The Italian-British artist who made his own blood his medium and his subject · whose Tate Modern catwalk of blood, I Miss You, turned bodily vulnerability into a statement of tenderness and loss.
Franko B (born Franco Bosisio, 1960, Milan; London-based since 1979) is an internationally recognised performance and body artist, and I keep him with a content advisory and a clear framing: although blood and pain are the leitmotifs of his work, they are in the service of love, loss and vulnerability, and the body is treated as the site of the human condition rather than as a source of shock. A formally trained fine artist (Camberwell, Chelsea, Byam Shaw), he is also a painter and a maker of red-neon text works.
His best-known piece is I Miss You (1999–2005). In it the artist, nude and painted white from head to toe, walks slowly up and down a long white canvas laid out like a fashion catwalk while blood flows from cannulas in his arms; the blood pools and marks the canvas, which becomes a painting, and the only sound is the click of photographers' cameras at the end of the runway. The work was staged in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003, as part of the Live Culture programme, and at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and other European institutions. It is one of the defining images of contemporary body art.
Franko B has been explicit about how the work is made, and I record his own framing: I Miss You is a controlled blood-letting, the same medical procedure as giving blood, not cutting, and he has expressed frustration at the persistent misdescription. I note this, documents the art and its themes, and supplies no method detail; what matters is the meaning the artist attaches to the act, not its mechanics.
That meaning is, by his own account and the critical reading, tenderness rather than violence. "We are all bleeding inside," he has said, and the bleeding body on the white canvas is offered as a shared human vulnerability rather than a spectacle of harm; his red-neon works, carrying phrases like I Miss You and Because of Love, make the same point in light. Critics have distinguished his work from the more confrontational body art of Chris Burden or Gina Pane precisely on this ground: the intent is to unite an audience in feeling rather than to shock it.
Franko B sits in the Live Art canon alongside Ron Athey and Marina Abramovic, and the two artists in this sub-section are directly linked: Athey wrote for Franko B's monograph Still Life, and they showed in the same Tate Modern Live Culture programme in 2003. I keep Franko B in the Performance sub-section as the body artist for whom blood is a language of vulnerability, and whose standing in major institutions (a bleeding performance in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern) marks how far the transgressive-body tradition has travelled from the underground the archive's sound came from.
The content advisory governs this entry, as across the sub-section. I document the art and its themes, record the artist's own framing of the work as blood-letting rather than cutting, and presents Franko B as the serious, widely recognised artist he is, the bleeding body turned into a statement of love and loss.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene