ABSTRACT
Bob Flanagan is a live model of the post-human, for he illustrates step by step how the human senses —taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight-have been utterly reorganized by technology. Just as microscope, oscilloscope, speculum, X-ray not only altered what we saw but how we perceived the human body in the past, so today sophisticated imaging techniques (CAT scans, PET scans, MRI, etc.) raise scores of questions: ‘What is pathology?’, ‘What is “sick”?’ (One of Bob’s performances was called ‘Bob Flanagan’s sick’, which is also the title of Kirby Dick’s award-winning 1997 documentary film, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.) In one witty scene in the film, Bob nods to all the artists working in the wake of Artaud: the Viennese Actionists, Yves Klein, Fluxus, Nam June Paik, etc. But none can hold a candle to him, for he is the ‘original Mr. Derivative’! Flanagan used ritual to fulfil the prophecies of Artaud regarding the painful reorganization of the theatre, and the urgent demand for a new type of corporeal speech: ‘We need above all a theater that wakes us up: nerves and heart.’* His rituals create a spontaneous corporeal force between his own ‘shocked’ neuromuscular responses and those of the spectators, enlivened and updated by the new technologies that heighten interactivity.
