Magiciens de la Terre as an example of contemporary art being inseparable from questions of artistic, political, economic, and cultural globalisation.

Analyze one example of global contemporary art, artist, exhibition, or biennale, and how it exemplifies the claim that art in our era is inseparable from questions of artistic, political, economic, and cultural globalisation. Towards the end of the 20th century artists from around the globe increasingly started to address issues connected with globalisation. For example, “the movement of peoples, the movement of trade, the growth of international brands and the seemingly receding importance of the nation state.”1 To explain, globalisation, used as a term in recent economic and political theory, often relates to, in the words of Fredric Jameson, “the sense of an immense enlargement of world communication, as well as of a horizon of a world market.”2 To illustrate this point with a hypothetical example: a piece of work produced and debuted in Sao Paolo, Brazil, can be purchased in the artist’s studio by a group of visiting trustees from a major institution in London, where the piece is placed on view within the next month for thousands people from the local area as well as for the groups of tourists from the dozens of countries. Precisely such circumstances, however, demand that art be seen in correspondence with the larger context of a world shaped principally by the forces and movements of global capital. For among a postindustrial landscape it becomes clear, as put succinctly by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their benchmark volume of globalism, Empire (2000), that “the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.”3 4 Furthermore, globalisation has often been characterised as two related areas: economic globalisation and cultural globalisation. It is easy to think that with reference to the production of visual art we are in the realms of cultural globalisation; however, the role of economic globalisation is arguably equally or more important.5 For example, the role of emerging markets, new commercial galleries and new collectors drove the growth of interest in contemporary Chinese art and contemporary Indian art. The emergence of new art fairs and museums in the Middle East might have had more to do with the area’s new-found economic clout rather than a long-standing widespread interest in Modernism. Commercial galleries based in the West embraced artists from outside the West who showed healthy results at the auction houses and what not.6 Today we live in the era of contemporary art. To speak about art as ‘contemporary art’ is already the effect of global transformations. We cannot claim that the art, which is produced now in Asia or Africa, is modern according to the canon of the West. But this art is truly contemporary.7 Contemporary art today means art after modernism, just as it once meant modern art. Modern art always had a purpose of distinction and absolute power. Modern history separated the world, since it wasn’t everyone’s history. “Hence the term “contemporary” serves as a beacon to guide artists past old borders to enter the new, more global terrain.”8 Art no longer aims at the avantgarde position of modern art, but presents itself as contemporary, in a chronological, symbolical, and even ideological sense. 1989 was one of the most significant years in the 20th century. During that year, the political transformations that took place in Berlin, Beijing, Kabul, New Delhi and Johannesburg shuffled the geopolitical order and allowed exchanges and interactions with other territories, which until then had been impossible or difficult.9 Events like the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the invention of the World Wide Web, resulted in a new political settlement, a new global economy and the growing collective consciousness

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Niru Ratnam, Globalization and art Fredric Jameson, The Cultures of Globalization, p.12 3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, p. xiii 4 Tim Griffin, Worlds apart: Contemporary Art, Globalization, and the Rise of Biennials 5 Niru Ratnam, Globalization and art 6 Ibid 7 Peter Weibel, Globalization and contemporary art 8 Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, From art world to art worlds 9 Annie Cohen-Solal, Revisiting Magiciens De La Terre 2

