Magiciens de la terre richard long biography

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“Magiciens” and the Third Havana Biennial established the two models of exhibition-making that dominated the 1990s and 2000s by tinkering with both form and content. rather than about a couple of privileged countries, and this was absolutely revolutionary.” It’s a useful reminder that an exhibition like “Magiciens”—even if almost universally panned—can have a catalyzing effect.

Art history has a long tradition of lavishing attention on singular authors and artifacts, a tendency that in turn has supported long-standing clichés of male genius.

These two photographs, in their chronological distance and structural proximity, frame a possible history of the way in which the contemporary art context (Western in its geography, bourgeois in its culture and capitalist in its economy) has dealt with cultural practice and associated objects that do not in principle belong within it – because of their geography, but more importantly, because these practices and objects occupy a different position and play a different role in the cultural and socio- economic contexts in which they originate.

This history is in part one of representation – of what could be referred to, setting a dualistic opposition between self and otherness, as a history of the inclusion (integration, or incorporation, appropriation, even co-option?) of that which does not originate from within.

The former responds to the question ‘Who are we?’, by addressing both the community whom it represents (and which constitutes itself through this representation) and the visitor from its outside; the latter implies a removal of agency from those being represented, and therefore from the process of construction of their cultural and political identity.

Display, and the principles that rule its articulation, proposes a discourse that is sometimes at odds with the discourse that surrounds the exhibition. This includes a replica of Esther Mahlangu's Ndebele house, a faux Tohossou temple for Benin-based sculptor Cyprien Tokoudagba, and a towering iron structure for the bark painting produced by a group from Papua New Guinea led by Nera Jambruk.

However, Steeds also attempts to turn her factual chronicle into a more speculative theoretical argument. . In ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, such redefinition is accompanied by two additional twists, which makes it a specially revealing case. Instead, 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 every one of them is presented as an inhabitant of a common space.

Only by addressing the two together does a comprehensive picture of the actual position of the exhibition in relation to this history of identity struggle emerge. That is, the magician is the individual who wants to and is able to escape the determinations presented by his or her immediate context.The relationships of opposition are then not binary, in the form of an acting subject versus a passive subject or an absent subject, present through his or her ‘silent’ work.

(That is, the exhibition consisted of a number of artists invited on the strength of their individual practices, although the display might have subsequently modulated their individuality by creating relations that disturbed it). Like the ‘affinities’ that Rubin and Varnedoe defined as ‘basic shared characteristics’ or ‘common denominators’, ‘migration of form’ is a strategic tool in exhibition-making rather than a hard concept; but unlike the ‘affinities’, and against its actual name, ‘migration of form’ is not about form, it is about a displacement that allows for new articulations of both form and content.

‘Magiciens de la Terre’ did not obviously set out to propose such articulations, but its insistence on form and its belief in the equal availability of artistic practice certainly brings it close.

“Magiciens,” presented in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette, is well known for having billed itself as “the world’s first global art show.” Organized as a riposte to the heavily criticized “Primitivism” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984, it was widely viewed as having repeated the ethnocentric crimes it sought to redress, lumping together works from various regions and traditions under the rubric of contemporary art.

The main essay, by art historian Rachel Weiss, carefully elaborates the tensions between Fidel Castro’s restrictive cultural policies and the radical ambitions of the curatorial team—particularly Gerardo Mosquera, who championed critical and experimental work. Perhaps most frustratingly, although the Third Havana Biennial is renowned for its opening-week conference—a program that augured the discursive orientation of Documenta 10 and innumerable biennials thereafter—this crucial aspect of the show is not covered in real depth.

Oblivious to this, Rubin and Varnedoe follow André Malraux in his demand that, to avoid the separation between viewer and object, and to allow the object to become art, no information could be provided on the object’s origin or possible function.

The process of progressive liberation from context undertaken by anthropology throughout the second half of the twentieth century draws an alternative trajectory, one that can modify or qualify the understanding of what the system of art can give occasion to.

In the first place, the agency of the artist, in order to escape the problematics of modernism and its sociocultural determination, is reframed as the agency of the magician – an individual who has a privileged relationship to group and place and who, thanks to that privileged relationship, gains his or her individuality. An understanding of the exhibition as medium is central to differentiating a show whose content is important for art history (e.g., “Primary Structures” as the first roundup of Minimalist sculpture) from one whose form is important to exhibition history (e.g., “January 5–31, 1969,” which reversed the relationship between catalogue and exhibition).

The success of this attempt is still disputed and discussed in terms of the exhibition history of the past twenty-odd years, but it remains undeniable that the exhibition enacted an important break with some of the conventions of exhibition-making and strictly defined notions of modernism. But is this enough?

A dynamic exhibition history needs to present the show under discussion as a complex node of competing and contradictory forces while also paying close attention to the exhibition as a medium.