Magiciens de la Terre was a contemporary art exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande halle de la Villette from 18 May to 14 August 1989.
Magiciens de la Terre literally translates to "Magicians of the Earth." In 1989, in the wake of the infamous "Primitivism" show at MOMA, curator Jean-Hubert Martin set out to create a show that counteracted ethnocentric practices within the contemporary art world as a replacement for the format of the traditional Paris Biennial. This exhibition sought to correct the problem of "one hundred percent of exhibitions ignoring 80 percent of the earth." He did this in his show, Magiciens de la Terre, exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande halle de la Villette. With "Magiciens de la terre" Martin had successfully organized an international exhibition of contemporary art that featured 50% Western and 50% non-Western artists shoulder to shoulder in an equal manner where all participants were still alive at the time of exhibiting, making it truly contemporary. Magiciens also marked a traditional departure from previous exhibitions of non-Western work by identifying non-Westerners by their proper names alongside their Western counterparts, who were always identified in this manner. The artists were presented as individuals rather than by geographic region or time period as was commonplace. This was an attempt by Martin and his curatorial team to subvert the illusion of Eurocentric superiority in the field of artistic representation and the vision of the world inherited from the colonial age.[1]
Martin's show worked to confront problems presented by several exhibitions that perpetuated a colonialist mentality, the most recent being the aforementioned show, "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Many critics condemned "Primitivism", as it fell into a similar Modernist trap of providing only a pure aesthetization of the work of native cultures. "Primitivism" stated that it was only interested in displaying tribal works that influenced Modern artists and studying how this phenomenon functioned within the Modernist discourse. Many of the tribal works were presented vis-à-vis Modernist works when little or no historical evidence of these works drawing inspiration from specific "primitive" works or, in some cases, even a "primitive" idiom. (Varnedoe 13)
In addition to the "Primitivism" show, Magiciens de la Terre worked with the 1931 show, L’Exposition Coloniale as a counter-reference point. This exhibition was organized in a typical colonial fashion, to show the economic and moral superiority of the French country, as well as the products of the grateful colonized. The souvenir medal from the exhibition speaks volumes. The bas-relief features a Western woman on the right (A personification of France with references to allegorical representations of Liberty, Truth, or Wisdom) outstretching her arm to gently comfort and protect her smiling representations of ethnic stereotypes. The Paris Colonial Exhibition is covered within the Magiciens catalog, where this show's colonialist ideology is explained. This show served as a definition of what Magiciens was not.
Although Magiciens served to counteract the ideology expressed in the two shows, Magiciens was also meant to resolve some long-standing problems of the format of the Paris Biennial. In years past, the French curatorial team would select the countries to be exhibited, and representatives from the respective countries would select artists that they deemed the greatest artistic talents of their nation. In the view of certain art critics, this method was seen to have failed for including non-Western artists who those critics regarded as second-rate practitioners (in style and content) of artistic movements that originated in the West. It was felt that these artists were not exemplary of the diversity of human cultures, and their work only strengthened Western hegemony. But other critics saw in such pronouncements as "second rate" and "originated in the West," the very eurocentrism these critics were reputedly denouncing, especially as many of the so-called "Western" styles could trace their origins to visual cultures outside and older than Western civilization. In this light, the lack of self-reflection by these critics, with regard to their own criteria and self-reference, showed the entire enterprise of Western criticism to be wanting of a deeper self-analysis, at the same time as it exposed an urgent need for a more thorough exposure to, and exchange with, cultures and histories still distinct from the West.
With the failings of the previous shows in mind, Martin organized Magiciens by selecting one hundred artists from around the world: fifty from the so-called "centers" of the world (the United States and Western Europe) and fifty from the "margins" (Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Australia). No specific criteria were set up for the selection of the individual works in the show as long as this numerical ratio was maintained. When selecting artists from outside the Western tradition, the curator claimed to choose artists according to their artworks’ "visual and sensual experiences." Martin explains:
I want to play the role of someone who uses artistic intuition alone to select objects which come from totally different cultures, … But obviously, I also want to incorporate into that process the critical thinking which contemporary anthropology provides on the problem of ethnocentrism, the relativity of culture, and intercultural relations. (Buchloh 122–133)
But let us not forget, after all, I have to think of this project as an "exhibition." That is, if an ethnographer suggests a particular example of cult . . . but the objects of this culture would not communicate sufficiently with a Western spectator in a visual-sensuous manner, I would refrain from exhibiting them. (Buchloh 122–133)
In an interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh he acknowledged this method had inherent flaws, but also noted that any methodological framework for the selection of works will make similar mistakes. Martin felt that the inclusion of the fifty non-Western artists would begin to facilitate a change starts de-centering notions of an artistic center(s) within the Western tradition of art practice.
Magiciens de la Terre was reviewed by Jeremy Lewison for The Burlington Magazine in August 1989. Lewison gave examples of how the curation of Western artwork with the "margined' art creates cross-currents impacting viewers perception of the Western artists' attempts:
The ritualistic and religious nature of the Aborigine work endows Long's circle with a meaning which, in another context, it might not have ... Where religion, sex, death and functionalism seem to be the basis for the creation of most forms of 'ethnic' art, art itself is often the only reason for the making of western art ... Baldessari's photographic story-book seems tired and knowing when juxtaposed with the innocence of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, whose own imaginative tales deal with the language of animals, stones and trees and illustrate the evolution of the nuclear missile from the chicken-bone by way of the arrow, and whose view of history (Caesar and Ulysses, for example), previously known to westerners in a European form seems equally plausible as African history.[3]