MIRALDA'S TOUCH:
FROM PRIVATE NOTES
TO ARTE PUBLICO
Inventing projects to be carried out in public spaces, Antoni Miralda was
a public artist before the practice became fashionable among artists in the
late
1970s.
He learned to think and plan his projects through his private notes and
drawings. As author, choreographer and master of ceremonies, Miralda had
to convince
himself of the tone and rhythm of each event and project. The components
and directions
of his site-works had to be developed, recorded and explained through
drawings and verbal directions to the numerous players in his orchestrated
artworks.
At times, the projects had to be presented to sponsors and public officials.
In
all cases, the drawings served multiple purposes. For the audiences who
did not see them, the resulting artistic actions were linked to remote places
and
times, to fleeting episodes and occurrences as in music and dance performances.
Our connection now to the thinking behind those public ceremonies, performances
and installations are the drawings in this book. Taking great risks as
an artist by producing ephemeral site related work, Miralda developed
his ideas
and images
on paper, but he never really intended many of these images and notes
as more than personal working documents. In addition to some formal presentation
drawings,
many private drawings were “rescued” for their first public
presentation here. Although some of the drawings embody private thoughts,
most of them
relate to works of public art.
While much of the reality of public events is evanescent, some of their
flavor, genesis and sources are still preserved in the drawings, in surviving
monuments
and in the images and case histories in this book. Thus, in a historical
sense, these drawings reveal the workings of the artist's mind, the emergence
and evolution
of ideas and forms, and especially for the unrealized projects, their
sole existence.
Working in the public realm in our times requires that artists be explicit about
the components and timing of their projects. Workers have to be cued and trained,
fabricators have to be directed, sponsors have to be convinced and motivated.
Beyond the emergence and evolution of the artist's ideas we also see here the
rhetoric of the artist's intentions and his use of drawings to present, explain
and convince. We also view the magic of visual and verbal representation, the
interplay of squiggle, ideogram, pictograph, letter and word. We witness the
near-chemical emergence of a position, a gesture, a movement and their evolution
into images and language.
The public art terrain in which Miralda operates remains an exposed frontier
of culture clearly functioning in other terms than the conquered cultured
parcels of art museums and the uncharted but protected corners of the art
world. In many
ways, in these drawings we also witness the artist's definition of his
territory, the carving of the social space for artistic intervention, the
stretching of
the conception and boundaries of the work of art. Each site-specific
event was sculpted by Miralda in collaboration with a group of performers/participants,
every time in a different circumstance, always charged with the passion
and thoughts
of the presenters and the audiences, saturated with the emotions and
momentum of each environment. This book places Miralda's work on the border
of ancient
traditions of public ritual and at the forefront of the evolving movement
of public art in the last half of the twentieth century.
The approach to inventing, selecting and siting public art in Europe and
in the United States has evolved significantly in the last four decades.
From the
earliest attempts in the 1960s at placing large studio works outdoors,
through the collaborations between artists, architects, engineers and other
professionals
of the 1980s, to the more recent political engagement and action of artists,
the notion of public art has been radically challenged and re-examined.
As the drawings and case histories show, Miralda was pushing the boundaries
of this
unexplored territory, risking at times the perception that his work
was some kind of glorified ritual, facing the sceptical questioning of his
work as
legitimate and relevant art.
In all of his projects Miralda was firm and clear about his esthetic intent,
at times relying on his historical awareness, intuition and informed
imagination, whether he was functioning alone or with a group of bakers
or cheerleaders, always
recognizing the practical and philosophic differences between working
in a public environment versus the private realm of the artist's studio.
Even
when
laboring
with other artists or with craftsmen, Miralda acknowledged and respected
his co-workers' esthetic potentiality, joining them in their own forms of
self-expression.
This
serious attitude and approach as a public artist led him to value an
adaptive method of artmaking that is formally and imaginatively responsive
to an audience,
a place, its history, context and use. Unlike the isolated practice of
traditional studio-artists, today many artists are embracing and welcoming
a broad
public into all aspects of their art. With Miralda the audience and the
co-workers in any project were an integral component of the artwork since
his first
Fête
en Blanc.
Many of the scenarios exposed in presentations and publications about public
art do not sufficiently emphasize the fact that the artist is the central
focus of any art production, that the artist is the one taking risks and
assuming responsibility
for the total work of creation. In addition to his/her vision and concepts,
an artist producing a work of public art must consider what is realizable
with limited
resources, what is allowed by commissioning entities and public agencies,
what is possible to construct in compliance with building codes and standards
of public
safety, what is accepted by increasingly vocal public audiences, what
is vulnerable to political interference, what is realizable under the overused
covers of artistic
freedom.
