[This lecture took place on November 23rd, 2015 at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway]

Vesna Madžoski

The Magicians of Globalization:

Magiciens de la Terre, 25 years later

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915

[The Prologue]

I would like to open this talk with a short mentioning of a news from last week that opened
up so many questions and might disturb many of the usual assumptions when it comes to
the so-called abstract art. Namely, during their celebration of the 100 years since Kazimir
Malevich's Black Square was publicly exhibited, the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow had
performed an X-ray scan of the painting. Already significantly cracked, X-rays were still
needed to see what might have been hiding behind. The layers of two other paintings were
discovered underneath, but also a seemingly enigmatic writing in Russian, which might be
the actual title of the painting, “battle of the Negros.” According to the authorities, this is a
clear reference to a following joke by the French writer and humorist Alphonse Allais, a
joke we would clearly call racist today, and that was published as a cartoon in 1897; it
reads “The battle of the Negros in a cave, during night”:

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Regarding his own relation to the Black Square, it has been already known that Malevich
had doubts about the painting he has created, and was quoted as saying: 'I couldn’t sleep or
eat; I wanted to understand what I had done.' 1 And there might be some more sleepless
nights invested in understanding this painting, as well as of its symbolic value in our
contemporary culture and definitions of art. With a hope that there will still be some critical
thinkers left to analyze and write about this “case,” we shall go back to the story about
Magiciens de la Terre, an exhibition that took place in Paris in 1989, and which is seen as
the beginning of the so-called globalization of art.

1. The Context

The end of Cold War has been considered by many as a moment marking the beginning of
an unprecedented globalization process that changed the world in which we live. Under the
guise of freedom and democracy, what was successfully spread was the system of
(neo)liberal capitalism, introducing new market logic worldwide. Simultaneously, we have
witnessed the expansion of institutions of contemporary art, from biennials to museums,
also demanding the change of art production in localities at stake. Nowadays, we measure
cultural and economic development of a place on the basis of existence or absence of
museums of contemporary art.

1 For more on this topic, please see: Sophia Kishkovsky, “There is more to Malevich’s Black Square than a
hidden racist joke, Moscow curators reveal.” The Art Newspaper, 18 November 2015.
http://theartnewspaper.com/news/news/161279/ <visited 18 November 2015>

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 The 1990s in Europe were significant not only on a political level, but had marked a
new moment in the development of artistic and curatorial practices as well. A new kind of
curator suddenly had to become an expert not only on history of art, but on local cultures as
well. Or, in the words of Francesco Bonami, “The role of the curator today involves such
enormous geographical diversity that the curator is now a kind of visual anthropologist –
no longer just a taste maker, but a cultural analyst.”2
In the moment of re-canonization of Western artistic practices, new tools for
understanding art from all over the world were needed. Curiously enough, they were found
in anthropology. Nevertheless, these two disciplines have responded to the post-1989 shifts
in highly different ways. As Thomas Boutoux notices,
Whereas anthropology plunged into years of epistemological crisis and
anxious introspection, contemporary art can be said to have inaugurated
an unprecedented era of vitality and expansion (...) Throughout the
1990s, the anthropological world found itself in a quandary, when asked
to explain how it contributed to the understanding of the world in which
we live. (...) During the same period, the contemporary art world
enthusiastically embraced “the global,” taking this new phenomenon as
an opportunity to reinvent itself.3
The official art history takes as a turning point of this shift the exhibition
"Magiciens de la Terre" that took place at the Grande Halle de la Villette and the Pompidou
Centre in Paris in 1989. In the words of Pepe Karmel: “What began in 1989 with the
Parisian circus of Magiciens de la Terre has now become a non-stop art festival in East
Asia, South Asia, Australia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.” 4
This exhibition was conceived already in 1985 by Jean-Hubert Martin, a newly appointed
director of the Paris Biennale,
Originally intended as a replacement for the Biennale's traditional format
(in which contributors were selected by cultural representatives and
committees from each participating country), this show has now grown
into a major exhibition of international contemporary art. Its organizers
intend to explore the practices of artists in Asian, African and Latin
American countries, juxtaposing a selection of work from those cultural
2 Cited in Boutoux, Tomas. “A Tale of Two Cities: Manifesta in Rotterdam and Ljubljana.” In: The
Manifesta Decade. Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe. Ed.
Vanderlinden, Barbara and Elena Filipovic. Roomade and MIT, Cambridge: 2005. pp.203-204.
3 Ibid., pp. 201-202.
4 Pepe Karmel, “Just What Is It That Makes Contemporary Art So Different, So Appealing?” Visual
Resources, 27:4; 2011, 318-329; pp.318.

