[-empyre-] Vivophilia’s Excesses

[Adam Zaretsky]

Vivophilia’s Excesses

This is Adam Zaretsky chiming in from Woodstock, New York. Thank you
Margaretha for some wild topics. Its been hard to write as its been a lot
to feel through. I am going to just make a few looming musings into the
woven maze here as a start.

I think about life-as-art-as-life interfaces as meant rein in endless
reasoning-for-usury and let the vital just splay. Spinning webs of
complexities leave chaote’s reign over reductionist utility. Elan vital is
the pumping, striving, stretching, churning swirls of swollen
life-worldings. Life’s teeming makes this a planetary messy morass; so
slimy and swampy, orgonomic and cthuluscenic.  Are Vivophilia’s Excesses
capitocene-centric or festive displays of abundant life?

A short introduction: I hold labs… hands on vivoart labs. The ecoart labs
offer fertile, wildlife green releases and problematic riffs on ‘foreign’
species xenophobia along with alien ecostability and remediation arts. I
believe in organic farming and endosymbiosis and have borne witness to
autopoietic abundance. The Art for NonHumans labs and explore concepts of
rehabilitation, rewilding the globe for migrating keystone species and
enrichment for captive non-humans (including refugees, the imprisoned and
wage enslaved ‘volunteers’). These are the inclusive, intuitive,
intersectional arts I produce in celebration and grieving.

My other labs are often more suspect of egregious carelessness: food art
and bioart. Food art and bioart generally rely on life usury traditions of
the Capitalocene. The emphasis on cultivating relationality (particularly
in the liner notes of bioart) falls flat in contained and failing life
support and geek love freak show allure [as if after the parasitism of food
or biotech production we can give some lip service to the care of the moist
media of life, instead of admitting the feeding-on or moulding-into
vivoarts.]

Performance art labs, as in liveart and bodyart are often human-centric but
least suspect of material usury of any life available. They often rely on
personal or small group volunteering and often take the role of being-stuck
like them (others.) Most performance artists are giving much more than
taking the live being incorporated into art. They may be emphasizing the
embodied, the enduring body or just revivifying through monstrous rushing
perturbance but, they are volunteering. It may be a non-clinical trial, a
sensorial differencing by choice (perhaps always already seekers in altered
states). It might be a proof that it doesn't hurt as much as we feel it
does but this would not be your standard masochist's tutelage. Pre-personal
Perception of being alive sometimes takes more than words towards the
opening of the gates.

What we run into with life-care issues in art making is always the economy
of what to do and how to keep actions, any actions (even inaction) from
being fascist stewardship: what lies in the balance: i.e. ethological ties
to Land-Blood-Nation eco-integrity racism as ‘right livelihood’, the
geoengineering fast-tech answer to all anthropocene perma-scarring of the
ecosphere, or the double binds of regenerative concepts to promote a
symbiotic globe and the wishful immortalist medicine of perpetuity. Even
the ecological, non-anthropocentric animal studies people have reason to
reflect on the problem of sacrifice in these benevolent economies.

There is also the question of feeding-on and moulding-to as inevitable
negentropic life striving across all organism-ness. And that opens me to
the list. I do have to thank Lissette and Ben and Margaretha for being in
keeping with the trouble along with many others for perpetuating the
potential for positive futures. How to allow for Vivophilia’s Excesses:
Recuperative Celebration?
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