Franko's arty revolution

Franko B is best known as a performance artist, but before you start imagining creative dancers, jolly jugglers or those statue lookalikes in Covent Garden, let me put you straight.

Franko B's work is neither whimsical nor amusing. It is deep, dark and disturbing, and fairly unpalatable even for the most broad-minded. For the central player in all Franko B's performances is his own blood.

In his last work, I Miss You, it dripped from his bleeding body as he paraded up and down a length of canvas, stretched out like a catwalk. In his latest, Oh Lover Boy, he lies bleeding on a table in a set-up that's somewhere between an autopsy and a life class.

The gruesomeness and self-obsession of Franko B's performances put him right alongside those other notorious conceptual artists - Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn - whose work, it seems, the contemporary art world can't get enough of. Emin's underwear is currently on show in Century City at Tate Modern; Marc Quinn, whose vase cast in blood was part of the Spectacular Bodies exhibition at the Hayward last year, has been displaying DNA extracted from his sperm in a test tube at White Cube2.

This use of the body - and its functions - as a canvas thing is very clever and conceptual, of course, and perhaps it's the only way to jolt us out of our 21st-century seen-it-all, done-it-all torpor (providing the same gory voyeuristic thrill as that other current obsession - forensic crime fiction).

But what does it really offer us beyond shock value? Franko B explains: 'My work presents the body in its most carnal, existential and essential state confronting us with the essence of the human condition in an objectified, vulnerable and yet seductively powerful form.'

Without an agent, Franko B has remained on the periphery of the BritArt pack (though he has been featured on The South Bank Show and had his work shown at Tate Modern), but he very much looks the part of the iconoclastic enfant terrible (shaved and tattooed head, gold teeth) and his home more than lives up to preconceptions.

For it is he who lives in this bijou little flat just across the road from Waterloo Station. It's not, as you might expect, somewhere most of us would call home (indeed, to a middle-class, Surrey-bred softie like me, it seems the very antithesis of that). With its metal-clad walls, stainless-steel furniture and preponderance of crosses, it's uncomfortable on the eye.

Everywhere you look there is something provocative or disturbing: a ladder of Mexican skeleton dolls; a wall of gay pornography; the bathroom with its car bonnet and blood-spattered ribbon curtains (made from that catwalk canvas); a pinball machine customised with a very personal display of very personal things (best not to go into that).

Franko B doesn't just do performance art but expresses himself in all sorts of media - sculpture, painting, film, photography - and the flat is simply an extension of his work and of himself.