dominant partner in life and in art, speculates: "People aren't used to seeing anything that real on the screen." While we increasingly raise the image threshold of what we can look at, real suffering is as hard to take as ever-and as hard to represent. Flanagan was all about real and shameless self-disclosure. He lived his life at death's door. A medical anomaly, he managed to survive with cystic fibrosis (CF) until the age of forty-three. (Most CF sufferers die as children or young adults.) Certainly Flanagan behaved like someone with no time to be untrue to himself. "This is the person I am," he once declared. "I'm not afraid of any aspect of what I am." That included the part of him that lived as a "supermasochist"-and always had. As a boy, he'd begun inflicting pain on himself because it helped him cope with the chronic pain of CF. Flanagan used to put it this way: "I've learned to fight sickness with sickness." 322 FIN-DE-MILLENIUM In the late '80S, he began staging his pain-inducing rituals as an art form. "1 never wanted to call myself a 'performance artist,'" Flanagan once said. "1 just went out and did these things from an honest place." Spectators fainted on both coasts. A hopeful Jesse Helms even sniffed around for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. (There was none.) Flanagan only did the nailed-penis act twice in his life, but something like that tends to become the defining moment in an artist's career. More routinely, he would nail his scrotum, insisting that it didn't really hurt. Obviously, he had a high tolerance for pain. The guy sounds scary. But Sick transcends the usual shock-horror expectations about transgressive artists and becomes a meditation on universal themes: suffering, shame, intimacy, desire, and death. Flanagan is unflinchingly honest, and his angry response to what the universe has dealt him usually takes the form of deadpan humor. The s&m life presented in the film is completely unglamorous, far removed from the leatherclad ideal. For Flanagan, this is a need that has nothing to do with style, everything to do with pain management and the consequences of dependence. His Supermasochist character appears in a hospital-gown cape, oxygen tube in his nose, Hickman catheter in his chest, scrawny, pasty, and singing (to the tune of "Supercalifragilistic "): "A lifetime of infection and his lungs all filled with phlegm / The CF would have killed him, if it weren't for s-and-m." Cystic fibrosis is a disease that fills the lungs with mucus, providing fertile ground for bacteria to grow, but worse, making it difficult to breathe. As Sheree Rose, Flanagan's lover and collaborator of fifteen years, pointed out after his death, Bob drowned. Anyone with CF needs to be hit hard on the back periodically to break up the mucus. Does this make someone want to be hit? Does it really make sense to control pain by adding pain? When the filmmaker interviews Flanagan's parents, he asks if maybe they loved Bob a little bit more when he was suffering. "He was in pain so much of the time," his mother replies. Flanagan's parents found out about his sexual proclivities only near the end of his life. "I'm still stunned by it," his mother admits. "Where was I?" As a boy, Flanagan used to stick pins through a belt and whip himself with it. No one ever found out. He'd wrap belts around...