Magiciens de la terre

Magiciens de la Terre was a contemporary art exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in 1989.

Magiciens de la terre literally translates to “Magicians of the World.” 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. (Buchloh 158) 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 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.

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)

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