Month: May 2015

Waking the Magicians, 2015
In addition to his solo exhibition at the Museum this summer, Artist/Curator Brad Isaacs has selected two works from McMaster’s collection―one by Carl Beam and the other by Richard Long―for the installation in the adjacent gallery. The works are intended to renew questions about land, place, relationships to nature in an art historical context, and the space for indigenous art within the broader contemporary art world.  His title for the installation, Waking the Magicians, is a reference to the controversial juxtaposition of works by Richard Long and the Yuendumu language group (Northern Territories), Australia in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou curated by Jean-Hubert Martin. Waking the Magicians continues until August 15, 2015.

Magiciens de la Terre, 1989
“An exhibition loved and hated in equal measure, Martin curated the show to address the fact that there were, as he put it, “one hundred percent of exhibitions ignoring 80 percent of the earth.” He attempted to engage critically with certain aspects of neo-colonial mentality in the West, particularly a resurgent interest in ‘primitivism,’ which Martin felt aestheticized exotic cultures without destablilizing western definitions of fine art, modernism, or identity. The exhibition included works by 100 artists (50 from the so called ‘West’ and 50 from the ‘margins’), attempting to show all on equal footing.” ¹

For the 1989 exhibition, Richard Long’s Red Earth Circle was installed beside Yuendumu community’s Yam Dreaming. On this juxtaposition, art historians Ivan Karp and Fred Wilson wrote:
“The sand painting…in front of [Long] left you with the feeling that here were two artists from extraordinarily different places trying to reproduce the elements of the world. But for Long, the elements are base materials themselves, and for the Australian Aboriginal painting, they’re visible signs of the hidden world.” 2

Here is a video of the Yuendumu community installing their work in Magiciens de la Terre

Magiciens de la Terre, 1989 (7′ 50″ clip) from Marco di Castri on Vimeo.

And here is Richard Long installing his work in Magiciens de la Terre

¹ “Magiciens De La Terre.” FORMER WEST“. BAK, n.d. Web. 20 May 2015. <http://www.formerwest.org/ResearchLibrary/MagiciensdelaTerre>.

^{2  “CONSTRUCTING THE SPECTACLE OF CULTURE IN MUSEUMS” Ivan Karp and Fred Wilson
This text is drawn from the lecture series ‘Art in context: rethinking the New World,’ sponsored in the Fall
of 1992 by the Atlanta College of Art Gallery and Continuing Education Department. It was originally
published in Artpapers, 17:3 (May–June 1993), pp. 2–9.
http://www.jinavalentine.com/archiving/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Wilson-Karp-Museums.pdf}