Echoing the manifesto culture of Western modernity and of the avant-gardes, The Complete NothingDoings calls to mind The Communist Manifesto, the declarations of Dada, the literature of Surrealism, the Situationist writings of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, and the texts of conceptual artists such as Sol Lewitt and Lawrence Weiner, while also resonating with Platonic dialogues as well as with other texts of spiritual enlightenment like the Bible, The Buddhavacana, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Parsa’s prophetic tone, his first person address, his frequent usage of phrases such as ‘my brethren’, and the overabundance of exclamation points bring into motion an array of textual references to confessions of faith and pronouncements of truths.

The Complete NothingDoings is not a modest proposal: it suggests that neither objects nor experiences need to be produced and made, and it argues for a radical deskilling and the ultimate dematerialization of art. The book is about the refusal to make art by practicing any kind of ability or competence and by producing any new material or object. It is an invitation for the perpetual rethinking of things, whether texts or objects, and a call for the endless repositioning of perceptions, behaviors and experiences. The NothingDoings are a systematic expansion and, at the same time, an undoing of all and every post-Duchampian paradigm of conceptual, post-conceptual and relational art.”
—from the Afterword by Agnes Berecz

Author bio:

Born in Tehran, Amir Parsa attended French international schools in Iran and the U.S., studied at Princeton and Columbia, currently lives in New York, and teaches and directs trans/neodisciplinary initiatives at Pratt Institute. An internationally acclaimed writer, poet, translator, new formist and cultural designer and curator, he is the author of more than twenty literary works.