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Partage d'Exotismes or Sharing Exoticisms, the 5th Lyon Biennale, is 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 triumphal 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 Aspassio Haronit aki, Serie: Les Hybrides. 96 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art Orlan, Femme Syrum et Femme Euro-ForEzienne, 1.25 x 1.56 m Lyon Biennale, Thierry Prat and Thierry Raspail, who chose Jean-Hubert Martin, say that this exhibition honors "the victory of anthropology over traditional aesthetics." Anthropophagi are more like it. The live mermaid who was wheeled through the famished crowd at the opening reception was a blatant, if unintentional , symbol: festooned with hors d'ouevres, her fishtailed costume was quickly denuded of its smoked salmon scales. This Lyon Biennale is a feeding frenzy of global exoticisms. I was prepared to despise the exhibition , which begins with a false display of mutual otherness: geometric designs by American conceptualists Sol LeWitt and Ndebele house painter Esther Mahlangu share a freestanding billboard-like structure. This curatorial flourish and absence of a real wall deprives both these artists of their context, content, and raison d'etre, and makes them look like decorators instead of the dissimilar but equally conceptual wall painters they both are. No wonder the advance word from African intellectuals was highly critical: the French still don't get it. They're still propping up old notions of western superiority with misleading comparisons, aboriginal paintings, tattoos, and curio-cabinet objects. Old perennials like Tapies, Ben, and Gilbert & George share space in Lyon with aboriginal dream paintings and bizarre curios (an embellished skull from Solomon Islands; five pieces of a legionnaire's tattooed skin), as well as regionally-known artists such as Jane Alexander and Willie Cole; new global art stars such as Shirin Neshat, Soo-ja Kim, Manuel Ocampo (skewering his nation's heritage of cross-cultural colonialist degradations); and Nedko Solakov (spoofing naive western stereotypes in his 1994 fiction of a western art-collecting tribal chief). This show has the poirier's vast carbonized post-industrial metropolis, lit by neon sign spelling "Exotica." It also has Thomas Hirchhorn's even vaster United Nations, a torched and war-torn multinational mini-golf terrain of cardboard houses and UN vehicles, with de-exoticized signposts that read: Kosovo, Chechnya, Rwanda, as well as Liza Lou's beaded kitchen, an irresistibly exotic piece of America. Despite its intentions of inclusiveness , this Lyon biennial focuses a European gaze back upon its own his carved wooden customs installation of 1997, complete with video, photos, carved suitcases, crates, signs, airplane (propellers whirring), and immigration-related anxiety. While western artists indulge in non-western fantasies, African artists cannily Africanize western modes and deal with their own colonized heritage. Asian artists exploit stereotypical orientalism in works such as Chai Guo Qiang's gauzy hot tub installation with live canaries and scholar's rocks, Wenda Gu's dining chamber fit for a video-loving emperor, and Liew Kung Yu's Temple of Eastern Paradise. And Latin American artists (a distinct minority) make pointed jokes about their post-colonial exoticisms. Venezuelan Sergio Vega installs a sly paradisiacal diorama, The...

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