In 1994, performance artist Bob Flanagan performed Rear Window[1], an endurance based piece in which he gives himself a wine enema. It is set in a hotel room. The audience were positioned in a separate hotel room, only able to see Flanagan through their window. Flanagan suffered from Cystic Fibrosis and at this point in his career was in the final stages of the disease, the audience are therefore witness to a visibly sick body. I am interested in what gaze is being articulated here – how Flanagan blurs the medical gaze with the personal. Flanagan is alone and so by lacking the interactions with an audience previously common in his work with Sheree Rose, the voyeurism of the audience is instead explicitly presented as an escape from intimacy, perhaps to avoid its real emotional demands. This is interesting to consider then, that it was at a time when Flanagan was at his most sick and his ‘sick body negates the 1950s Hollywood romanticism of the suffering artist’[2] instead the audience become sadistic viewers.

The form of the piece has an every-day quality; the application of the enema by Flanagan alludes to a kind of pain management fusing both the medical and the personal as it takes place in a private space. I would like to explore such forms and by making my performance itinerant, from an open gallery space to a private room, I can explore such merging of public performance and private acts.

 I am concerned with finding a way to endure the regimes that apply to Hydrocephalus. In the same way that Flanagan uses his own medical apparatus I have been thinking about how to relate this to Hydrocephalus, which has had an impact on my choice of materials – plastic tubing and straws to date adhere to my relationship with the disease in which a tube is present in my body from my head to abdomen so that brain fluid is drained properly. I want to explore the materials of the world of the medical condition further, perhaps extending to everyday intimacies, where Flanagan for example, uses a water bottle. Unlike the original Hitchcock film[3], the themes of voyeurism and exhibitionism are subverted. Flanagan’s own identity practicing BDSM and as an exhibitionist is brought to the fore but because it is framed through the hotel windows it becomes explicitly everyday.

Flanagan’s work speaks to anxieties around visibility, ways to be seen, taken in and accepted. I want to continue this interrogation, further exploring how bodies map out their pain. He could be seen as unintentionally vulnerable through the audience’s place as invisible spectators yet by practicing endurance-based art, he is recontextualsing his existence as not just a body suffering from a chronic illness but a human being.

 

 

[1]Bob Flanagan (1994) Rear Window, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, 1997 (dir. Kirby Dick)

[2]Martin O’Brien (2014) Performing Chronic: Chronic Illness and endurance art, (Taylor and Francis: Performance Research, 19:4) [Article: Online] p.60

[3]Alfred Hitchcock (1954) Rear Window (Paramount Pictures)