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.
(more…)