that we live with today.10 Both post-colonial and post-communist states were brought into the new world order on cultural as well as economic terms, and biennials or regular international exhibitions were one of the key means to position cities from these countries as open for business.11 The world of art fairs and biennials, and of museums and galleries, changed drastically and took an inexorable turn in 1989 with the emergence of new types of artists, new territories, new routes, and new types of curators. The spread of worldwide biennials changed art’s geography forever, where co-presence with the Western art scene replaced the non-presence of a new generation of artists.12 Today’s art presents itself not only as new art, but also as a new kind of art, an art that’s expanding all over the world. As one of the earliest attempts to exhibit contemporary art from non-Western parts of the world in the West and to deal with the possibility of multiculturalism, “Magiciens de la Terre”, set an important precedent for many projects to come with its ambition of offering a global vision for contemporary art. It was curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in Paris during the summer of 1989. Martin gathered one hundred artists (50 western and 50 non-western) and, according to Lucy Steeds, Magiciens de la Terre was considered to be the first worldwide exhibition, creating a transnational legacy and making the nation state irrelevant.13 In the history of contemporary art exhibitions, only a handful can claim to mark the beginning of a new era. “Magiciens de la Terre” is unmistakably amongst such “milestone” exhibitions, as it is commonly referred to as the starting point of the art-world globalisation in the 1990s.14 Magiciens de la Terre sought to deal with the question of how to realise an internationalist vision of art in terms that were shaped and understood locally. It addressed by default the new world that was emerging, whilst at the same time serving directly to open up territory that has since come to be occupied by many new international artistic gatherings.15 Any exhibition can, by virtue of its focus, function like a magnifying glass on the contemporary art world, as art itself is a magnifying glass on the contemporary world.16 Magiciens de la Terre acted precisely like such magnifying glass for the art world at a time it took place, reflecting all the transfers and transformations, translations and changes, within the art world and the world, on a global scale. Jean-Hubert Martin, chief curator of the exhibition, stated that he started with two exhibitions in mind, which, for him, acted as negative reference points: the Exposition Coloniale Internationale of 1931 in Paris and the more recent ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, which took place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1984. Both exhibitions put the non-Western ‘Other’ on display in related ways; in the first, colonised subjects literally performed their ‘otherness’ as living displays placed in buildings that were supposed to resemble indigenous villages. The latter exhibition focused on formal affinities between what was termed ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ art and the work of Modernist artists who drew on such art at the start of the 20th century through a process that is termed ‘primitivism’. The intentions of the curator, William Rubin, were to focus on the ways in which modern artists such as Picasso and Matisse ‘discovered’ this art, and critics, including Martin argued that this attitude effectively meant that the ‘tribal’ art objects were given the status of not much more than footnotes or addenda to the Modernist avant-garde.17 Martin took a different approach. Magiciens de la Terre drew together one hundred artists and artist collective groups from around the world and displayed them in a way that often juxtaposed work made in the West next to work made outside the West.

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Niru Ratnam, Globalization and art Charles Esche, Making Art Global: A good place or a no place? 12 Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, From art world to art worlds 13 Lucy Steeds, Magiciens de la terre 1989, p.5 14 Tim Griffin, Worlds apart: Contemporary Art, Globalization, and the Rise of Biennials 15 Charles Esche, Making Art Global: A good place or a no place? 16 Peter Weibel, Globalization and contemporary art 17 Niru Ratnam, Globalization and art 11

Figure 1 Richard Long’s Mud Circle (1989) and Yarla (1989) For example, Richard Long’s Mud Circle (1989) hung near the Yuendumu community’s ground painting Yarla (both seen in Figure 1), a piece of work made within the ongoing tradition of indigenous Australian art (Aboriginal art). Long’s large mud circle visually echoes the repeated circular motifs of Yarla and their juxtaposition provides a good example of the sometimes surprising formal congruencies that can crop up between seemingly very different works.18 Additionally, in a short and rare video document available online, which shows the preparation process for this exhibition, we see collectives of artists—from Australia, Tibet and the USA, as the representatives of what we could call traditional artistic practices. In the case of the representatives of traditional art, they seem as if they were abruptly taken out of their original context and placed in the proclaimed neutral space of a white cube, a sort of a 'democratic' platform where different artistic practices will be compared to each other. Martin justifies it by saying that: “The objects in our exhibition will be displaced from their functional context. (…) But we will display them in a manner that has never been used for objects from the Third World. The makers of these objects will be present, and I will avoid showing finished, movable objects as much as possible. I will favor "installations" made by the artists specifically for this particular occasion.”19 Additionally, Martin argued that he felt like he needed to move away from a hierarchical model where the non-West was constantly locked as ‘other’ to the West’s ‘self’. He also argued that it was not possible to simply exhibit work from around the world in some sort of formal exercise as Rubin had done, whilst ignoring the social and political realities of European imperial dominance and the colonisation of the non-Western world.20 Thus the exhibition catalogue to Magiciens contained a number of texts and images pertaining to colonialism, including pieces documenting some ill-informed European views on the non-Western world. “The common statement that artistic production can only exist in the Western world can be blamed on the arrogance of our culture”, wrote Jean-Hubert Martin in the catalogue.21 Annie-Cochel Solal, in her “Revisiting Magiciens de la Terre”, states that she saw the catalogue

