POWER: Adam Zaretsky
Living “off the fat of the land” became apparent at the dawn of history when privileged individuals were first relieved of tasks related to providing food, constructing shelter, and raising the young. By relying upon their neighbors for their material needs, archaic priests, warriors, chiefs, and healers initiated an enduring social tradition whereby some individuals consume a disproportionate share of the resources. Since the Industrial Revolution, the volume of production has accelerated, enabling more people to amass more material goods, dump more waste, guzzle more resources, and spew more pollutants than every before. Advanced societies are reeling from an excess of excess. Obesity has replaced the ‘fat’ of the land. This inequitable distribution of material wealth is typically accompanied by a comparable inequity of power.

Adam Zaretsky addresses the fetish for power that has led humanity to pump its intellectual, mental, and physical muscles and dominate other species, earth forces, and each other. His innovative measures to reverse power-mania take the form of cultivating submissiveness. Indeed, Zaretsky craves submissiveness as others crave power. He has formulated a triad of unlikely techniques to replace aggressive power-mongering with docile obedience: organic farming, sadomasochistic sexual practices, and biotech experimentation. The first is a bizarre charade. The second is a performance spectacle. The third is lunatic science.

Adam Zaretsky with Katherine Wright, Tarvis Watson and Chase Pierson
pFARM: Initiation Ritual Still image from video
2007

Organic Farming: Prior to industrial agriculture, farm animals provided a fine example of submissiveness. Beasts of burden submit to a yoke, labor in silence, and endure fatigue without complaint. Zaretsky creates opportunities for humans to emulate this ideal at his farm in Woodstock, New York. Members, students, and visitors crawl and pull ploughs, till the earth, sleep in pens, sport chains attached to the rings in their noses, and sit on eggs until they hatch. They are banished to the compost pile if they misbehave. Courses are offered through a “submission program.” Zaretsky says they are designed to “inform/deform the present day conceptions of getting back to nature.” ¹

Although the farm was inactive at the time of this writing, native medicinal plants have been cultivated and marketed to manifest the positive principle of submissiveness. For example, the crops are grown by submitting to natural biodynamic processes instead of the hostile take-over of the land that characterizes industrialized and chemical-saturated agriculture. Furthermore, the tinctures made from the plants are marketed in the streets by members. Besides selling their remedies, they enact strange public rituals wearing leather regalia and pink overalls in celebration of submissiveness. Zaretsky explains that he perform a “cash-intensive minuet” to “confront the seedy side of our ‘free’ market, capital-obtrusive, and thoroughly heisted lives.”

Biotechnology: Zaretsky’s desire to free the world of the scourge of domination is also activated on the scale of DNA. He is attempting to isolate the gene for submissive behavior and thereby create a new breed of humans who are obedient and selfless.

Sadomasochism: Since masochists’ experience of submissiveness is connected to gratification, fetishism, and eroticism, Zaretsky believes they are a treasured source of genetic makeup for his DNA experiments. Gathering genetic samples from desirable organisms is not new. Selective breeding has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. What is revolutionary is the characteristic that pFARM chooses to favor. Marketing submissiveness as a desirable state of being threatens the fundamental tenets of contemporary civilization. The excess so many people currently enjoy, as well as its damaging consequences, are the result of dominating tactics that characterize industrial farming, engineering, mining, manufacturing, and constructing. Through his insightful lunacy, Zaretsky links taboo sexuality with environmental and social reform.

Zaretsky’s multi-pronged strategies to eradicate “the fat of the land” therefore incorporate cloning, transgenics, and genomics, as well as pranks, posturing, and absurdity. A wild proposition emerges from their intersection – the time has come for humans to abandon the presumption of privileged status. Instead of a brave new world, Zaretsky strives to create a timid new world. He concludes, “We are breeding for pleasure in a world of hurt. Our children will be posthuman but not superhuman … And we are proud not to be proud.” ²

-----------------------------
¹Adam Zaretsky, http://www.emutagen.com/pfarmgl.html (February 2007).
²Adam Zaretsky, EMutagen: Viva Vivo (May 2007).