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 contexts with contemporary works from the United States and Western
Europe.5

Richard Long, Red Earth Circle and Yuendumu community, Yam Dreaming, at Magiciens de la Terre, 1989

Therefore, this particular exhibition should be seen as a “failed” biennial, or as a 14 th Paris

Biennial that never happened, and due to the bankruptcy of the Biennial, it had to find a
new formula in order to survive. The decision was to continue with its execution, and after
Jean-Hubert Martin was appointed a new director of the National Museum of Modern Art,
it has been decided that Centre Pompidou will be the second location, next to La Grande
Halle de la Villette, extending the space of the exhibition to 15.000 square meters. The
financing of the exhibition, as stated by Martin himself in a private conversation, was saved
by the support from the TV station Canal+, next to the Ministry of Culture and an
American non-profit Scaler Foundation from Texas.6 [By operating from a newly founded
private entity instead out of a public French institution, one could even conclude that
perhaps this was the moment of privatization of the Paris Biennial, since it has made
possible to sell the works after the exhibition, something public institutions in France were
not allowed to do.] This exhibition is usually seen as part of the 1989 political and
economic changes in Europe, but it is also important to mention that, on the local level, it
has been seen as part of the celebration of the 200-years of the French revolution (1789),
giving us a potentially new reading when seen in the light of the French post-colonial
redefinitions of past and present.
When I begun my research on this exhibition a several years ago, beside the very

5 Buchloh, Benjamin (interview with Jean-Hubert Martin), “The Whole Earth Show.” In: Art in America,
vol.77, no. 5, May 1989, pp. 150.
6 The private conversation with the curator was organized by the Summer School of the Kandinsky
Library, the seat of the archive of this exhibition, at the Pompidou Centre Paris, in July 2014.

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high number of critical texts and essays by numerous academics, the on-line material about
the original exhibition was quite scarce. I suggest here that we first see a short insert from
the documentary made about the exhibition and which initially prompted me to continue
further with the research.
[http://vimeo.com/14421900]7
This short segment opens with the images of the artists under the title Yuendumu,
Australia, hence one could consider it to be the name of this group, community, or a tribe.
Nevertheless, it is a name of a town that ranks “as one of the larger remote communities in
central Australia”8 and was established by the Australian government after World War II;
here, we find it used as a naming tool for this group of artists belonging to either Walpiri or
Anmatyerr people. We find them working on a large painting on the ground, but we do not
understand a word they are saying. We see their faces, noses, hands, they talk between each
other, but we are not given a translation or insight into the meaning of their words.
Nevertheless, what is translated is the explanation of their artwork: it represents the
dreaming of rain; you can see the rain that falls, and the clouds are next to it.
The next part offers us no name for the artist filmed: we see a Chinese guy washing
newspapers in a washing machine, and making a wall installation from it. We hear from
him that his main inspiration is Taoist philosophy which refuses to seek for answers, that he
has a problem to define his relationship with the Chinese culture although he is supposed to
represent China at this exhibition, and that he finds this show very important as it allows
him to compare himself to other, Western artists, hence discover new things about his
work.9
The third segment introduces a group of Tibetan monks working on a sand mandala.
We see the hard work they are investing in this almost impossible task of creating a
complex image using only dust and metal sticks. We hear the sound of scrubbing, we see
the drops of sweat on their foreheads, but we are given no names and hear no voice from
them.
The last part of the video states the name of the artist – we see Joe Ben Jr., a Navajo

7 Later on, the research has demystified the origin and function of the film this insert was from. It has been
filmed by two Italian filmmakers, Gianfranco Barberi and Marco di Castri, the authors of twenty video-
catalogues made for various exhibitions from 1988-1995. This one was produced by the Centre
Pompidou and was sold as a on a VHS tape as a video-catalog next to the book catalog.
8 “Yuendumu, Northern Theoritory.”
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuendumu,_Northern_Territory [visited October 3, 2012].
9 The artist's name is actually Huang Yong Ping, and we can find the following information on his
Wikipedia page: “In 1989 at the age of 35 Huang Yong Ping went to Paris for the Magicians of Earth
exhibit. He then ended up immigrating to France and living there ever since.” Actually, he has become
one of the most well-known contemporary Chinese artists in the West.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Yong_Ping [visited October 17, 2012]

