Anti-action

Installation view of Laurie Parsons's 578 Broadway, 11th Floor 1990 at Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York. Courtesy Lorence-Monk Gallery © Laurie Parsons.

“Laurie Parsons went so far as to refuse to include her name on the invitation to the opening and to remove all reference to the show from her CV. Four years later, she ceased to produce works altogether.”

I want to coin a new art term: Anti-action.

Anti-action is a term for art practices today that deliberately try to make the impact of their work as slight as possible. This type of work can be sublime.

In its simplicity it considers the human impact on earth, the over saturation images in our world and extreme efficiency. On the Tate Modern website a similar term, Nothing Works, have emptiness as a theme. The Anti-action could be described by the work of American artist Laurrie Parsons empty galleries and her complete cessation of art-making as an artwork.

There are a number of artists working within this theme today. The dematerialised artwork finds its most recognisable form as Performance art, a practice in which the pre-existant body is the only material of the work.