BOB FLANAGAN & SHEREE ROSE http://one.usc.edu/bob-flanagan-and-sheree-rose-collection/
Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan (1952-1996) are most known for their intensive bodily performances that explored love, sex, pleasure, sadism, masochism, and Flanagan’s long-term battle with cystic fibrosis. The collection at ONE Archives includes original diaries and unpublished poetry by Flanagan dating back to the late 1970s; performance ephemera and documentation, including photographs and video; VHS masters of video works by Flanagan; an extensive body of photographs and slides by Rose documenting Los Angeles’ BDSM and queer communities; and the Bobaloon, a twenty foot tall inflatable depiction of Flanagan complete with pierced penis, ball gag, and straitjacket.
Jennifer Doyle, Professor of English at UC Riverside, explains Rose and Flanagan’s relationship to queer sexuality and performance practice on Artbound:
Sheree Rose come out as a feminist in the 1970s – she had been married with children and realized that being a housewife wasn’t for her. She divorced and began to counsel single mothers on education and economic independence. While getting a masters degree, she participated in feminist reading groups and found herself in dialogue with women who saw lesbianism as a sexual expression of a feminist politics. Some of the women she talked to saw men as “the enemy.” Rose wondered, however, if there was a different way of practicing heterosexuality.
For 16 years she explored this question with Bob Flanagan. Their romantic and creative partnership is hard to classify – our vocabulary isn’t nearly as elastic as it needs to be on this point. Contemporary art features a handful of artists whose practice is expressed through their romantic/domestic relationships: Marina Abramovic and Ulay (who worked together from 1976 until 1989), the British artists Gilbert and George (who have described their partnership and collaboration as “living sculptures”), General Idea (a 25-year partnership, artist collaboration and media experiment between AA Bronson, Jorge Zontal and Feliz Partz).
All of those artists explored ways of being together, as a part of their creative work. They challenge ideas about authorship, expression, and the line between public and private life.
Rose and Flanagan belong in that company – but their importance is different. Their history is worth knowing not for what they did to art, but for what they did to love and sex. This is where Rose’s relationship to her practice is quite different from that of the people mentioned above. It was an already- existing active engagement with sex politics as lived and felt that brought Rose and Flanagan into galleries and museums. They were together for years before that relationship morphed into an art practice, and their activism was, at first, an explicitly sexual activism localized to their personal lives and to their activism within and on behalf of the BDSM community.
Documentation of Rose and Flanagan’s work will be included in Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm, an exhibition project organized by ONE’s curator David Frantz within the Made in L.A. 2014 biennial at the Hammer Museum. As a part of ONE Archives, the collection emphasizes ONE’s role in documenting and making accessible not only LGBT historical materials but also more broadly various forms of queer cultural production and radical sex activism.
Los Angeles : http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/disciplines/performance/ June 21, 2013 Sheree Rose: A Legend of Los Angeles Performance Art By Jennifer Doyle
At noon on Sunday June 23, Sheree Rose will reprise her work as a performance artist. Rose will stage "Do With Me What You Will," a 24 hour durational performance with the London-based artist Martin O'Brien, at a dungeon on La Cienega, just under airplanes taking off from LAX's runways.
Rose is a legend of multiple Los Angeles underground scenes. Punk shows, feminist reading groups, poetry scenes, fetish clubs, underground performance art events -- she's been there and done that as an active participant and also as a documentarian.
Sheree Rose come out as a feminist in the 1970s -- she had been married with children and realized that being a housewife wasn't for her. She divorced and began to counsel single mothers on education and economic independence. While getting a masters degree, she participated in feminist reading groups and found herself in dialogue with women who saw lesbianism as a sexual expression of a feminist politics. Some of the women she talked to saw men as "the enemy." Rose wondered, however, if there was a different way of practicing heterosexuality.
