“The turning point for Tabar occurred when he realised that the hospital environment offered opportunities to exploit his lust for creativity.“
The Tabar in question is Ive Tabar – a medical performance artist (and hospital orderly) from Slovenia – and an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Performance and Art (from MIT press) describes some of his achievements. “… for instance, in ‘Fibrilacija’, Tabar performed a medical procedure called fibrillation, where he, while fully conscious, pushed a catheter all the way to his heart so that the audience could see the moment when his heart trembled on a monitor.“ In another of Tabar’s pieces ‘Luknjo v koleno’ (hole in the knee) he drilled though his leg with the aid of a ½ inch surgical drill in front of a live audience. (He’d had some practice – having previously drilled though some beef bones from a local butchers to perfect the technique.)
Read more about Tabar’s art in this (roughly translated) article from Mladina Tednik magazine. Note : complete with pictures – which are decidedly not for the squeamish.