19.02.1998

Love hurts

Kirby Dick ‘Sick: the life and death of Bob Flanagan, supermasochist’ 1997, ICA and selected cinemas

Good cinema like good art is uncompromising or inspiring: if you’re lucky it’s both. Sick falls in the latter category. It is not easy viewing, delving into a very mar­ginal and challenging area of hu­man sexuality. Bob Flanagan was a performance artist and self-styled supermasochist who died in 1995 following a long battle with cystic fibrosis. The film documents the fi­nal years of his life.

Flanagan was a fighter. Sick from birth, he was given a life expect­ancy of only six or seven years. Against the odds he survived into his 40s. His art focused unapolo­getically on his condition and his supermasochism.

In a strangely humorous scene, Flanagan relates the difficulty he had simulating excreta for his - au­tobiographical - sculpture, Visible Man. This see-through statue had cystic fibrosis phlegm oozing from its mouth, semen from its penis and excreta from its anus. Flanagan recounts how he experimented for a year before finally settling on an unlikely mixture of VO5 shampoo and paint.

The film is dotted with inter­views with Flanagan’s family. His parents’ reaction to their son’s sexuality is a mixture of confusion and deep insight. His father likens Flanagan to a trapeze artist who challenges death with every twist and turn yet lands on his feet each and every time. His masochism was affirmation of control over a body damned and distorted by cystic fibrosis.

The film is not for the squeam­ish. Nor for the narrow-minded. Inserting a large steel ball up some­one’s rectum as an act of love could easily be dismissed as, well, sick. Driving a nail through your penis even more so. And yet this is a truly human film. Warmth and humour shine through. Definitely one to see.

Andy Hannah