Introduction
Bob Flanagan (December 26, 1952 – January 4, 1996) was an American performance artist, comic, writer, poet, and musician.
Biography
Early life
Flanagan was born in New York City on December 26, 1952, and grew up in first in Glendale, then Costa Mesa, California, with his mother, Kathy; father, Robert; brothers John and Tim; and sister, Patricia. (Another sister died in infancy from cystic fibrosis.) At a young age, Flanagan was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (from which his sister, Patricia, who died from it at age 21, and a second sister, who died soon after birth, also suffered), a condition which would influence his art and ultimately claim his life. Flanagan survived into his 40s despite the cystic fibrosis—an unusually long life at a time when the life expectancy of those diagnosed with CF was 17 years and because doctors did not expect Bob to live past the age of 7 or 8.
Flanagan studied literature at California State University, Long Beach and the University of California, Irvine.
Flanagan moved to Los Angeles in 1976. In 1978, he published his first book, The Kid Is the Man. He also worked with the improv comedy group The Groundlings.
Death
On January 4, 1996, Flanagan died from complications of cystic fibrosis, aged 43. He was survived by his wife Sheree Rose.
The final years of Flanagan's life, including his death, are the subject of the Kirby Dick documentary SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Flanagan's participation in the film was contingent upon his death being part of the completed project.
Career
While some of Flanagan performances were notable for acts of extreme masochism (on at least one occasion he hammered a nail through his penis, while cheerfully singing If I Had a Hammer), he also wrote humorous songs, many of them intended as much for children as adults.
Flanagan briefly appeared in Michael Tolkin's The New Age as one of the alternate lifestylers encountered by Peter Weller's character.
Flanagan's latest posthumous piece by Sheree Rose entitled Bobaloon, was shown in Japan, featuring a 20-foot tall inflatable Flanagan complete with pierced penis, ball gag and straitjacket.
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, all with a mixture of pain and pleasure on his face.
In 1993, Flanagan also appeared in the video for the Danzig song "It's Coming Down". In the uncensored version of the video (near the ending), 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 bit part in Godflesh's "Crush My Soul" video, as a suitably blasphemous, upside-down suspended Christ, hoisted on to the ceiling of a traditional-looking church by his partner/companion Sheree Rose.
Selected works
- Visiting Hours: An Installation by Bob Flanagan in collaboration with Sheree Rose, Santa Monica Museum of Art and the New Museum, 1994
- A Matter of Choice, in collaboration with Sheree Rose, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, July 1992
- Bob Flanagan at the Movies, Artists' Television Access, San Francisco, April 18, 1992
- Bob Flanagan's Sick, Art in the Anchorage, New York, August 1991
- Tell Me What to Do: An Improvisational Reading and Performance, Beyond Baroque, Venice, August 14, 1987
Partial bibliography
- The Kid Is the Man (1978)
- The Wedding of Everything (1983)
- Slave Sonnets (1986)
- Fuck Journal (Hanuman Books, 1988)
- A Taste of Honey with David Trinidad (1990)
- Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist (1993) (interviews)
- Pain Journal (1996)
- The Book of Medicine (manuscript, never published)