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Niru Ratnam, Globalization and art Benjamin Buchloh (interview with Jean-Hubert Martin), The Whole Earth Show, p.154. 20 Ibid 21  Magiciens de la Terre (exh. cat., Paris, Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1989) 19

created for the exhibition as a clear political statement.22 This unusual catalogue, formatted akin to an atlas, appeared to be a radical manifesto against the iniquities of the Western world, offering a body of political texts, photos, illustrations, and collages. It also included references to the 100 exhibited artists, presented in an unusual manner: the two pages allocated to each artist offered biographies and reproductions of works, as well a small planisphere indicating their geographical location. Interestingly, in each case, the planisphere was reoriented in such a way that the referent dot remained at the center. Thus, the curator was clearly admitting the central impact of a new geography in his representation of the art world.23 Responses to the exhibition at the time it took place and years after were mixed. Martin’s curatorial framework was subsequently criticised, in particular his idea that all the participating artists could be described as ‘magicians of the earth’. Many commentators argued that this replayed a common colonial stereotype of the non-Western subject being more spiritual and less worldly than their counterparts in the West. A further criticism was that the exhibition did not escape ethnocentrism and that the non-Western works were still defined only in relation to their Western counterparts. It still seems, though, that most of the criticisms revolved mainly around a discrepancy between an inclusive project in the selection of the “invisible artists” and a final strategy of selection that remained largely “intuitive.” Is there a particular reason why, in the case of Africa, the curators never requested the advice of those local “dynamic actors,” as they did in China?24 Or how can it be understood that they rejected the artists trained in the local academies in favor of others, less urban, whom they invited to Paris? Such was the meaning of the Turkish critic Bedri Baykam’s text when he wrote that “one should have tried to prove that to ‘make a gesture’ and favour the art of the third world was nothing but a generous idea coming from the West.”25 In fact Martin argued that he could see no other way to select work from outside the West than by using his “own history and sensibilities”, and that he would not exhibit works that he thought would not communicate to a Western viewer .26 27 “It sometimes happens that the system of signs, [carried by a work of art], does not match anything we know, or else that its stylistic features largely fail to address the Western taste, however elastic its frame might be. Those works of art are invisible.”, says Martin in his interview with Benjamin Buchloh. Far from being a closed chapter of curatorial history, Magiciens de la Terre has a continuing legacy in exhibition practices today, partly since so many curators have sought corrective approaches to the problematic of center and periphery, and partly since the core dilemma of that exhibition–of bringing together different cultures only at a peril of re-inscribing neocolonial perspectives–persist even now.28 The progressive transformation of Magiciens de la Terre – from an exhibition into a global forum of debates – forces us to examine it through a much more complex lens than it first appeared, because it addresses the symbolic production, the geopolitical order and the intellectual comprehension of our world altogether. The emergence of what has often pejoratively been termed ‘biennial art’ is in fact the result of a formal shift in terms of techniques and materials, as well as resulting from a new critical acceptance of art’s relation to politics and social context.29 Seeing Magiciens de la Terre as an example of a truly contemporary exhibition, we can claim that art today is indeed inseparable from questions of artistic, political, economic, and cultural globalisation.

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Annie Cohen-Solal, Revisiting Magiciens De La Terre Ibid 24 According to Annie Cohen-Solal, next to the artist – who remains the “manifest agent” of the art world – the term “dynamic agents” refers to all of those who, around him, organise the conditions of her/his visibility and production in a certain space and at a certain time: critics, gallerists, collectors, curators, and museum directors. 25 Bedri Baykam, Cameleon Diabolicus 26 Benjamin Buchloh and Jean-Hubert Martin, "The whole earth show: An Interview with Jean-Hubert Martin", p.155 27 Niru Ratnam, Globalization and art 28 Tim Griffin, Worlds Apart: Contemporary Art, Globalization, and the Rise of Biennials 29 Charles Esche, Making Art Global: A good place or a no place? 23

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‘Magiciens de la Terre,’” in Making Art Global (Part 2) “Magiciens de la terre” 1989, Lucy Steeds et al. (London: Afterall Books, 2013), 94-110. § Preziosi, Donald, “The Art of Art History”, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1998), 507– 25. § Rubin, William, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (exh. cat., ed. W. Rubin; New York, MOMA, 1984). § Sassen, Saskia, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on The New Mobility of People and Money (New York: The New Press, 1998); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Free Fall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of The World Economy (New York: Norton, 2010). § Seppa, Anita, Globalisation and the arts: the rise of new democracy, or just another pretty suit for the old emperor?,” Journal of AESTHETICS & CULTURE Vol. 2, (2010). § Smith, Terry, Thinking Contemporary Curating, (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), 218. § Smith, Terry, “Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition Beyond Globalization,” in The Global Contemporary: The Rise of New Art Worlds after 1989, edited by Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, Peter Weibel (MIT Press for ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2013), 186-192. § Steeds, Lucy et al., “Magiciens de la terre’ 1989”, Making Art Global (Part 2) (London: Afterall Books, 2013). § Weibel, Peter, “Globalization and contemporary art,” The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2013).

Media Resources: Magiciens de la Terre, 1989 (7' 50" clip), http://vimeo.com/14421900