Aesthetic self-medication: Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose's structures of breathing

Abstract

This essay tracks adaptations to corporeal transformations in breathing in the performance art and life writing of Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) and Sheree Rose (b. 1941). It chronicles how breathing as an aesthetic strategy gets entangled with breathing as an exceptional or ordinary effect of disability over the course—and, in Rose's case, in the aftermath—of Flanagan's cystic fibrosis. The term “aesthetic self-medication” describes the process through which breathing is induced as an aesthetic form, and its patterns and rhythms transcribed and dramatized, in order to stage minimally coherent self-encounters amidst crisis. As Flanagan's chronic illness worsens and the couple's sadomasochistic dynamic no longer manages chronic pain, aesthetic self-medication structures laboured breathing into new genres of, or affective and libidinal relations to, pain, including boredom and musical humour.

Keywords:

• life writing
• durational performance
• endurance art
• collaboration
• breathing
• cystic fibrosis
• disability studies
• medical humanities

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Lauren Berlant, Patrick Jagoda, Jennifer Scappettone, and the participants in ACLA's “Unforming Feeling” seminar (led by Hannah Manshel, Daniel Benjamin, and Judith Goldman) for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. Thanks also to Sheree Rose for her generosity and candor.

Notes on contributor

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is assistant professor of 20th- and 21st-century American fiction and film at New Mexico State University. Their scholarship has appeared in Criticism, Post45, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Critical Inquiry, Arcade, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. They are currently at work on a book-length study of the aesthetics and politics of breathing in North American literary, screen, and performance cultures since the 1970s.

Notes

1 Most scholarship wrongly attributes Flanagan and Rose's collaborative work to Flanagan alone. According to Dominic Johnson (2015, 107), Flanagan's “signature goofball style” drew more attention to itself than did “Rose's deadpan.” Unless I refer to work authored by Flanagan on his own or produced by Rose after Flanagan's death, I insist on their status as co-creators.

2 In Anzieu's (1995) use of holding, D. W. Winnicott's term for the mother's provision of a comfortable and sound environment for the baby, each breathing subject does double duty as mother and baby, holder and held. I return to Winnicottian holding later in this essay.

3 On breathing and air as exemplars in Balint's psychoanalysis, see also Sedgwick (2011).

4 I’m indebted to Michael Eigen's (1999, 3) notions of “toxic nourishment” and “negative refueling” (i.e. toxic nourishment that is repeated over time) in a theory of emotions that relies on an organic metaphor. To illustrate these notions, Eigen (1999, 3) tells an anecdote about breathing: “I think of a wonderful philosophy teacher who had emphysema. In his first semester of retirement, he decided to teach in Switzerland, after years in New York. He died soon after arriving in Switzerland. I imagined his lungs could not take fresh air, after years of adaptation to toxins.”

5 The dynamic between agency and openness or receptivity is of prime concern to critical theory. It shows up as the capacity to affect and be affected in affect theory (Massumi 1987), as the interplay between self-organizing systems and emergent processes in phenomenology (Thompson 2007), and as the double meaning of plasticity as giving and taking form in humanities explorations of neurobiology (Malabou 2007).

6 As Amelia Jones (1998) notes, contractual submission and domination quickly turn into one another. Flanagan: “I am ultimately (this is what every masochist hates to hear, or admit) in full control” (Juno and Vale 2000, 32).

7 Flanagan's solo bibliography also includes three collections of poems: The Kid Is the Man (1978); The Wedding of Everything (1983); and Slave Sonnets (1986b). Unpublished journals, incomplete and in fragments, are held by Flanagan and Rose's archival collections at the Ohio State University and at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, housed by the University of Southern California.

8 In his incomplete manuscript of the “Book of Medicines, Flanagan (2017) mentions a journal he wrote, at least in part, in 1979. I believe that this is the partial journal from the late 1970s that I consulted in the archive.