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American Indian. But before we see him, we witness a short talk between his wife and an
African woman wearing traditional clothes. On first woman's comment that her blanket
looks just like the American Indians' one, African woman asks “In India?” and hears “No,
no... United States Indian.” We hear her “Aha” as a polite expression of understanding
something that does not seem logical. Further on, we see a couple with a little daughter
working in the sand. The father is the artist, and we see him putting different pigments,
working on the sand painting. His daughter participates as well, she shows her little
painting to her mum and erases it in the next moment by burring it with sand. A little
gesture of destruction as a prerequisite for the possibility of a new creation, one could say.
What can be fruitful for our discussion at this point is to try to understand the
definition of contemporary art in this case. We see collectives (in some cases families) of
artists—from Australia, Tibet and the USA, as the representatives of what we could call
traditional artistic practices; the only individual here that seems to correspond the closest to
the canon of what we name modern art is the nameless Chinese artist; even in his
explanation, he states that his motivation to participate here was in confronting his own
practice with the Western artists. 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. Although a small fragment, and almost an
accidental testimony of this exhibition, the video does not give us any information about
the other, Western artists participating here. What becomes obvious, nevertheless, is that
contemporary art is understood in its most literary meaning, as an activity of producing art
in the present moment.
According to the curator Jean-Hubert Martin, his intention was to “treat
contemporary art production on a global, worldwide scale.”10 The way to do this, according
to him, is through the eyes of Euro-centrism:
Since we are dealing with objects of visual and sensual experience, let's
really look at them from the perspective of our own culture. I want to
play the role of someone who uses artistic intuition alone to select these
objects which come from totally different cultures. I intend to select these
objects from various cultures according to my own history and my own
sensibility.11
Although approaching the same territories and cultures, Martin distinguishes his method

10 Buchloh, Benjamin. Ibid, pp.152.

11 Ibid., pp.153.

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from the ethnographic one:
If, for example, an ethnographer suggests to us a particular example of a
cult in a society in the Pacific, but it turns out that the objects of this
culture do not communicate sufficiently well in a visual-sensuous manner
to a Western spectator, then I would refrain from exhibiting them. (...) I
cannot select objects in the manner of ethnographers, who choose them
according to their importance and function inside a culture, even though
such objects may "mean" or "communicate" very little – or nothing at all
– to us.12
On Buchloch's question what are his criteria for the "strength" of a work, Martin replies,
“The intensity of communication of meaning...”
BB: Meaning for us, or meaning for them?
JHM: For us, obviously. That is important because whatever meaning a practice
has for its practitioners is not relevant to us if it cannot be communicated to us.13
As his main idea was to create a dialogue with other cultures, we can assume that
Martin believed this was the way to do it – not trying to understand elements of other
cultures, but focusing only on the items that “we” might consider visually attractive hence
valuable. Or as he had formulated his answer to the possible neo-colonial subtext of this
exhibition:
I oppose the idea that one can only look at another culture in order to
exploit it. Our first concern is with exchange and dialogue, with
understanding others in order to understand what we do ourselves. 14 One
cannot say that we still live in a neo-colonialist period. Obviously, the
Western world maintains dominant relationships with respect to the Third
World, but that should not prohibit us from communicating with the
people of these nations, nor from looking at their cultural practices.15
And that is achieved, one might conclude, by looking at them from our own perspective,
favoring our own cultural framework in relation to theirs, offering them to participate in a
dialogue with previously set rules and communicators. Nevertheless, the reason for this
exhibition, as we read further, is in order to gain [French] primacy in taking a discourse of
Western art into a new direction:
What is especially important to recognize is that this will be the first truly

12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., pp.155.
15 Ibid., pp.211.

