Four performances from Via Nova series
The title of the performance originates from Joseph Beuys piece titled JA JA JA JA JA, NEE NEE NEE NEE NEE performed in Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf on December 14th 1968. “In the essay „How the piece was created“ Stüttgen reports of an encounter with Beuys. His academic colleagues had just published the „mistrust manifest“ against him. Stüttgen reports that Beuys was just returning from a funeral at the Niederrhein region. Instead of discussing the political situation at the academy he enjoyed talking about the elder women at the funeral meeting with coffee and cake and that they were sitting around the table, murmuring the same pitch for hours: „Ja Ja Nee Nee.“ (www.ubu.com)
“To make people free is the aim of art; therefore art for me is the science of freedom.” This is one of many Joseph Beuys’s statements about the meaning of art. At least from Duchamp onwards the art is what the artist succeeds to define as art. And this is what the art is preoccupied with for the whole century: to create new definitions of art. Is this art or pure bullshit? Is this artist or bluffer? Yes (Ja) or no (Nee)? Today the answers are vaguer than ever. We do not want to pretend that we know answers. The first rule of the game we are playing is: never allow the question to trick you with an answer. We feel we are most real when we touch upon something that can no longer be rationalized, when we no longer have to pretend to understand something we don’t. To make people free from art is the aim of Via Negativa. Ja ja ja nee nee nee…
Performances
What Joseph Beuys told me while I was lying dead in his lap
Game with toothpicks
No one should have seen this
Tonight I celebrate
Concept: Bojan Jablanovec
Conceived and performed by Boris Kadin, Kristian Al Droubi, Katarina Stegnar, Bojana Kunst, Uroš Kaurin, Tomaž Grom
Production: Via Nova performances produced by Via Negativa and supported by Ministry of Culture of RS and the City of Ljubljana. Collective presentation Ja ja ja nee nee nee as a part of the project Via Nova via FFT Düsseldorf produced by FFT Düsseldorf and supported by Kunststiftung NRW as a part of “Exposed – Grenzen der Schaulust.”
Producer: Špela Trošt
Technical director: Igor Remeta
Venue and date: FFT Kammerspiele Düsseldorf, 20 November 2010 as part of Via FFT Düsseldorf program (pdf)
Duration: 3 hours