9 I have kept all Pain Journal excerpts intact, syntactical, grammatical, and typographical errors included.

10 In the 1977 piece “Breathing In / Breathing Out (Death Itself),” Marina Abramovic, the patron-saint-slash-bad-mother of performance art, and her then-partner Ulay connected their mouths and breathed in a “closed circuit”—although there is no absolutely closed circuit when it comes to breathing: air can travel through the pores, for instance—for almost twenty minutes. A reflection on aggression in artistic collaboration, the piece also showed the depletion of bodies isolated from a nourishing milieu. Abramovic and Ulay's sustained exchange of toxic air, which relied on a combination of control and abandonment, rendered breathing as a perfectible technique for pushing bodies to their limits—limits beyond which lies “Death Itself.” See Pomeranz Collection (2017).

11 This loopy writing sharply contrasts with the didacticism of Flanagan's earlier writing, evident in “Why,” a 1985 piece whose title is a shorthand for the psychological question that Flanagan's life and art have raised: Why does he seek pain, given that he is already sick? These are the first few items on Flanagan's list: “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” (Juno and Vale 2000, 64–65). Flanagan recites “Why” in a steady, percussive manner in Dick's documentary (Sick 199 7). He doesn’t breathe between each clause, but the semicolons at least mark occasions for taking a breath.

12 In The Pain Journal, this humdrum coexists with television programs—Letterman, the O. J. trial, late-night movies, and other late-twentieth-century artifacts—which provide background noise more than they constitute a source of inspiration. Flanagan (n.d.) addresses the confluence of TV watching and difficult breathing in the unpublished poem “Dead Air:” “That's all that's there / but what do you care? / I’m wasting my breath / waiting for death / choking on my own phlegm, / saving it all for them / the audience and you.”

13 Elizabeth S. Goodstein (2004, 2n2) calls Phillips’ essay “an intriguing reading of boredom from an object relations perspective.” Goodstein's (2004, 1) definition of boredom as an “experience without qualities” isn’t so different from Phillips’ model, in so far as both authors gesture toward a dissatisfying lack. Lars Svendsen (2005, 31) similarly describes boredom as “a lack of personal meaning” amidst “objects and actions [that] come to us fully coded.”

14 A particular structure of desire, not age, defines the subject of Phillips’ essay on boredom, the child. Childhood is an important erotic scene for Flanagan. His boredom picks up where his masochism left off: in the realm of infantile desire. Flanagan was candid about the impact of the care and attention he received as a sick child on the development of his masochism. In a recorded performance of “Death Monologue” (n.d.), Flanagan revisits the origin tale: “I have to go to the CF clinic, which is still in a pediatrician's office. I sit in these little chairs, and stuff. That's where I get a lot of new inspiration for my work.” Another collaborative video, “Bob Flanagan at the Movies” (n.d.), includes a montage of movie scenes to which Flanagan and Rose were erotically attached, from a Looney Tunes cartoon to Cinderfella, a 1960 retelling of the Cinderella tale starring Jerry Lewis as a boy (read: Flanagan) at the mercy of his controlling stepmother (read: Rose). And in the 1 May 1995 entry of The Pain Journal, Flanagan (2000, 47) attributes a brief resurgence of his “SM frame of mind” to Sheree's travels: “I think it's like being kid again, with the parents out.”

15 Dick's documentary features some of Flanagan's comedic songs (Sick 199 7). In the aforementioned “Smart-Ass Masochist,” on diet masochism, Flanagan regularly interrupts the chorus—“Anything you want me to do / I’ll do it just for you”—with slapstick performances of discomfort: “No, no, wait, wait!” At a camp for kids with CF where he serves as a counselor, he introduces a love song by crooning, “I called her Ivy, not ’cause her name was Ivy—’cause she was on IV.” He prefaces another piece, which borrows the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins, with a warning: “I know that any Disney people here, they’ll probably tell me to cease and desist, and believe me, I will, but not yet. In my own time.” Coughing intermittently, he then intones, “Supermasochist Bob has cystic fibrosis / He should've died young, but he was too precocious / How much longer he will live is anyone's prognosis / Supermasochist Bob is cystic fibrosis / I'm dili-dili, I'm gonna die / I'm dili-dili, I'm gonna die.”

16 See also Bersani and Phillips (2008). Although I follow Bersani's formal approach to embodiment and relationality, I agree with Amber Jamilla Musser's (2014, 14) criticism of what she aptly identifies as the “exceptional” status of gay male sexuality in Bersani's work.