Aesthetic self-medication: Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose's structures of breathing

This essay tracks adaptations to corporeal transformations in breathing in the performance art and life writing of Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) and Sheree Rose (b. 1941). It chronicles how breathing as an aesthetic strategy gets entangled with breathing as an exceptional or ordinary effect of disability over the course—and, in Rose's case, in the aftermath—of Flanagan's cystic fibrosis. The term “aesthetic self-medication” describes the process through which breathing is induced as an aesthetic form, and its patterns and rhythms transcribed and dramatized, in order to stage minimally coherent self-encounters amidst crisis. As Flanagan's chronic illness worsens and the couple's sadomasochistic dynamic no longer manages chronic pain, aesthetic self-medication structures laboured breathing into new genres of, or affective and libidinal relations to, pain, including boredom and musical humour.