Bob Flanagan

Bob Flanagan

The Pain Journal

Internationally famous as "that guy who nails his dick to a board," Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences from Seattle to Boston to Berlin. Combining text, video, and live performance Flanagan created a highly personal but universal exploration of childhood, sex, illness and mortality. A documentary film about his life, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist , made with Sheree Rose and Kirby Dick, won the Sundance Special Jury Prize in 1997.

The Pain Journal , Flanagan's last finished work, is an extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death of cystic fibrosis at the age of forty-three. Whereas Flanagan celebrated the erotics of pain in his early work The Fuck Journal (Hanuman Press: 1994), The Pain Journal is a close-up, daily view of his ragged coexistence with the unavoidable pain of disease.