The Village Voice, November 11, 1997:

[Bob] Flanagan was all about real and shameless self-disclosure. He lived his life at death's door. A medical anomaly, he managed to survive with cystic fibrosis until the age of 43. (Most CF sufferers die as children or young adults.) Certainly Flanagan behaved like someone with no time to be untrue to himself. "This is the person I am," he once declared. "I'm not afraid of any aspect of what I am."

That included the part of him that lived as a "supermasochist"—and always had. As a boy, he'd begun inflicting pain on himself because it helped him cope with the chronic pain of CF. Flanagan used to put it this way: "I've learned to fight sickness with sickness."

In the late '80s, he began staging his pain-inducing rituals as an art form. "I never wanted to call myself a 'performance artist,' " Flanagan once said. "I just went out and did these things from an honest place." Spectators fainted on both coasts. A hopeful Jesse Helms even sniffed around for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. (There was none.) Flanagan only did the nailed-penis act twice in his life, but something like that tends to become the defining moment in an artist's career. More routinely, he would nail his scrotum, insisting that it didn't really hurt. Obviously, he had a high tolerance for pain.

[Ed.: Flanagan is the subject of a new feature-length documentary, aptly titled Sick.]

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