A type of art work… Important to note and repeat.
A TYPE OF ARTWORK… that is unmanifest, and unannounced…
(And is not the equivalent of ‘doing nothing’.)
Here are some excerpts that will shed light, O yes…
{From The Complete NothingDoings}
The NothingDoings of Amir Parsa constitute a radical shift away from the production of objects AND from the curation of non-object-centered experiences, a general poetics that leads to—without ever claiming adherence to—the ‘art-ing’ of the living of life. I should, perhaps, reword that: the NoDos (pronounced ‘NoDoh’ and not ‘NoDoo’) also disrupt the art/life paradigm that is a bit ‘in vogue’ as of this writing, the ‘life-as-form’ paradigm, the ‘ephemeral aesthetic’ paradigm, the ‘relational art’ paradigm—you get my drift. Not only do the NoDos constitute a new way of creating art and a new art form—and in the process shift the paradigm of artistic creation and the epistemological, aesthetic and social quiddity of art—but they also, through the subtle operations at work in each type of NoDo, shift the paradigm of living and of experiencing art, and even shift the paradigm of paradigm-shifting.
That’s right: it can be put forth with much aplomb that the NothingDoings, in their variety, their irreverence, their humor and their rigor, had and have, as core principal objectives: to save art from itself, save the artists from excessive drowning in the mechanisms of the art world, save a downward spiral into the perpetual construction of objects and the production of non-objects, and lead to or at least propose a rebellion against these modes of fashioning art. The NothingDoings invite, I should say impose, a pause, a reconsideration, a radical shift as I alluded to above, a shift of shifting, towards, well, justement, the NoDo. A well-needed, crucial pause, I say again, a necessary cessation of activities in the regular realm, a cessation of excessive activitation (that’s right activitation—not a typo) in the regular regime, in favor of non-activities, or, more accurately, a-activities, ultimately making the phenomenological processes that allow the arts to be part of our lives—that is, seeing, feeling, breathing etc.—the constitutive components of the artworks themselves.
*
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 Loafapalooza (itself made of a sub-trilogy, namely Eloge du Brouillon, La Gloria del Quit, and In Praise of Idleness), 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!