Analysis Of Jean-Hubert Martin's Exhibition Les Magiciens De La Tert

‘I want to show artists from the whole world, and to leave the ghetto of contemporary Western art where we have been shut up over these last decades’ (Buchloh & Martin, 1989, p. 27). Jean-Hubert Martin’s exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre more than challenged, it stampeded into the contemporary Western art world demanding that it expand its vision beyond the generally agreed and understood definition of art. Martin wanted the art world to encompass the global through his sole curatorial vision. In a response to the centralised view of the art world of the time, Martin curated an exhibition to redefine this view and include his discovery of the art of the peripheries which he brought back to this local centre. Arising from this, the dominant

Martin presented a still not complete, but broader world view and therefore corresponding understandings needed to be developed. O’Neill (2012) emphasises how Les Magiciens representations of otherness took the approach of postmodernist pluralism (p. 57) highlighting diversity and difference which aligned with a global art world of a vastly wider range. By opening the scope of the art world, the Western view slowly but radically changing to comprehend this awareness of what contemporary art was defined as on a global scale. One example of the opening of opportunities that followed can be drawn from Alfredo Jaar’s (2014) reflections from progress since Les Magiciens. Jaar commented how ‘provincial’ he found New York upon his arrival from Santiago de Chile in 1982. The city was considered to be an art ‘capital’ but was completely absorbed in its own production and being from Chile he found it impossible to operate outside the minority areas. His opinion is that Les Magiciens broke through this Euro-American central view and the current more global art world in which he can now exist in is as a result of these breaks into what he terms the ‘Western art