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Magicians of the Earth
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16748 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
2,260 Words |
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Michael Gibson
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The monster show presented in Paris during the summer under the title Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth) will be remembered as the first-ever attempt at a planetary exhibition of contemporary art. Four years in the making, the show assembled works of one hundred artists from some forty countries--mostly countries and regions that have been largely overlooked by the mainline art establishment. It filled the entire top floor of the Pompidou Center as well as the whole of the six-plus acre converted cattle shed of la Grande Halle de la Villette. In many ways, Magiciens was more like a worldwide biennale of a new kind rather than a conventional exhibition.
With some exceptions, reception by the French press was cool to frosty. The organizers themselves were all too aware that any departure from what might be described as the floating consensus of the art establishment carried risks of critical penalties--penalties all the more painful in view of the venture's 30 million franc ($5 million) price tag--but they plunged ahead anyway, damning the consequences and producing a hybrid that was provocative, uneven, and engagingly vulnerable.
The show was vulnerable because it raised more issues than it could reasonably hope to handle. These issues needed to be raised, however. Critics and theoreticians will be forced, one hopes, to come up with a new approach to art; in other words, a new approach to life itself, taking into account both the reasoned skepticism fostered by science and the irrepressible need for a meaningful existence felt by ordinary people.
In any event, the show, conceived by topflight curators who are well integrated into the French establishment (Jean-Hubert Martin is chief curator of the National Museum of Modern Art), reflected unconcealed perplexity at the current state of the arts in Western society. In its attempt to suggest solutions, it opened its arms ecumenically (yet in an inevitably ambiguous way) to the art of people culturally remote from the Western world and to artists hitherto unknown--for whom curators scoured Africa, Asia, New Guinea, Australia, and both Americas. The mere fact of seeing recent works from Paris, New York, Alice Springs (in Central Australia), or Apangai (New Guinea) set side by side forced visitors to ask themselves what their common denominator might be. At a time when art tends to be equated with fashion and it is fashionably assumed that art is best approached with cool irony, this show attempted to revive the notion that a successful work of art should be surrounded by an "aura" (hence the "magicians" in the title).
Bonding Force
The spirit of the venture was entirely different from that of the controversial Primitivism show organized at the museum of Modern Art in New York some years ago. The latter took a formalist approach and sought to show how certain modern works had drawn their formal inspiration from (or held formal affinities with) works originating in Africa or the South Pacific. According to the organizers, however, Magiciens de la Terre show explored the quasi-imponderable factor of what makes a work of art a "receptacle of the spirit."
The exhibition therefore included a large number of works from parts of the world where a belief in magic or in the spiritual realm is not only rooted in the individual conscience but is shared as a
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