Beyond these factors, more elusive conditions play important roles in public
art: the willingness of patrons to provide support and funding to complete
artworks without compromise, the cooperation of sponsors and bureaucrats
in re-interpreting
guidelines to accommodate flexibility and possibility, the complicity
of art writers and critics in supporting public art and in presenting this
type of expression
in its own terms. Even when the artwork was itself the subject of the
interests of sponsors, whether as an image for public relations or marketing,
Miralda
acknowledged the changing interpretations and transformation of the meaning
of his works as
their images transcended the boundaries of his own intentions. Permeable
to the porous contours of culture, Miralda has been an astute player in all
of his works
that have actually materialized, especially those staged in the United
States. In the few instances where sponsors attached too many strings and
conditions to
their support, Miralda firmly stated his convictions, opting to decline
producing a project compromised and changed beyond his purposes.
And yet, having crisscrossed and charted the public territory in Europe and in
the United States, Miralda can also be an intensely private artist. The earliest
drawings done in a modest sketch book in military camp explore the actual profiles
of figures and uniforms. His studies for the Projet pour un banc
de square, the
re-alignments of images from military manuals, the permutations of soldier images,
all become obsessive personal commentaries on social structuring and strong statements
against war and aggression.
In his early work, Miralda was also an avid appropriator of images, especially
in the many works which include toile de jouy, and the Essaie
d'Amelioration executed on historical posters. He was also a willing collaborator with
other artists, becoming involved in all aspects of a project or exhibition,
including
the design of many of his exhibition announcements. His posters and unlimited
edition postcards extended his images and ideas into the public realm
of the mails. In contrast, the Suicide Cake provides a recipe an individual
or a group's
fatal ritual.
Other drawings include choreography annotation, descriptions of unusual materials,
recipes of all kinds, menus, alignment of marchers in a street parade,
elaborations on techniques of coloring bread or rice. Some drawings reflect
upon the history of art (Venus Bolero) while others celebrate popular
culture, imploding political and gustatory territories (Coca-Cola Polenta).
Themes like the Last
Supper appear as a set of postcards in the Mercedes Benz Last Supper,
eventually becoming encoded in other projects. Drawings for numerous tables
show the artist's
ever expanding conception of one of mankind's most universal pieces of
furniture: appearing in multiple geometric guises and also broken, exploded,
forming a labyrinth,
jutting into the Mediterranean Sea, elongated like a serpent, shaped
like an airplane, becoming a double-tailed mermaid.
As Miralda explored food for humans and deities through the years, he also
developed events of all types, served famous food to animals, worked with
Montse Guillen
on a showcase restaurant, El lnternacional, engaged and married statues,
concieved monument-gifts from various cities to his famous couple. All of
this is included
here, at times embryonically, at times in full illusionistic splendor.
Drawing as a way of recording persons and objects, drawing to actualize reality,
drawing to probe his mind for images, drawing to capture the fleeting
inner commentary, drawing to resolve technical and logistical details of
a project,
drawing as
a means of documenting other versions of an artwork, drawing to seduce
a potential sponsor, drawing to comply with bureaucratic requirements: all
these
have been
employed by Miralda in the three decades of work shown in this catalogue
of the artist's instruments.
Drawings in military camp, in trains and planes, in New York, Miami and Barcelona,
drawing in Paris and Berlin, Miralda has faced the empty page with simple
pens, pencils, markers, sometimes a little watercolor or the occasional shadowy
smear
of his own saliva. This book contains a major selection of the artist's life
work, revealing a range of expression and invention, exposing the nervous
garabato which becomes a black swan or a marching figure in a parade, embodying
a dizzying
imagination which conceives, rethinks, enlarges, revises and executes. Flipping
through these pates viewers see the artist testing his ideas, adjusting initial
modes, shifting directions and refining the ever-evolving structures and
forms.
These extended uses of the language of drawing, beyond the prevalent perception
of a drawing as the means of recording of visual reality, of the drawing
as “finished
artwork” for the art market, of a drawing as the history of a moment
of inspiration, are manifest here. The artist focuses his draughtsman's
tools on
a locus of potentiality and invention; his drawings become the record,
the evolving imaging of directed aesthetic formalization, its history
and his
probing.
Miralda's arsenal of drawings expose a linguistic and semiotic exploration,
revealing to a broad public a form of private communication and the substance
of his search
for a public esthetic. Beyond their relation to the many projects and monuments,
the images speak volumes for themselves, awakening and strengthening in all
viewers a belief in the power of drawing as a universal, timeless language.
As a fundamental
means for the artist to deal with his artistic vision and his inner and outer
reality, the drawings in this book embody the struggle and the record of
Miralda's universal public art and fascinating private quest.
Cesar Trasobares
Miami, September 1994
Cesar Trasobares, an independent artist and
art activist based in Miami was Executive Director of the Art in Public Places
program in
Dade County, Florida (1985-1990), one of the pioneer programs of public
art in the United States. Trasobares worked with Miralda in his projects
for the New
World Festival of the Arts in Miami in 1982.
Menus: Miralda, Sa Nostra-Caixa de Balears, Palma, Mallorca, 1995
(concept for book by Miralda in collaboration with Trasobares)
Essay appears on pages 16, 17; also in original Spanish version (pp. 18-19)
and in Catalan (pp. 13-15)
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