On A Body to Live In, Fakir Musafar’s documentary about a body-modification pioneer
Source: Artforum.com
USA – WHEN ROLAND LOOMIS was seventeen years old, he had an out-of-body experience. Left alone for the weekend by his parents, he fasted for two days, then borrowed as much logging chain as he could carry from his father’s garage and elaborately rigged himself up in his mother’s fruit cellar. After several hours of bondage, he began to feel weightless, as if he were dangling from a cable above a chasm. “Finally, all the consciousness I had left was in the center of my head. It was like a little light, and finally it went click. . . . And what I saw with this was my body lashed to the wall, about ten feet away.” This was in 1947, in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Loomis had already been experimenting for several years with piercing, self-bondage, and sensory deprivation—activities he collectively termed “body play”—as well as photography, which he used to meticulously document his results. Despite his mother’s wishes, he was not going to become a Lutheran minister.
See more and larger photo’s on: Artforum.com
Loomis, who passed in 2018, is best known today as Fakir Musafar, a performance artist and pioneer of body modification who in 1979 coined the term “Modern Primitive” to describe himself and his community of like-minded followers. As Angelo Madsen’s chimerical documentary on the kinky guru, A Body to Live In (2025), reveals, this network extended from readers of the Bay Area punk zine RE/SEARCH to patrons of the Gauntlet, a legendary West Hollywood body piercing studio, and Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey.
In his intuitive fusion of esoteric spiritualism and subversive hedonism, Musafar’s metaphysical philosophy braids many strands of what is still hazily referred to as the New Age movement. Piercing, deprivation-induced trances, and group BDSM acts were, for Musafar, all ways of “get[ting] out of [one’s] physical condition.” Inspired by his own experiments, he believed in the transcendence of spirit beyond the flesh—an awareness of which was, paradoxically, best experienced through erotic pain. “In the course of s/m play,” he explains at one point during an archival interview, “very often a bottom in the scene would go into some other kind of space. . . . What was actually happening here was, I think, a shamanic act of spiritual exploration.”
Musafar, who frequently appeared on television during the 1970s and ’80s—and could pass for a Republican congressional candidate when he wasn’t wearing his septum tusk or working two pearl-handled daggers into slips behind his nipples—was a kind of ambassador for this uniquely blended admixture of devotional practices. Madsen’s film seeks to track all aspects of its heterodoxy without judgement, and includes many interviews with Musafar’s closest collaborators as they explain their various relationships to the Modern Primitivist movement. But the film only tacitly acknowledges how profoundly unconventional and unmistakably American Musafar’s belief system was in its magpie’s nest of rituals and benign entrepreneurialism. Over the course of the documentary, interviews with Musafar reference a litany of disparate cultural antecedents, including Sufism, tantric yoga, carnival culture, Christian and Buddhist asceticism, African and Aboriginal body modifications, Native American dances, and Todd Browning’s 1932 film, Freaks. Cléo Dubois, who was Musafar’s life partner, traces the primary inspiration for his earliest experiments to the pages of National Geographic: “He came from the ’30s, you know!”
Cultural appropriation is an inevitable corollary to Musafar’s legacy, as A Body to Live In frankly acknowledges. Reaching deep into the archives, Madsen manages to take Musafar’s transcendental mission seriously while calling out the frequently offensive blitheness by which he extracted his rituals from other walks of life. In one remarkable excerpt from an ’80s daytime television talk show, several Plains tribes of Native Americans pointedly critique Musafar’s ad hoc reenactment of their Sun Dance ritual, as seen in the 1985 documentary Dances Sacred and Profane, a sensationalizing study of American subcultures. “I think the whites ought to look into their background. I think there’s a lot in their background that they could be proud of,” one Native man suggests, as Musafar struggles to compare the Sun Dance to a Hindu ritual he also performed. “They don’t need to look over the fence at what somebody else has.” In contemporary interviews, several fellow travelers evince a reluctance to put labels on their experience, while still honoring Musafar as a leader in drawing attention to the body as a spiritual threshold.
In its combination of digital and film, tabletop and scanner photography, stop-motion and archival video, A Body to Live In does an admirable job of formally replicating the complexity of the subject it unfolds. Musafar’s life and beliefs were fascinating, and his own self-portrait photography deserves broader recognition, earning a place on museum walls beside Catherine Opie and Francesca Woodman. But while the movie faithfully reconstructs the late shaman’s life and times, it’s more interested in calling attention to aspects of physicality and spirituality that are universally accessible, even if the methods of activation remain subversive. As disembodied voices ask more than once in the film: “Are you trying to find an answer to a question that you cannot form?”
Nolan Kelly is a writer and critic based in New York. He produces a monthly column on great filmmakers of the past century for Mastermind.
Angelo Madsen’s A Body to Live In (2025) is running at New York’s Anthology Film Archives through March 12.