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 international exhibition of worldwide contemporary art. (...) The objects
in our exhibition will be displaced from their functional context, and they
will be shown in a museum and another exhibition space in Paris. But we
will display them in a manner that has never been used for objects from
the Third World. That is, for the most part, the makers of these objects
will be present, and I will avoid showing finished, movable objects as
much as possible. I will favor "installations" (as we say in our jargon)
made by the artists specifically for this particular occasion – for example,
a Tibetan mandala, an Ijele "mask" from Nigeria, or a Navajo sand
painting.16
Hence, the newness promoted through this exhibition was to exhibit not only objects, but
the artists as well, a fact to which we will come back. Just like the Chinese artist has
articulated in the video, one of the effects of this exhibition was to juxtapose, to compare
all those different works belonging to different contexts and traditions, to one source – that
of the Western art. We are not to expect a multilateral comparison between different
cultures, a method in which Western art would become one among many, but it will serve
as a parameter to which all others will be compared to. Or in the words of its curator:
This exhibition will also establish other types of cross-cultural
relationships: for example, between the manner in which the repetition of
identical models functions in Tibetan Tanka painting and in the work of a
contemporary painter such as Daniel Buren, who has consistently
repeated the model which he established for himself in the late 1960s.17
One of the most contradictory statements given by the curator relates to the question of the
effect of Western invasion on other peoples and cultures, in which we also find out about
the Australian Aborigines' reason to participate in the first place:
I am really against the assumption that we have in fact destroyed all other
cultures with Western technology. A text written by the aboriginal artists
of Australia who are participating in this exhibition has clarified this issue
for me. They state the problem of decontextualization perfectly well. But
they go on to argue that they commit their "treason" for a particular
purpose: to prove to the white world that their society is still alive and
functioning. Exhibiting their cultural practices to the West is what they
believe to be the best way to protect their traditions and their culture at

16 Ibid., pp.154.
17 Ibid., pp.213.

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 this point in time.18
Hence, the Aboriginal participation can be seen as part of their protest, as part of
their resistance of the destruction brought by the white people; in an interesting twist of
arguments, their desire to communicate that they still exist, not because of the mercy of the
whites but thanks to their fight and resistance, has been turned into a proof that we have
been forgiven for the crimes.

2. The Re-enactment

In 2014, Centre Pompidou has decided to mark the 25 th anniversary of this exhibition by
organizing a summer school and opening its archive to the researchers for the first time.
Also, a small partition of the museum was staged as a reenactment of the original
exhibition, a staging that revealed the official position when it comes to how this exhibition
should be remembered in the future.

[Magiciens de la Terre in 2014, photo from the archive of M. Franzoni]

Actually, the summer school and us, around 20 researchers from all over the globe, were
inserted into this space as a live specimen to be shown to the numerous visitors over the
next 14 days. In this space, we gave individual presentations, mostly critiquing the original
exhibition, in front of the chief curator, Jean-Hubert Martin, who had a chance to defend or
oppose our assumptions. When one looks closely into the reenacted exhibition, it becomes
18 Ibid., pp.156.

9
obvious that, although MDLT was comprised of 50% Western artists and 50% of non-
Western ones, the reenacted version remembers almost exclusively the non-Western ones,
with the exception of the few. Paris-based artist Sarkis was invited to create the visual
installation from the archival material, and the result is to be seen on the walls: a
'posterized' version of the historical event, where any additional context is erased for ever,
and where the so-called democracy among the artworks is being achieved by turning them
into images of the same size. The visual installation also included videos projected on the
walls, and these showed various documentary material filmed during the preparations for
the exhibition. In those, we see exotic artists in exotic locations creating their works of art,
but also a whole footage of the visits of exotic Australian Aborigines and Tibetan Monks to
the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, and other Paris tourist attractions.

[photo from the personal archive]

[photo from the archive of B. Luethi]

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 The material from the archives was placed in glass vitrines and numerous diaries,
research documents, personal notes were exhibited as precious objects with no possibility
to access them. What one could learn, however, is that this whole operation was taken
really seriously, and the chief curator had several helpers / experts who were sent to
different parts of the world to “discover” new artists. They were actually sent to “missions”
as the archival material points out.

[photo from the archive of M. Franzoni]

[photo from the archive of M. Franzoni]

Without a doubt, doing exactly what ethnographers and anthropologist did, but hundred
years earlier. What shocks the most is the conclusion that the people involved in this
enterprise seem to have truly believed they are discovering new people and new cultures
that were actually there all the time. Going back to the visual installation of the re-

11
enactment, one has to be reminded of the colonial frescoes used as ornaments in the former
Museum of Colonies (Musée des colonies) in 2012 renamed into Museum of the History of
Immigration (Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration), and located at the historical site of
Palais de le Porte Dorée made for the infamous 1931 International Colonial Exhibition.

