Fakir Musafar: Spirit + Flesh

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Book Reviews of Fakir Musafar: Spirit + Flesh

Book Review: Libidomag.com review by Jack Hafferkamp
Summary: 5 Stars

Be forewarned, this book, beautifully designed and realized as it is, is disturbing. If you think Robert Mapplethorpe went too far, this is probably not for you. The images we run here in the Libido Review Gallery are on the cuddly end. Others in the book make me wince no matter how often I see them.

Not all of the images in this book are of Fakir, but most are. And this is as it should be, because it is clear that Fakir is the centerpiece of his own universe, in which the TV idea of the makeover is taken to an extreme hard to imagine without seeing it.

After the initial shock wears off, one can't help but wonder why, one would want to poke very large nails into one's self or hang one's body from giant hooks like so much cattle carcass. Why would one do this to one's self.

The answer is found both in the photos and Mark Thompson's excellent introduction. For me the question turn on the point at which performance art becomes a public spiritural quest. For Fakir, pain is a portal to the divine; he has turned himself into a "technician of the sacred," using his own body much the same way flagellants from a variety of religions use pain to seek the divine.

The only difference is that Farkir has documented his experiments with a photographic artists's eye.

Summary of Fakir Musafar: Spirit + Flesh

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