Art Degree Zero goes to the edge of un-art.
Back to beginnings. Before the making. Before the performance. Before the concept. Before the trace even. Launch work and live in a traceless world: to find again the path to marks and traces. The before-first-step. To unburden and unearth again. A brazen look at all that might be possible in the grand untilled field. Uncommitted to mediums, genres, disciplines, traditions. Before drawing, before lines. dots. Before alphabets.
A cleansing of sorts. A radical, total, cleanse. All washing off. Before a first mark. Before a first sign. Or letter. Or gesture even. Before a first love. Before a first letter. Or trace. So that… So that a whole new vision can be propounded.
Art Degree Zero:
*
One is tempted to dub the adventure The Degree Zero of Art, or Art Degree Zero, a tabula rasa of aesthetic consideration and artistic practice. Were it not for the fact that Parsa himself did conceive The Degree Zero of Art (DeZA)—where he pointedly included three of his works: the book of The Complete NothingDoings, the hilarious Le Chaise (Yes, Le), and the sublimely witty and delirious Conceptual Conceptualism—we would be well-situated to introduce the term and implant it as the foundation of a reconsideration of where art begins, how art is formulated, and how art is propounded and disseminated. In fact, any one of these works could easily have stood for the DeZA by itself, but it is a tribute to Parsa for having conceived—and having the guts to actually present—such works as artworks, risking his own skin, as it were, to, as I like to say, stop the madness of perpetual production or even announced non-production! He knowingly undertakes an adventure that is dangerous for his career, let alone for a work that surely could go on and get mocked. And he knowingly—and this is perhaps something his harsher critics do not quite grasp—in our current atmosphere, humbly accepts becoming the rebel child against all faux rebels. We salute him, then, and we shall cease this introduction, and let the work thrust its own truthness upon our souls!