Howard, Yetta (ed.), Rated RX: Sheree Rose With and After Bob Flanagan, Columbus, Ohio State Press, 2020
→Jones, Amelia, Body Art: Performing the Subject, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998
→Rose, Sheree, Zoom, Billy, “Sheree Rose: Almost Infamous,” New World Writing Quarterly, 2011
Visiting Hours: An Installation by Bob Flanagan in collaboration with Sheree Rose, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, 1992–1994; The New Museum, New York, September 23–December 31, 1994; The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1995
→The Ascension: Performance by Sheree Rose and Martin O’Brien, Jason Vass Gallery, Los Angeles, December 30, 2017
→The Wake: Performance by Sheree Rose and Martin O’Brien, LAST Projects, Los Angeles, November 12, 2022
American photographer and performance artist.
Sheree Rose was raised in Los Angeles and was pressured by her traditional Jewish family to marry by the time she graduated. While she did marry and have two children, she eventually divorced in 1977 and went on to earn a master’s degree in psychology at CSU Northridge in 1979, and an MFA at UC Irvine in 1995. S. Rose eventually left her suburban lifestyle and immersed herself in political and LGBTQ+ activism.
In 1981, she became a freelance photographer for Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, an epicentre of the Los Angeles poetry scene, and held that role until 1985. She met Bob Flanagan (1952–1996), a poet and performance artist, in 1980 and they married in 1989. The couple emerged on the Los Angeles punk subculture scene as performance artists, with B. Flanagan as the central object of their masochistic works. Beginning in smaller local arts circles, their performances and S. Rose’s continued photographic practice explored the nexus of pleasure and pain, daily living with chronic illness and pushing the boundaries of sexual norms and societal conventions of heteronormativity. Both were immersed in Los Angeles’ BDSM and queer culture, and forged a “consensual slave contract” whereby B. Flanagan consented to obey S. Rose at all times and renounced all rights to his own pleasure and privacy.
By blurring the boundaries between the private and public lives of romantic couples, especially in relation to sexuality, they forged new conversations centred around sadomasochism. A huge component of their practice was body mutilation, often involving S. Rose interacting with B. Flanagan’s body through live piercings, the placement of clips, and the application of nails to his nipples, genitalia and multiple other bodily sites. This intersection of pleasure and pain, along with S. Rose’s sexual dominance in contrast to B. Flanagan’s submissiveness, was the crux of their joint practice.
Their retrospective exhibition, Visiting Hours (1992–1995), explored Flanagan’s masochism in relation to cystic fibrosis and was shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (1992–1993), The New Museum (1994), and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1995). Each space included props and objects illuminating their relationship, as well as B. Flanagan’s childhood sexual fantasies. The centre of the exhibition was a room transformed into a mock hospital setting, where B. Flanagan remained throughout the opening hours of the show. Intermittently, S. Rose would hoist B. Flanagan up by his ankles and suspend him over his hospital bed, his gown flopping away to expose his nude, emaciated body to viewers.
After B. Flanagan’s death, S. Rose worked as an associate producer on Kirby Dick’s 1997 film SICK: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, which won both the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Grand Prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival that year. In 2011, S. Rose collaborated on a performance about BDSM and cystic fibrosis with British artist Martin O’Brien (b. 1987). Their partnership includes performances such as Do With Me As You Will (2013), Dust to Dust (2015) and Rose’s Wake (2022).
A notice produced as part of the TEAM international academic network: Teaching, E-learning, Agency and Mentoring
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2023