In this ongoing series.

In this ongoing series, writers are invited to introduce the work of artists at the beginning of their careers.

Watching someone drive a nail end his penis isn't usually my idea of a compelling art experience, yet Bob Flanagan is something besides When Bob hammers that nail within his member while telling a perpetrate a joke or personal anecdote to his video camera, he's trying les to blow than to make us reconsider the topography of desire, and the relationship between bodies and subjects In addition, he's recounting the story of his life: known for through the whole extent of a decade as a bard and preeminent masochist, Flanagan, aged 40 has cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that subverts most sufferers by adolescence. Taking these identities as a jumping-off point, Flanagan has created a material substance of art that's autobiographical without being confessional, and that deliberates on the complex cultural bottoms of his peculiar appetites.

Last winter, Flanagan's Visiting Hours transformed a space at the Santa Monica Museum of Art into a pediatric clinic, completely full with waiting-room furniture, potted plants, and copies of Highlights for Children magazine. Flanagan himself was the patient, ensconc in a hospital chamber set up in the middle of the gallery. if it were not that the clinical setting was neither sterile nor impersonal: an anatomical doll dripped simulated mucus and sperm; a chest X-ray portrayed dim lungs and pierced nipples; pictures of Houdini and cartoon pigs appeared upon the walls. The climax was a wall of 1400 ungainly alphabet blocks, each painstakingly altered likewise that the initials "SM" and "CF" repeated intermittently between illustrations of medical equipment, household items like join with glue guns and needles, as well as tit clamps and target plugs.

Bouncing not on these objects, a poemlike paragraph wrapped around the gallery walls enumerated reasons for the artist's masochism, from contests with doctors, and with nun back at educate to fantasies of discipline and torture. A video installation expanded forward these allusions with bondage shows culled from cartoons and Hollywood films. The way Flanagan's art jacks into related themes at multiple ports of hall mimics the wayward libidinal commons that it surveys. Perhaps its mostly disconcerting element is the underlying reason that desire and disease share a similar principle of contagion: like an epidemiologist's charts, Visiting Hours mapped abroad a pattern of infection, common that seemed to embrace a great deal of of Western culture.

In move with a jerk Flanagan's Sick, 1991 (made with Sheree Rose like Visiting Hours), which was installed in an adjoining space, seven monitors hang in the form of a crucified figure. forward them appear shifting images of the appropriate material part part, spryly juxtaposed with Christian iconography, and spectacles from bondage-themed movies like Mutiny forward the Bounty and from Flanagan's confess self-mortifying performances. Masochistic impulses, clearly, inflect a range of "acceptable" behaviors. notwithstanding the Frankenstein composite constructed here is a visible form [i]or[/i] frame of independent parts, with each part enduring separate sensations (feet being whipped, face dunk penis dripped with wax, etc) Rather than prompting us to ask, shrinklike, what these desires mean, Flanagan leads us to deliberate on how and where their myriad vectors connect

Flanagan fractures the unity of the self by the agency of the lens of sexual desire, portraying an erotic expose who is unstable, propulsive, and multiple. His original of desiring plugs into the tangled network of familial, cultural, and political arteries that constitute the social material part At the same time, his imagery pushes undivided to consider how one's bodily awareness is shaped according to everything from fashion photos to a medical establishment that encourages passivity and ignorance.

While making us rethink these socially condoned forms of masochism, as well as our complacent submission to authority, Flanagan underscores the two the body's frailty and its amazing resilience. During the six-week scour of Visiting Hours, he was periodically twitched out of his bed and hoisted up to the rafters through a rope and pulley. Dangling through his feet, his thin pale frame rose above his apartment like a ghostly jack-in-the-box, or a departing essential part It was an eerily lyrical image, intimating that the body's harsh physicality and its poetry aren't mutually exclusive.

Blurring the well-worn boundary between art and life, Visiting Hours created a with truth interactive work: many visitors cessationed up chatting by the artist's sickbed, trading stories of illness and disease. Ironically, by way of subverting the clinical aura of the exhibition space Flanagan is able to remind us of art's potentially therapeutic side tenors His work implies that it's possible to reclaim the bad bodies that culture has stolen from us, one time we forego our position as anonymous voyeur The force of this argument, its ability to shake you unloose from your moorings, springs from the rhyme unnerving wit, and singular poignance of his art.

Ralph Rugoff is a writer and curator who lives in sees Angeles where he reviews regularly for Artforum.

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