Aesthetic Self-Medication:
Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s Sick Art
A Talk by Jean-Thomas Tremblay
February 22 | 7:30 PM | Dome
This talk, stemming from Tremblay’s book Breathing Aesthetics, tracks adaptations to changing respiratory conditions in the performance art and life writing of Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) and Sheree Rose (b. 1941). In so doing, the talk tells a story about the ways breathing as an aesthetic practice gets caught up in breathing as an ordinary or exceptional effect of disability over the course—and, in Rose’s case, in the aftermath—of Flanagan’s experience with cystic fibrosis. The term “aesthetic self-medication” describes the process through which respiration’s patterns and rhythms are transcribed and dramatized to stage minimally coherent self-encounters amid crises. 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.
This lecture is extended as a public program of Resistance & Respiration, curated by Amanda Cachia.
February 22
Doors: 7:00 PM
Talk begins: 7:30 PM
Q&A to follow.
Location: Dome
FREE with registration. Let us know you’re joining!
About the Speaker
Jean-Thomas Tremblay (he/him)
Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor of environmental humanities at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Steven Swarbrick, a coauthor of the forthcoming Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction(Northwestern University Press, 2024).
About Breathing Aesthetics
In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity.
About the Artists
Bob Flanagan (he/him) + Sheree Rose (she/her)
Bob Flanagan (December 26, 1952 – January 4, 1996) was an American performance artist and writer known for his work on sadomasochism and lifelong struggle with cystic fibrosis. Sheree Rose (born 1941) is an American photographer and performance artist. She is best known for her collaborative work with performance artist Bob Flanagan, and her photography documenting a wide range of Los Angeles subcultures, especially in relation to BDSM and body modification.
Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose began their artistic collaboration during the late 1980s in the Los Angeles club and art scenes. Their performance, photography, and video integrate elements of BDSM, which culminated in the exhibition Visiting Hours at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and New Museum of Contemporary Art. After Flanagan died from cystic fibrosis in 1996, Rose continued to make artwork honouring his legacy and their collaboration. The final years of Flanagan's life, including his death, are the subject of the Kirby Dick documentary SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Flanagan's participation in the film was contingent upon his death being part of the completed project.
