Ceremony: D.A.D.A. degree awards

Diplomas mark the acquisition of the knowledge and skills without which we would be incomplete, unfinished, and perhaps unfit. They cap a list full of tedium and qualities whose renewal follows the metamorphoses of our activities, our desires and our lives, which doggedly go on smiling and destroying. If DADA grew out of the devastated soil of a Europe whose promise of scientific, technological and moral progress could not stop men from engaging in unprecedented butchery, then what can be said of our hopes and our beliefs, our certainties and worries a century later? About our capacity for wanting the best while hatching the worst?

Rather than cutting out our tongues/languages, we could swallow them, spit them out, stiffen them, roast them; take them apart and reinvent them, and finally, offer a list of utterly new skills on the occasion of a degree ceremony or, more exactly, a “ration of civaplomas.” As if DADA was not just that amiably entertaining if insurrectional moment in the history of art and must continue in a form of contemporary idiocy and verbal catastrophe.

Performative tour of the exhibition “Raoul Hausmann” by dancer Viviana Moin and musician Pierre Courcelle, Friday 16 February, 7–7.45 pm.
Organised as part of the late-night events organised by Jeu de Paume and the Musée de l’Orangerie, it is free on presentation of a ticket for that day’s exhibition.
Information: infoauditorium@jeudepaume.org