Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

Negation as affirmation and affirmation as discrimination

Four performances from the Via Nova series. The title of the presentation originates from Joseph Beuys’ work Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee, which he performed on 14 December 1968 at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. “In his essay How the work was created, Stüttgen recounts his meeting with Beuys. His academic colleagues had just published the “mistrust manifesto” 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. “Duchamp insisted on his “no” and used this spirit of negation for a series of ingenious artistic creations” (Laszlo Glozer). Every negation is a potential affirmation and every “yes” is a potential discrimination. The first rule of the game is not to fall for this trick with your answer. When we touch something that can no longer be rationalised, that is when we are most real; that is when we no longer have to pretend to understand something we don’t understand. To liberate people from art, that is the mission of Via Negativa.

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

2010 • Via Nova
Collective presentation • 180 min

Performances
— What Joseph Beuys Told Me …
— Game With Toothpicks
— No One Should Have Seen This
— Tonight I Celebrate

Concept and direction — Bojan Jablanovec
Performers — Boris Kadin, Kristian Al Droubi, Katarina Stegnar, Bojana Kunst, Uroš Kaurin, Tomaž Grom
Technical manager — Igor Remeta
Producer — Špela Trošt
Production — Via Negativa, FFT Düsseldorf

Presentation
20-11-2010 • FFT Düsseldorf