For 16 years she explored this question with Bob Flanagan. Their romantic and creative partnership is hard to classify -- our vocabulary isn't nearly as elastic as it needs to be on this point. Contemporary art features a handful of artists whose practice is expressed through their romantic/domestic relationships: Marina Abramovic and Ulay (who worked together from 1976 until 1989), the British artists Gilbert and George (who have described their partnership and collaboration as "living sculptures"), General Idea (a 25-year partnership, artist collaboration and media experiment between AA Bronson, Jorge Zontal and Feliz Partz). All of those artists explored ways of being together, as a part of their creative work. They challenge ideas about authorship, expression, and the line between public and private life.
Rose and Flanagan belong in that company -- but their importance is different. Their history is worth knowing not for what they did to art, but for what they did to love and sex. This is where Rose's relationship to her practice is quite different from that of the people mentioned above. It was an already-existing active engagement with sex politics as lived and felt that brought Rose and Flanagan into galleries and museums. They were together for years before that relationship morphed into an art practice, and their activism was, at first, an explicitly sexual activism localized to their personal lives and to their activism within and on behalf of the BDSM community…
…Bob Flanagan was a pathfinder as a writer, as an artist and performer, and as a person. He had cystic fibrosis, and lived into his 40s -- this was almost unheard as most people with this illness struggle to make it to 30. A big part of his story is the way he integrated pain into his life as a source of pleasure. Flanagan was a self-described "supermasochist." And it was through their sadomaschistic practice that Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan rewrote the history of performance art.
In a 2009 interview with the artist Tina Takemoto, Rose explains how she and Flanagan developed their practice: I would say that there were three main phases in our relationship. The first phase was our personal life -- just him and me and all the crazy, wild, fun things we did together during the first couple years. Even though I photographed everything, this documentation was just for us. The next five years, the second phase, were spent organizing the sadomasochistic community, which had not been done before. SM was a really important aspect of our lives. We believed in it enough to pour all of our energy into making SM a national movement and creating public and community spaces for it. We became spokespeople for sadomasochism, giving lectures and demonstrations and raising awareness about the SM community. Nowadays, it's gone much further than we ever expected. But at that time, the SM movement was just beginning. And, because we got such good responses within the SM community, we flirted with the idea of bringing SM out into the mainstream. That was the beginning of the third phase, the art phase. Perhaps what we are seeing from Rose now is a forth phase -- a return to performance, as a mentor to younger artists exploring how SM, power and sexuality might figure in their practice.
There is so much that is inspiring about Rose and Flanagan's story -- and also about Rose's relationship with this part of her past. The media is filled with headlines describing especially young women's sexual victimization (e.g. Steubenville); we need to pay attention to the way that Rose and Flanagan didn't just consent to participate in an SM relationship: they eroticized consent itself -- their public practice allows people to expand their understanding of how the negotiation of intimacy itself doesn't have to be a soul-crushing enterprise. Consent, agreement, negotiation -- all of this was, for Rose and Flanagan -- part of their daily poetics (and this is part of SM political culture). They wrote contracts, for example, describing Flanagan's obligations as a slave and Rose's obligations to him -- those documents structured their relationship in ways that were both practical and sexy. They sought to recover all that the marital contract removes in its naturalization of the structures of domestic relationships -- they found a way to constantly renew their relationship as one of active, and sexualized negotiation of domination and submission -- and they opened that process up to the public in performance actions.
As much as BDSM has entered into the popular imaginary via "50 Shades of Grey" and the cross-over appeal of a kink master like James Deen, the profoundly feminist project of surfacing the dynamics of complicity and resistance, of suffering and pleasure within sexual life is still punk, revolutionary -- and necessary. For the question that nagged Rose in the 1970s - What does it mean to "be with" a man, as a feminist? -- that question is as relevant as ever. And I'd like to think that today we have to room to see that question as not "just" about sex -- it's about collaboration, intimacy, and conversation -- it's about being in the body you are in, and with the bodies you are with.
