‘Magicians’ Does an Appearing Act : Huge show rivals Germany’s ‘Documenta’

France lost its status as the world’s artistic and intellectual capital following a flowering after World War II. Because the French pursue an unquenchable quest for La Gloire they have been trying ever since to recoup. It’s really sort of lovable.

Governments, however, are incapable of legislating talent, so they usually fall back on the creation of institutions. France is no exception. For a decade and more it has been spawning culture palaces faster than you can flick a dust mote off your lapel.

First came the Tinker Toy Centre Georges Pompidou, followed in higgledy-piggledy order by a massive science park at La Villette, the Musee Picasso, the Musee D’Orsay, an endless renovation of the Louvre and the currently bogged-down Opera de la Bastille. Most projects have been controversial; all have been interesting.

But once edifices are erected, bureaucracies are forced to the desperate expedient of putting something in them such as plays, operas or exhibitions. Naturally, when you are out for La Gloire such exercises must be framed in superlatives.

And thus it is with a contemporary art extravaganza just opened at the Musee National d’Art Moderne in the Pompidou Center, better known as Beaubourg. Titled “Magicians of the Earth” and on view through Aug. 14, it includes 100 artists and is so big it sprawls all the way to La Villette on the edge of the central city. There the shank of it is installed in La Grande Halle--a massive cast-iron relic of the beloved and defunct Les Halles (where we all used to eat onion soup at 3 a.m. while pretending to be Hemingway or Picasso).

Organized by museum director Jean-Hubert Martin, the show is large enough to rival Germany’s “Documenta.” It is billed as the first truly international exhibition ever, despite the fact that the Venice Biennale regularly includes India and other outlying nations. Let’s not quibble. “Magicians” is surely grander in scope, spreading its reach from the frozen tundra of Alaska to Africa’s sweltering veldt.

“Magicians” is go grand that on the day of the press preview dozens of journalists, photographers, critics and assorted artniks were kept waiting until the minister of culture, Jack Lang, came sweeping through, smiling behind a phalanx of adoring TV cameras. Of course, nothing in France is grander than lunch, so at 1:30 everybody was shooed out so the guards could eat. Certain traditions are sacred even in revolutionary times.

Revolution?

Sure. This year France celebrates the 200th anniversary of its revolution. “Magicians” carries a strong implication that it intends to be the aesthetic version of that great event, messy as the overthrow of the monarchy, idealistic as the establishment of liberty, equality and fraternity.

According to the show, the word “international” in art circles is a term of pious cant that only includes nations of Western Europe, the United Staes and a sprinkling of other mainstream toadies. To break this ethnocentric monarchical hegemony, “Magicians” turned itself into a regular Noah’s ark of multicultural aesthetics, bringing on board everybody from cosmopolitan superstars like Anselm Keifer to Iraqi calligrapher Yousuf Thannoon, folk-style artists like Madagascar’s Efiaimbelo and makers of ritual grounds like three Nepalese who fashioned a mandala especially for the occasion.

In principle this is a liberal and good-hearted gesture. In practice it is silly beyond reasonable comprehension. When you juxtapose a mainstream word-works artist like Barbara Kruger with a Tibetan painter like Temba Rabden she looks like a chic Madison Avenue poster illustrator and he looks like kitsch Chinese restaurant decor. When you put Francesco Clemente in the same neighborhood with three Mexican papier-mache sculptors he looks effete and they look like makers of Mardi Gras grotesques.

“Magicians of the Earth” implies the possibility of our learning something about the influence of shamanistic grass-roots artists on over-world artists. There is some of that in the occasional juxtaposition like that of a powerful monumental doughnut circle by Richard Long near a magical earth painting by Australian aboriginal artists. But the show doesn’t stick to the point. Besides we already knew about that from a million texts and “Primitivism and 20th Century Art” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art a while back.

“Magicians” is like some nightmare version of a Saturday night around the fountain at the foot of Boulevard St. Michel. Students resplendent in everything from saris to mufti to kilts yammer on in different languages to the point where you forget that they all mean the same thing, they all want love, excitement and security. It just looks like a chaos of conflicting styles and the Tower of Babel hallucinates into view, confirming everybody’s worst fears about the others. Third World people look quaint and naive and mainstream people look pompous and smug. If we learn anything it’s that this show just can’t resist including the same old provincial international tribe that shows up again and again in European extravaganzas like Documenta and the Venice Biennale. They seem like the tiniest and most esoteric of all the tribes. And what have they got to do with the themes of magic and earthiness? Nam June Paik is about as shamanistic as a computer salesman, and when was the last time you thought Claes Oldenburg was a witch doctor?

There are people here who look good in spite of it all. Nigeria’s S.J. Akpan makes painted cement life-size figures of black men in costumes from tribal regalia to Eurocop. Moscow’s Ilya Cabakov sums up artistic longing in “The Man Who Flew into Space From His Apartment”--a poster-plastered hovel with a slingshot seat and a hole bashed through the ceiling. Abstract artists as diverse as Denmark’s Per Kirkeby and China’s Jie Chang Yang actually manage to appear serious. There are others but they are all exceptions.

A mere scan of the catalogue is enough to prove that the organizers of “Magicians” are nothing if not intelligent. How could such thoughtful people make such a spectacular mess? One clue may lurk in a catalogue project by Bernard Marcade called, “The Other, This Grand Albi.” It is a collection of campy photographs and quotations from artists, thinkers and travelers about the nature of people we still have the arrogance to call “primitive.” (If we would substitute the more neutral “basic” or “fundamental” we might realize that that’s us, too.)

Marcade’s essay is provocative but it also serves to remind us that Romantic Exoticism was a virtually French invention from Rousseau’s “noble savage” to Gauguin’s Anna the Javanese. In some inside-out way “Magicians” is just a kind of updated expression of love for the strange and far-away.

But the truth is that the makers of “Magicians” did not make a mess, they bumbled into an existing one. The art scene seems to have lost its bearings. There has been ample recent evidence--even in Los Angeles--that art is presently unable to order its options. It is in a state of profound confusion trying to decide if its priorities are artistic or sociological, its senses verbal or visual, it audience popular or cultivated, its values idealistic or monetary.

Nobody has to travel all the way to Paris to discover the problem but it is perversely comforting to find we are not the only ones that have it. Still it is disheartening to discover the malaise so general.