[The room of minister Paul Reynaud, photo from the personal archive]

[Deatail, the room of minister Paul Reynaud, photo from the personal archive]

Back to Australia, or: Magiciens sans Terre

Being part of the summer school, I approached the archive with an interest in the
participation of the Australian group, as they were also the ones, one could say, with a
strong political sensitivity and awareness when it comes to their participation in the
Western cultural institutions such as this exhibition.
When it comes to the groups of people inhabiting the Australian continent, they had
one of the most important roles in the history of Western science, whether it is evolutionary

12
theories, social experiments, or anthropological knowledge:
Australian Aborigines are surely the most famous of indigenous peoples,
due to their place in western evolutionary thought. In the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries they were studied as living evidence of the
earliest, most primitive form of a universal human past. All of us, it was
asserted, were once hunter-gatherers like these.19
Nevertheless, being located at the space usually considered a periphery from the Western
perspective, and after been located and fixed in the earliest phase of human evolution, they
had lost their appeal in contemporary times:
If ethnographic observations of Aboriginal Australian social life played
an important part in the development of major theories in the social
sciences and humanities, they are now only marginally significant in the
context of international scholarship.20
What these people had endured in the meantime, and actually still go through, is a
permanent denial of rights over the land they are inhabiting, which slowly became the most
important project in the process of privatization by the real-estate companies, as well as by
the land exploitation corporations. What they permanently face is “frontier violence,
dispossession of lands, the removal of 50.000 children of mixed Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal parentage from 1910-1970.”21 Whoever is interested in those issues, I suggest
watching some of the many documentaries testifying about a permanent systemic
discrimination of those people and the erasure of their history.
What follows is an anecdotal story by Bernhard Luethi, a German artist and the
curator of the Australian section at MDLT, although not amusing at all: the information
researchers are usually supposed to hide or transform into a different form, the material
they usually do not know what to do with. It's a story about things that happened after the
exhibition and that testify about, we could say, betrayal of the unwritten laws of friendship.
The important point here to learn is a specific meaning the land has in the lives of
Australian Aborigines: “Aboriginal life-worlds are ultimately grounded in the Dreaming,
and it is therefore crucial to recognize the significance of attachment to country and ritual
life for the sense of self, notwithstanding a person's involvement in the White world.” 22
Hence, one of the requirements of their participation at this exhibition was to send them
19 G. Cowlishaw, “Australian Aborigines: Sociocultural Aspect”, International Encyclopedia of the Social
& Behavioral Sciences, 2001, 956-957, pp.956.
20 Ute Eickelkamp, “Changing Selves in Remote Australia? Observations on Aboriginal Family life,
Childhood and 'Modernisation'”. 2011, Anthropological Forum 21:2, 131-151
21 Ibid., pp.138.
22 Ute Eickelkamp, Ibid., pp.139.

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back the soil, sand and other material used for the painting, which they will return back to
where it has been taken from, closing the circle of creation. Nevertheless, this never
happened, and it took several years of investigation to find out that this material had
mysteriously “disappeared.” The Australians had no other choice but to demand the return
of the totem as well, which they had donated as a gift to the museum in Paris.

[Photos from the archive of B. Luethi]

Identity - Politics
Let us now try to go back to the nineties: when we think about the artistic production and
the exhibitions of that time, the word that defines this period, the concept that inevitably
comes to mind is 'identity.' In those times of various shifts and global invasion of liberal
capitalism (popularly named 'globalism'), the definition of clear ethnic identities in art and
politics had become one of the most important traits of human beings to be worked upon.

14
As we have seen, the field of contemporary art had become one of the main collaborators
in this project, and suddenly the key to understand different artistic practices was found in
the domain of culture and cultural identities, more often in the origin of the artists than in
the art schools they might have attended. As it seems, we are to believe today that all this
has been resolved, at least – try to think about when was the last time you have heard the
word 'identity' in the arts?
What is important to repeat at this point is that at the very same time, the
anthropological theory had officially reached its crisis. This happened after the “discovery”
that its approach, its methodology, only exoticized the Others it was researching about,
being used as an extended hand of colonialism and having devastating consequences on the
political level for those Others. As it seems, the art world did not have any problem with
taking over the production and reproduction of the images of all those strange Others,
turning them into a main product on the art market. The avatar body of the dark side of
anthropology has found its new materialization, using this opportunity for the production of
a new spectacle.
If we go back to the video we have seen, one of the important aspects of these
'exotic' artistic practices is their ephemeral nature; if you have noticed, their material is
mostly sand or dust, used in different ways. After the show is over, there is nothing left
behind to be sold at the market. Nevertheless, by fixating the identities in the art world, this
new collection for the exotic cabinet of wonders testifies not only about the ongoing project
of erasing everything different from the Western traditions [by giving them the place in the
museum, things are already seen as if on their death bed] – it also testifies about the fact
that since there is nothing there we could turn into a product and sell on the art market, the
only thing left to be turned into currency and traded are their identities.
According to the curator of the Magiciens, contemporary way of exhibiting will not
mean exhibiting material objects only, but their creators as well.
Artistic/shamanistic/human creativity has been displaced, taken out of its context, reduced
to its aesthetic level, giving the illusion that we now understand it, that we comprehend
what happens there, that we are now in possession of knowledge: nevertheless, what we
actually have is information and not knowledge. Information about the others that does not
mean the possession of true understanding, of the knowledge that has to come from within,
from the inside – a process that can never leave us unchanged. If the aim of this exhibition
was to establish a dialogue between the equals, the question that remains open could be
formulated as: What would happen to contemporary art if it was judged by the other

