The Lyon Biennale
curator Jean-Hubert Martin's sequel to the notorious 1989 Magicians of the Earth. This problematic landmark exhibition— a troubling mix of contemporary folkloric and ritualistic art and artisanship—is still being attacked from all sides. Riddled with cultural ambiguities and romantic notions about the then theoretically fashionable unEuropean "other," it did pry open some Euro-centric eyes to the fact that intelligent artistic life exists in other locales. And, despite its unspeakable echoes of great white hunterdom, it managed to breach the not-so-international art world's unspoken borders. It got Jean-Hurbert Martin booted from the Beaubours. Eleven years later, the biennial in Lyon is his t r iumphal comeback, as well as his farewell to France. Not a lot has changed. Old habits of cultural colonization still lurk like parasites within the new globalism and also within this exhibition's multicultural and transnationally-chambered heart. The old exoticizing infatuations (Orientalism! Primitivism! Primal energies!) haven't been expelled yet from the heralded new spirit of empowerment and inclusiveness. This is hardly surprising. "Exotic" civilizations were providing sustenance for western art long before Picasso's larcenous gaze alighted on an African mask. The artistic directors of the