Lie Back and Take It: BDSM, Biomedicine and the Hospital Bed in the work of Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose

Abstract

This article considers the position of the patient in a hospital bed and the ways in which artists with severe illnesses have utilised this. The hospital bed allows biomedicine full control and access to the body and renders the sick person as patient. Lying in bed becomes a position of passiveness, submission and vulnerability. In this article I explore the ways in which artists have worked with the duration of the hospital bed in order to re-imagine this endurance as a worthwhile activity towards self-ownership. The article discusses a number of works but focuses on Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s 1992-1995 retrospective Visiting Hours (Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1992; New Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1994; and Boston Centre for Fine Art in 1995) in which the gallery is turned into a hospital displaying all of their visual and video art works and includes the artists themselves. I argue that their work denies the sick body as victim and resists the contextualising of the body as simply a machine. Flanagan/Rose are able to transform the position of patient from one of passivity and victimhood to a position in which agency exists and is performed.