Years after her practice with Flanagan was ended by his death, Rose returns to this project -- this time in collaboration with Martin O'Brien a young gay man (who also has CF and integrates that fact into his work). O'Brien could easily be Rose's son, and their performance dynamic has a hard maternal edge. (Rose is mentoring Martin O'Brien with another Los Angeles performance legend -- Ron Athey.)
Together, Rose and O'Brian explore the power dynamics of age and gender - Rose is the demanding mother to his child. On Sunday, he will be her "slave," to do with what she will. Rose is taking suggestions; people are invited to sit with them anytime between noon on Sunday and noon on Monday.
WHY: A Poem by BOB FLANAGAN Art Journal 56 58-9 Winter 1997
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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 of Porky Pig in bondage, force-fed by some sinister creep in a black cape; because of stories of children hung by their wrists, burned on the stove, scalded in tubs; because of Mutiny on the Bounty; because of cowboys and Indians; because of Houdini; because of my cousin Cliff; because of the forts we built and the things we did inside them; because of what's inside me; because of my genes; because of my parents; because of doctors and nurses; because they tied me to the crib so I wouldn't hurt myself; because I had time to think; because I had time to hold my penis; because I had awful stomachaches and holding my penis made it feel better; because I felt like I was going to die; because it makes me feel invincible; because it makes me feel triumphant; because I'm a Catholic; because I still love Lent, and I still love my penis, and in spite of it all I have no guilt; because my parents said BE WHAT YOU WANT TO BE, and this is what I want to be; because I'm nothing but a big baby and I want to stay that way, and I want a mommy forever, even a mean one, especially a mean one; because of all the fairy tale witches, and the wicked stepmother, and the stepsisters, and how sexy Cin- derella was, smudged with soot, doomed to a life of servitude; because of Hansel, locked in the witch's cage until he was fat enough to eat; because of "O" and how desperately I wanted to be her; because of my dreams; because of the games we played; because I've got an active imagination; because my mother bought me Tinker Toys; because hardware stores give me hard-ons; because of hammers, nails, clothespins, wood, pad- locks, pullies, eyebolts, thumbtacks, staple-guns, sewing needles, wooden spoons, fishing tackle, chains, metal rulers, rubber tubing, spatulas, rope, twine, C-clamps, S-hooks, razor blades, scissors, tweezers, knives, pushpins, two-by-fours, Ping-Pong paddles, alligator clips, duct tape, broomsticks, bar- becue skewers, bungie cords, sawhorses, soldering irons; because of tool sheds; because of garages; because of basements; because of dungeons; because of The Pit and the Pendulum; because of the Tower of London; because of the Inquisition; because of the rack; because of the cross; because of the Addams Family playroom; because of Morticia Addams and her black dress with its octopus legs; because of motherhood; because of Amazons; because of the Goddess; because of the moon; because it's in my nature; because it's against nature; because it's nasty; because it's fun; because it flies in the face of all that's normal (what- ever that is); because I'm not normal; because I used to think that I was part of some vast experiment and that there was this implant in my penis that made me do these things and that allowed THEM (whoever THEY were) to monitor my activities; because I had to take my clothes off and lie inside this plastic bag so the doctors could collect my sweat; because once upon a time I had such a high fever that my parents had to strip me naked and wrap me in wet sheets to stop the convulsions; because my parents loved me even more when I was suffering; because surrender is sweet; because I was born into a world of suffering; because I'm attracted to it; because I'm addicted to it; because endorphins in the brain are like a natural kind of heroin; because I learned to take my medicine; because I was a big boy for taking it; because I can take it like a man; because, as somebody once said, HE'S GOT MORE BALLS THAN I DO; because it is an act of courage; 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. Added material In collaboration with his partner, Sheree Rose, Bob Flanagan's performances combined text, video, and live performance in an exploration of sex, illness, and mortality. BOB FLANAGAN succumbed to cystic fibrosis on January 4, 1996. Bob Flanagan
Source: Art Journal, Winter97, Vol. 56, p58, 2p Item: 505835062