1994, ink-jet print, 17 × 13″.
Fun to Be Dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan, ed. Sabrina Tarasoff. Los Angeles: Pep Talk, 2024. 176 pages.
I KEEP SCORE of when my heroes die, and regard whether or not the memory of them fades from the culture at large over time. It’s been almost three decades since the artist, performer, and writer Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) passed, yet his legacy remains as potent and as singular as ever. I know four of the six books published in this stellar collection, Fun to Be Dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan, which document three distinct periods of his life: Bob’s participation in the literary goings-on at Los Angeles’s Beyond Baroque; his full immersion, physically and psychically, in BDSM; and his final years, writing from the brink of death as his cystic fibrosis was taking him apart.
I knew Bob through many of the rising scenes around LA during the 1980s and ’90s. I was a habitué of the Gauntlet in West Hollywood, one of the first body-piercing shops on earth, where he worked. But I got to know him better through his lover/mistress/dominatrix, Mx. Sheree Rose—a true force of nature—and the art they made together. Take Nailed, 1989, performed at Olio Space on Sunset Boulevard (located in a version of Silverlake that would be startlingly unfamiliar to many today). This piece featured a slideshow by Sheree and a reading/narration delivered by Bob, who was nailing his penis to a board while attached to an auto-torture device. In 1992 they collaborated on Visiting Hours, a durational performance/installation that debuted at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now known as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). The piece grew out of Bob’s long stays in the hospital owing to the increasingly debilitating effects of CF. Within the pristine white walls of this institution, the pair created a kind of kinky waiting room/rehabilitation clinic where Bob was able to greet people and convalesce. The tableau also included a multiscreen video and my favorite sculpture: a bed-of-nails gurney. To spend time with Bob, even as a work of art, was to understand the cycle of his phlegm production and how it affected every aspect of his existence: At regularly scheduled intervals, Sheree, who had attached a pulley system to his ankle restraints, and turned a crank until he was inverted, allowing him to have a productive, expectorating cough—suspension bondage as lifesaving physiotherapy.
My relationship with Bob became even more intimate through our sick-on-sick bonding. In 1990, due to a complication from an HIV infection, I needed a splenectomy. The procedure was stalled by a day and I was unable to tell my friends about it. Bob and Sheree, however, got the news—I was greeted by their faces and voices while coming out of heavy anesthesia in the hospital. “Twenty-five staples! I should have brought my camera,” said Sheree, which, of course, would have been completely appropriate.
Fun to Be Dead begins with the 1978 book The Kid Is the Man and its opening poem, “The Nails Drive Home,” part of which reads:
My hand / around the hammer starts these nails to sing— /. . . A nail / for every broken thing.
In another poem from this work—one of three titled “The Heart Is a Pump”—we encounter an early revelation on the power of masochism:
i scratch myself until the blood comes / the heart is a pump / hit me again / hit me harder until something shows / i can disappear / i can shrink smaller than your boot heel
The way he expresses love and submission—I can’t get enough. But what’s more incredible is how he pictures himself and his illness as a child in “The One”:
the late night cough / the fever the wheeze / the sick kid / wrapped in ice-water sheets / i’m the one / special kid bundled / my mother brings / cake
The books Slave Sonnets (1986) and Fuck Journal (1987) crystallize the ways art, life, masochism, sickness, and passion came together in Bob’s world. He portrays himself and Sheree as lovers trying to outrun death, exposing their inextricable bond, warts and all, to the public. Yet it is the relentlessness of Fuck Journal that particularly rides me. Each of the work’s twelve poems is titled after a month, heightening this desperate sense of racing against the clock. The texts are monomaniacal, like litanies; see this passage from “January”:
Fucking on acid. It lasts forever. I am so deep inside her I feel / like I’m inside out. / Still flying. I can barely feel my penis but it’s hard / and we’re fucking. . . . She lets me fuck her and sleep in her bed as well. We fuck / with me on top, and sometimes on our sides. / Tied up, face down, spread-eagled on bed, blind-folded / and whipped, butt vibrator up my ass. Turned over, spread- / eagled, fucked, and whipped some more. / We fuck again, slow and steady, me on top, no bondage. / We fuck after a terrible day of nothingness. Me on top, / her hands around my neck, choking me into a shaking, / quivering come.
In her introduction to Bob’s unfinished manuscript The Book of Medicine, published twenty-one years after his death, Dodie Bellamy writes that the work, a kind of autobiographical glossary, “is a compulsive text. At times it seems to be writing itself, demanding its own existence.” Bellamy’s essay—in which she discusses Bob’s antics, humor, pathos, atrocity exhibitionism, elegance, and devotion—riffs on the organizational format of Book of Medicine (for instance, under W, she offers the term “Wounded Hero”). Bellamy positions Bob’s masochism as the negotiator of his torturous disease. This was his logic, too. Bob’s work was never a sob-sister act—it was created out of love and art, at its most generous. I still feel blessed to have witnessed and rubbed against his intensity. And I am ever grateful that we still have his words, documents, and the living half of his partnership through Sheree.
Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA. Photo: Sheree Rose.
A few entries from Bob’s dictionary:
hammer A hammer is for building things—in my case, / a reputation.
piss All we are saying is give piss a chance. All we are saying is give piss a chance.
why Because it feels good; because it gives me an erection; / because it makes me come; because I’m sick; because there / was so much sickness; because I say FUCK THE SICKNESS; / because I like the attention; because I was alone a lot; / because I was different; because kids beat me up on the way / to school; because I was humiliated by nuns; because of Christ / and the crucifixion . . . because it does take guts; because I’m proud / of it; because I can’t climb mountains; because I’m terrible / at sports; because NO PAIN, NO GAIN; because SPARE / THE ROD AND SPOIL THE CHILD; BECAUSE YOU ALWAYS / HURT THE ONE YOU LOVE.
I remember when Bob addressed an audience after a talk he once gave: “You’re dealt a hand, you’ve got to play it.” And play it he did, like no one else, up to the very end.
Ron Athey is an artist who primarily works in performance and video. He is currently plotting the next installment of “Darkness Visible,” an immersive, thirty-person performance workshop that will take place in Athens, Greece.
