Roland Loomis (August 10, 1930 – August 1, 2018[1]), known professionally as Fakir Musafar, was an American performance artist considered to be one of the founders of the modern primitive movement.[2][3]
Life
Fakir Musafar
Born Roland Loomis, at age 4, he claimed to have experienced dreams of past lives which, along with his anthropological studies, influenced his interests in body modification.[4][5] He served in the army during the Korean War,[5] and was first married for a short time in the 1960s.[5] In 1966 or 1967, he first performed a flesh hook suspension, inspired by his viewing of anthropological works.[6] In 1977, he gave himself the name Fakir Musafar.[5]
In the 1985 documentary Dances Sacred and Profane, he was shown walking while wearing a device that pressed many small skewers into his upper body, and hanging from a tree by hooks in his chest, in his modified versions of other cultures' sacred ceremonies.[5] He was an extra ('Man in hotel room') in Die Jungfrauen Maschine (The Virgin Machine) in 1988,[7] and in 1991, he appeared in My Father Is Coming as Fakir.[8] He was featured in the 1989 book Modern Primitives,[5] which documented, propagated, and became influential in the modern body modification subcultures.
In May 2018, Loomis announced on his website that he was suffering from terminal lung cancer.[14] He died on the morning of 1 August 2018.[15] His death was initially announced in a public Facebook post by his wife Cléo Dubois, and later confirmed by an obituary in Artforum.[1]
