The original exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ was staged in over two exhibition sites in Paris (the Centre Pompidou and the Great Hall of La Villette), and ran from 18th May to 14th August 1989. It was hailed as the first global exhibition of contemporary art. The exhibition presented contemporary works by living artists from around the world, aiming to expose the range of artistic practices in a global context.
History and context
As the promotional text from the retrospective exhibition explains, Magiciens de la Terre was produced in order to show “that objects seen in Western cultures as works of art, but embodying a functional, spiritual aspect for the civilisations they came from, had a legitimate place in the Museum environment… evoking the precepts developed by Joseph Beuys with his Peace Biennial and Robert Filliou with his “Poïpoïdrome”, whereby the practice of art should include otherness and exchange as fundamental components at the very heart of creativity”. However, due to Martin’s insistence on representing only living artists, neither Beuys or Filliou could be shown as they had both passed away during the making of the exhibition. (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, pp.26-27)
As discussed during my previous blog (from week 94), the Magiciens exhibition was contextualised by “colonial presentations within world exhibitions in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries, the creation of the Musee de l’Homme in Paris in 1937 and MOMAs ethnographic projects throughout the first half of the 20th century” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p10). These early ‘global’ displays provoked various other large-scale initiatives, in an attempt to address cultural practices that had not originated in the West in relation to the Western art system. Such responses aimed to question the established art canon and introduce historiographic readings into contemporary art (Steeds et al. Making Art Global, p10). This expansion of the artistic canon, shaped by the end of the Cold War and the beginnings of globalisation, encouraged new ideas and approaches towards displaying ‘non-Western’ art. These projects included exhibitions which ran concurrent to Magiciens de la Terre, such as The Bienal de la Habana, and ‘The Other Story: Afro-Asian artists in Post-war Britain‘, “with its formulation of an unrecognised modernism produced by cultural and racial minorities in the UK” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p10),
Methodology of Magiciens de la Terre
In an effort to present an evenly distributed number of artists, the curators of Magiciens selected 50 ‘Western’ and 50 ‘non-Western’ artists. It was also decided that each artist should be treated as an individual creator or group, rather than as representative of their country, as usually happened in a traditional biennale style of categorisation. Utilising an ethnographic methodology, the four curators set off on numerous missions across the globe, accompanied by around twenty project leaders. These studio visits were preceded by visual documentation and recommendations from curators from the different continents, which they then followed up by meeting each of the creators in their working context.
Rather than selecting existing work for exhibition, the curators were more interested in developing an understanding of artistic practice globally, and then inviting artists to produce new work specifically for the exhibition context. Curatorial work as a “two-stage process” had been developed since the late 1960s, beginning with exhibitions such as ‘When Attitudes Become Form‘, organised by Harold Szeemen at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p13).
The relationship between centre and periphery was also stated as a concern to the Magiciens exhibition design and layout. As Pablo Lafuente explains in his introduction to ‘Making Art Global (Part 2): ‘Magiciens de la Terre‘, “the figure of the artist was the structural unit that gave form to the exhibition… it assigned each artist a singular location in the world, a dot in a map pictured on each of the artists’ sections in the catalogue, always at its centre, so that everyone of them is presented as an inhabitant of a common space” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p13). However, despite this “universalist conception of the act of artistic creation… this equality was denounced as fictitious, as oblivious to the socio-cultural and historical context in which the different selected practices emerged, and therefore as exoticising;.. the embodiment of a neo colonialist attitude that allowed the contemporary art system to colonize, commercially and intellectually, new areas that were previously out of bounds” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p11).
The exhibition: selection, collection, and installation
The intention was for most of the artists to produce works onsite. However, the curators also attempted to respond to the contextual requirements and expectations of the artists involved. This necessitated different agreements with different groups. Therefore, some of the works were borrowed for the duration of the exhibition, some were required to be destroyed after the exhibition according to specific instructions, and some were purchased by La Villette.
The criteria for selecting artists were stated as an approach to “radicalism, a sense of adventure and excitement, their originality with respect to cultural tradition, [and] the relationship between the maker and his or her work”. However, the accusations in relation to Magiciens ‘neo-colonialism’, also led the curators to abandon key modernist tropes, while asserting others, leading to a confusion between the Contemporary and contemporaneity (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p11).
The exhibition form as decontextualised space
Lafuente continues by describing the decontextualising move within the exhibition space, and how this impacts on the work of art. He explains “The decontextualisation effected by the western museum […] begins with an initial step of abstraction. This abstraction from the everyday conditions constitute an essential moment in the (Western) definition of the aesthetic experience, as has been understood since the end of the 18th century” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p20). Such abstraction has been criticised as alienating factor, being an arguably more familiar strategy to some of the ‘Western’ artists who were used to working within the contemporary art context.
However, despite the problems of decontextualisation [of the object] within the exhibition space, Lafuente suggests that a wholly oppositional perspective can also neutralise the artist’s agency. In other words, a focus on only the circumstances of the production of the artwork, could leave the artist reduced to a series of “biographical, social, economic or historical determinations” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p17).
Lafuente concludes therefore that the questions raised by the possibilities of display enacted in the Magiciens exhibition could begin give rise to a new understanding of the exhibition space, one “in which mixed and shifting agencies are possible, [determining] perhaps what the exhibition form is: a place where nothing belongs, but where, because of this, objects and people (artists, curators and others) enter into relations, according to and against their will” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p22).
