Having one’s scrotum pierced with needles or being restrained and spanked with a paddle is not everyone’s idea of art, but for Sheree Rose and Martin O’Brien, those were just some of what went on during their 24-hour performance piece, “Do With Me As You Will,” also known as “Make Martin Suffer for Art.”
As the title of the performance suggests, guests were invited to literally do with Martin as they wished, the restrictions being that no bodily fluids be exchanged and no serious harm be inflicted on O’Brien. The program stated, “Everything done to Martin will be consensual,” and that “there will be specific actions at various times, some dictated by the audience, some prearranged by Rose.” To keep the experience democratic, the performance was free to the public.
“I’m like the conductor here,” Rose said to the audience. “I’m orchestrating this but I want you all to be the participants.”
Beginning at noon on Sunday, June 23, and going on until noon the following Monday, the dungeon room Hades at Sanctuary LAX played host to Rose and O’Brien’s collaboration.
Rose, 70, a veteran of the performance art world and renowned in many other underground Los Angeles scenes, had guests do things ranging from spanking, flogging, needle play, to force-feeding and rope bondage. At the end of each hour, Rose would cut a tally into one of O’Brien’s arms to mark the end of each hour.
O’Brien, 25, hails from London and this collaboration with Rose marks their fourth performance together and his debut in America. The two corresponded over e-mail for some time before ever meeting in person and share a bond over Sheree’s late husband and former performing partner, Bob Flanagan. Flanagan suffered from cystic fibrosis and died from complications of the disease in 1996. O’Brien too suffers from cystic fibrosis.
“O’Brien could easily be Rose’s son, and their performance dynamic has a hard maternal edge,” said Jennifer Doyle in her June 21 kcet.org article, “Sheree Rose: A Legend of Los Angeles Performance Art.” Doyle is not far off the mark in her assessment of Rose and O’Brien’s relationship.
“I think the relationship with me and Sheree is quite motherly,” O’Brien said.
The connection to Flanagan is prominent in this collaboration – the cage that O’Brien is put into when nothing is being done to him, was Bob Flanagan’s.
It had gotten lost when Rose relocated to a smaller house. When she found out that it had turned up at Sanctuary LAX, she said she almost cried.
“I bought that for Bob for one of his birthdays,” Rose said. “I think maybe his fortieth birthday, and it’s been lost for many years and then it turns up here at the dungeon. So I thought, ‘Oh what an opportunity to use the cage and have Martin come and use it as well.’”
At one point during the night, Rose has O’Brien read some of Flanagan’s poetry and one of his journals as he sits in the cage.
Like Flanagan, O’Brien incorporates his disease into his performance work.
“I was really interested in pushing my body or using my body in a physical way so I started to think about ways I can use my body more and allow it to sort of be itself a kind of performance so I started working with physical endurance,” O’Brien said. “You know, thinking about the ill body enduring in some way.”
One of the side effects of cystic fibrosis is an excess production of mucous in the lungs. Sufferers of the disease must undergo certain kinds of physical exercises or therapies to get them to cough up the mucous, which can complicate breathing.
At one point during the performance, Rose demonstrated “pounding,” a therapeutic exercise where she pounded on O’Brien’s chest as he lay on a table. This loosened up some of the mucous in his lungs which he coughed up into a small jar for the audience to see.
The piece was the first time he and Rose have ever done a durational piece of this length, and the first time that they have ever allowed the audience this much control.
“I was quite nervous about it,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t really know what was going to happen.” Neither did the audience.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect because this is the first time I’ve ever witnessed anything like this in person,” said David Lucien Matheke, 30, an artist and painting major at California State University Northridge.
“I’ve just been trying to take as much in as I can,” Matheke said of his experience. “When Martin was getting his scrotum pierced to that board, I was standing there talking to him the whole time, [and] bottle-fed him some water. That was hard to watch.”
Matheke also related to O’Brien because he too suffers from a genetic disease: X-Linked Agammaglobulinemia.
“Basically that means that I don’t produce B cells on my own so every four weeks I have to get these infusions that take like six to eight hours of medications made from plasma extracts from like thousands of different people,” Matheke said. “And I’ve been doing that since I was three.”
Matheke’s disease has also been a source of inspiration for his artwork – he uses blood as a medium for his paintings.
“The blood painting is kind of just to talk about universal connectivity and how I have all these different people passing through me from one month to the next so the chemical make up of my blood varies from one month to the next and I have to ask myself if that affects my beliefs, my moods, the energy,” he said. “I’m really into energy and spirituality – like the connection between everything.”
Matheke said that he would be leaving the performance with a deeper sense of connection.
“I feel like even though my interaction was brief, I’m taking away a connection, like a very personal, almost spiritual, connection with Martin and Sheree, even though I just met them.”
For others, like performance artist Grace Hansmeyer, it was an opportunity to collaborate with Rose and incorporate BDSM into her work.
“I met Sheree last fall. I knew immediately I wanted to work with her in some way because we’re both very interested in endurance based work,” Hansmeyer said.
She contributed to this piece dressed in dominatrix gear and she force-fed O’Brien heart shaped cookies as he donned a slutty schoolgirl costume.
“I wanted to see a side of the masochist that you don’t normally see – more childlike,” she said. “I wanted to play with that clear your plate type thing that happens when you’re a kid and you’re not hungry and your parents are telling you not to waste food and you have to eat everything on the plate.”
She also had a paddle with hearts on it that she would use to discipline him intermittently, and forced him to hold a butt plug fashioned from a ginger root in his anus, a practice called “figging” she said.
The figging was O’Brien’s least favorite part throughout the 24-hour experience. “It burned!” he said.
Rose said she was concerned that the audience would not want to participate and that she would end up having to do everything while people watched, which she did not want to do.
“Everybody has been so helpful in this whole thing,” Rose said to a wave of audience members. “Everybody so far has been remarkable with things that they’ve done – some things very exotic and wonderful, and some things mundane but that’s the way it is, that’s how life is, right? And that’s how time is. And we’re just filling our time here and the fact that you’re spending your time with us here makes me feel very good inside.”
Hansmeyer said she also enjoyed her experience at the performance.
“I met a lot of wonderful people and I had a lot of really beautiful conversations and working with Martin and Sheree really made me feel like I’d like to do more endurance based work as an artist incorporating BDSM into my work,” she said.
It is this element of time and how it is spent and shared with others that Rose wants to impart with the audience.
“I’m a grandmother; he’s a young man,” she said. “I’ve lived a very long very full life. And so for me these years now – I just turned 70 – these years now are plus, they’re bonuses. I’m healthy, I’m alert, I can do things, I have fun and I’m looking forward to this. This is a plus and a bonus for me. Martin is a very young man – he’s 25 years old but he has a disease that might kill him by the time he’s 30.”
She said that this is why she kept the performance free and invited the audience to be performers, because as time and art are commoditized, it is up to us to decide what has value to us.
“We wanted to really take these 24 hours and make them meaningful for us and not as a spectacle necessarily, but showing we can use time to our own benefit,” Rose said. “We don’t have to be prisoners of time. We can use time and have fun with it, we can waste it, we can kill it, whatever we want to do – it’s our time.”
‘Do With Me as You Will: An Exploration of Time and How We Share It’ was originally written by Rich Yap for Mountiewire, 26 June 2013, http://mountiewire.com/archives/12495