Terms
REGIONAL, LOCAL, INDIGENOUS, PROVINCIAL
INTERNATIONALISM, GLOBALISM, NATIONALISM,
Regionalism: http://www.salzburger-kunstverein.at/en/exhibitions/current/2013-09-26/regionalism
Regional vis-à-vis Global Discourses: Contemporary Art from the Middle East
Vancouver Art in the Sixties
http://vancouverartinthesixties.com/essays/urban-renewal
MAGICIANS of the EARTH
Quotes from Pablo Laufuente’s introduction to the book by Afterall, “Making Art Global (Part 2) ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ 1989
“But at the root of these diputes there seems to be a dynamic of antagonism, a constant mode of confrontation based on the fact that what is being negotiated is not how specific work is being dealt with in the exhibition contet. Instead, what appears to be at stake is a redefinition of the field of agencies, and of the voices that are authorizsed to speak with and about those agencies.
Historically, this redefinition has been accompanied by a defence of the agency of the artist, in conflict with that of the curator and to the detriment of the work. In ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, such redefinition is accompanied by two additional twists, which make it a specailly revealing case. In the first place, the agency of the artist, in order to escape the problematics of modernism and its socio cultura determination, is reframed as the agency of the magician–an individual who has a privleged relationship to group and place and who, thanks to that privileged relationship, gains his or her individuality. (This individuation is, curiously, not far from the Western romantic notion of the artist.) The second inflection is that, again thanks to that privileged relationship, the magician is not only distinct from his or her cultural context (the work of the artists included is not the expression of a culture and a time), he or she is also to some extent freed from it. That is the magician is the individual who wants to and is able to escape the determinations presented y 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. ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ is also an exhibition of makers that sets itself against both an exhibition of cultures and an exhibition of silent object. This set of oppositions, if developed into a system of relations with two variables, results ina diagram with four nodes: exhibitions of contextualised objects; exhibitions of contextualised subjects; exhibitions of decontextualised subjects; and exhibitions of decontextualised objects. Such a diagram might allow us to move from an understanding of the history of inclusion of non-Western art as a negotiation of voices and identities to a consideration of how this history, through a study of modes of display, might actually expose the workings of the system of art. (16,17)
“In ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ the artists or magicians were all presented as equally capable of signifying independently from their context, eve though at least some of the non-Western artsts were less equal than the others because of their lack of familiarity with the new context that they had (suddenly) entered. In ‘The Short Century”, on the other hand artists were treated equally, but only in the sense of being conditioned by their biography and context. The risk of this position is that an understanding, of subject’s actions as the result of their context can, in its most extreme formulation, give the impression that the actions of those subjects are just the expression of their circumstances. Contextual determination threatens to curtain, even do away with, artists’ agency, betraying the emancipatory promise that art and the aesthetic experience might hold. ” (17)