15
cultures following the same criteria? What would be the value of 'our' masterpieces? The
answer to this question underlines the importance of cultural values inserted into art
objects, something this exhibition consciously had erased: it is clear that without exporting
the symbolic value with them, the value of our masterpieces would never reach the prices
assigned to them at the Sotbey's for example.

[Photo from the archive of Kandinsky Library, Paris]

One of the ways in which it is possible to interpret this process has been formulated by
Adolph Reed, an American political scientist and race theorist, who has often claimed that
identity politics “is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of
the left-wing of neoliberalism.”23 According to Reed,
The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on
taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call
some strains of inequality (…) over specifying the mechanisms that
produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. 24 […]
23 In: Ben Norton Blog, “Adolph Reed: Identity Politics is Neoliberalism,” published on 29 June 2015.
http://bennorton.com/adolph-reed-identity-politics-is-neoliberalism/ <visited 15 September 2015>
24 Adolph Reed Jr., “The Limits of Anti-racism”. Left Business Observer #121, September 2009, pp.1-5;

16
 We live under a regime now that is capable simultaneously of including
black people and Latinos, even celebrating that inclusion as a fulfillment
of democracy, while excluding poor people without a whimper of
opposition.25
In other words, “Reed condemns identity politics for, despite its putative good intentions,
disguising objectively right-wing, neoliberal ideology with superficially “progressive”
rhetorical window dressing.”26 The only solution for this situation, according to him, is
focusing on material conditions rather on social constructs like race on gender: “White
supermacy, patriarchy, etc. (…) should specifically be seen as what they are: the social
relations that are created by a white superemacist, patriarchal, … system of production –
that is to say created by capitalism. Race and gender must be analyzed in a true
intersectional manner, as inextricably linked to the material … conditions of which they are
constituted.”27 In short, the only way out of this logical deadlock might be through a
historical materialist perspective, something we definitely do not find in the approach
exhibited in Magiciens de le Terre. What makes this procedure more complicated is
formulated by Rasheed Araeen in the following manner:
The difference between the earlier modernity and the present structures of
modernity is that these new structures are camouflaged by the spectacles
of postmodernism to which everyone is allowed to enter and play their
own games. These games are now being played on the assumption that
this has given us the freedom to express ourselves; but what we are in
fact doing is only targeting the camouflage, leaving behind the structures
of domination almost totally intact.28
Hence, what is the economic reasoning behind the veneration of contemporary art? In the
words of Pepe Karmel,
Why has the focus of collecting shifted so dramatically from Old Masters
to modern to contemporary? One reason … is that there is only a limited
amount of first-rate Old Masters or even modern art still left in private
hands, and therefore potentially available for purchase. (…) The
investment bankers, real estate developers, and digital entrepreneurs who
have accumulated comparably vast fortunes today no longer look to the
pp.1.
25 Ibid, pp.4.
26 Ibid., Ben Norton Blog.
27 Ibid.
28 Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics.” Third
Text, 14:50, Spring 2000, 3-20; pp.7.

17
 past for legitimation. (…) They have, as Cappelazzo put it, “a religion of
the future”. Insofar as contemporary art remains avant-garde – insofar as
it attempts to imagine what lies ahead of us – it is in fact ideally suited to
this new class of collectors.29
Perhaps the key to “read” this exhibition is to be found in its title, The Magicians:
although we are made to believe we are encountering the esoteric rituals from exotic world-
wide locations, we might deal here with the magicians as we know them from our own,
Western tradition: a stage magicians or illusionists, who perform stage magic by creating
the illusion of impossible or supernatural feats.30 In this light, perhaps we can see this
analysis as an attempt to reveal what actually happened on stage, during the performance of
our stage magicians. As the magicians would say themselves, “once revealed, never
concealed.”

[Photo from the archive of Kandinsky Library, Paris]

29 Pepe Karmel, Ibid., pp.321.

30 Wikipedia, Magician or The Magician. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magician <visited 1 November
2015>

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