Coffins and Cameras: A conversation with Sheree Rose

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, Sheree Rose partnered with Bob Flanagan to produce sensational multimedia artworks, the most famous of which was their touring performance installation of Visiting Hours (1993–5). Rose's final collaborative work with Flanagan, who died in 1996 after a long battle with cystic fibrosis, was a Memento Mori trilogy involving three different casket installations. The first part, Video Coffin, displayed in the New York exhibition of Visiting Hours, consisted of an elaborate Catholic funerary casket containing a video monitor with Flanagan's face, which, when triggered by the approaching viewer, would change to reflect the viewer's face. The other two parts of the trilogy, unrealized because of Flanagan's death, included Dust to Dust, a Jewish pine coffin overflowing with thousands of small photographs of Flanagan; and The Viewing, an entombment featuring a camera placed in Flanagan's coffin after his death. Flanagan described this latter piece with his usual gallows humour in the award-winning documentary film Sick: The life and death of Bob Flanagan, supermasochist (1997):

I want a wealthy collector to finance an installation in which a video camera will be placed in the coffin with my body, connected to a screen on the wall, and whenever he wants to, the patron can see how I'm coming along.

This interview with Sheree Rose took place in June 2009 and deals specifically with the memento mori theme.