MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Often regarded as a direct response to MoMA’s controversial exhibition "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art (1984), Magiciens de la Terre was organised by French curator Jean-Hubert Martin five years later, attempting to raise postcolonial debates on art and focus attention on the problems of Western approaches to representation. Conceived as an attempt at cross-cultural dialogue, it included the artworks of fifty contemporary practitioners from Western art metropoles together with contributions from an equal number of artists from the non-Western world, including ritualistic and indigenous practices. Although the curator’s approach was based on his “artistic intuition”, Martin worked together with a team of anthropologists, ethnographers and regional specialists. The selection was made on the basis that the works have “an aura” of a universal creative impulse. The artworks were generally presented autonomously in spaces dedicated to individual artists at the Centre Georges Pompidou, with the exception of those juxtaposed with each other in the Grand Hall of the Parc de la Villette. Such pairings were not without controversy, the most striking of which was the positioning of English artist Richard Long’s Red Earth Circle above a rectangular ceremonial floor installation made of earth, ochre and crushed herbs by the Aboriginal Australian Yuendumu community – a purely aesthetical juxtaposition, with the effect of diminishing the ritualistic value and cultural meaning of the aboriginal work. Magiciens de la Terre is regarded by some as a precursor of exhibitions of contemporary art with a globalised perspective, and was also described as “the first major exhibition consciously to attempt to discover a postcolonial way to exhibit objects together” (Thomas McEvilley). Though praised by some for its attempt to depart from Eurocentric perspectives, the exhibition was also condemned by others for its formalist approach, de-contextualisation and de-politicisation of artworks, particularly of those from outside of the West.