Bob Flanagan, “Auto-Erotic SM” (1989): This bloody image documents a confrontational performance by Bob Flanagan, accompanied by a caption text that simply reads “Sewn up and nailed to a two-by-four.” This comedically blunt description pretty much sums up the grisly (and equally blunt) act, which concludes a number of S&M acts staged with his partner Sheree Rose for a multimedia series that also includes graphic depictions of symptoms and medical treatment of Flanagan’s cystic fibrosis.
Although extreme, Flanagan’s performance appears conspicuous not due to its uniqueness per se but for the unique context in which it is presented (i.e. as art.) Examples of self-castration date much further back and can be found even in literature, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, where we find an incompetent assassin character named “Gradus,” who no longer felt any pleasure except by shedding blood, after having freed himself from lust (for his mother-in-law) by attempting to castrate himself. Such extreme cases are not only found in fiction and metaphor, as David Foster Wallace writes: “The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: each year between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to emergency rooms after having castrated themselves, with kitchen tools usually, sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges have become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.” [1] While these acts of self-castration (typically pathologized as skoptic syndrome) demonstrate the desire to become an asexual eunuch, Flanagan endures phallic self-mutilation with the hopes of attaining a transcendence of a different nature—namely, the desire to overcome pain rather than desire, i.e. to utilize controlled, sexualized pain in order to subvert and draw attention away from the more menacing, uninvited pain, presented here as cystic fibrosis. Prematurely claiming the lives of its victims, CF poses as both a source of physical pain and an existential threat. Through art Flanagan universalizes the personal experience of CF by posing it here as a stand-in for mortality, as he suggests: "I want to turn my own death into art … I want to be buried with a video camera so that people could view me after I was dead inside the coffin." [source: Daily Bruin, “Masochist Flanagan endures”]
While a patent far cry from 19th-century mentality, Flanagan’s therapeutic aims for this sadomasochistic project appear oddly related to Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, which espouses aesthetic experience as momentary relief from the endless cycle of desire, fleeting pleasure, and existential dread [see The World as Will and Representation, book III]. Drama theorist Meiling Cheng presents us with a more nuanced, complex reading than a simple escape from the Schopenhauerian “weltshmerz” that comes with a constrained will; worth quoting in full:
“The art practised [sic] by Flanagan is..simultaneously an engagement with life traumas and a search for body healing. In this context, the manifest masochism in his performances of sensual violence is a self-prescribed homeopathic medicine that confronts the pain caused by foreign bodies - be they organic, chemical, or mechanical - by producing self-willed pain. Such a strategy does not so much reflect a sensorial substitution of pain with pleasure than to suggest an instant translation of self-determination, however painful, into pleasure. As the arbitrary autonomy of his disease prevents him from owning a large portion of his body, he turns to his most prodigious body part, the penis, and renders it into a surrogate self, a cooperative body double solely under his control. His torso in bondage and his tortured penis then project two types of pain: the first type mimetic, imitating the effects caused by the medical machine’s aggressive architectonics; the second type is volitional, appropriating his most frequent sensation to be a demonstrative, ecstatic release.” [2]
It is precisely in this ecstatic release that accompanies both extreme pleasure and pain beyond the threshold of ordinary experience, where one might conflate the two ostensible antipodes in S&M. In psychoanalytic theory, the term jouissance is typically used to characterize this phenomenon, which Slavoj Žižek describes as “a deadly excess rather than pleasure; its place is beyond the pleasure principle. In other words, the term plus-de-jouir (surplus- or excess-enjoyment) is a pleonasm, since enjoyment [jouissance] is in itself excessive, in contrast to pleasure, which by definition is moderate, regulated by proper measure.” [3] With Flanagan demonstrating a preoccupation with jouissance rather than aesthetic contemplation, perhaps a figure like Georges Bataille serves as a more apt philosophical analogue than Schopenhauer.
If nothing else, Flanagan’s performance in this artistic context appears as a project of inversion, whereby: the internal becomes external, the private becomes public, the tragic becomes comic, the commonplace becomes extraordinary, the profane becomes sacred, the painful becomes pleasurable, the violent becomes tender or caring, the lustful becomes loving.
1 David Foster Wallace. “Big Red Son” from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays; 13 Dec, 2005: Little, Brown and Co.
2 Meiling Cheng, “Bob Flanagan’s Body Double,” in The Artist’s Body. Tracey Warr (ed.), Amelia Jones (survey), (London, New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2000) 229.
3 Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. (London: Verso, 2012) 47.
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