Access Intimacies in BDSM and Durational Performance Spaces

This presentation is based on a portion of my introduction to the forthcoming edited collection of photographs, archival materials, and essays, Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan. Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan’s most well-known collaborative exhibition, Visiting Hours (1992–95), transformed the museum space into a hospital space that equally reflected the crip intimacies of their BDSM practices in life and art. In reflecting ill, aging, and disabled bodies through queer sexualities, Rose’s recent collaborative and durational performances (2013–17) have taken place in spaces including rented hotel rooms and dungeons. In these spaces, visitors were invited to participate and/or watch within fixed but open periods of time, such as 24 hours, which breaks down what Elizabeth Barnes discusses in The Minority Body as “bad-difference” versus “mere-difference.” By taking into account a range of abilities and non-normative approaches to sexuality, these less-conventional performance spaces radicalize the intimacies of the artists’, audience members’, and participants’ encounters with each other. In turn, the spaces as part of the performances open up access that permit unrestricted forms of participation, agency, and consent. Ultimately, these performances ask us to consider the possibilities of de-privileging ableist and heteronormative rationales that often define the temporal and spatial arrangement of performative art practices.