Antoni Miralda, 1973
Coloured Feast, 18 September, Kaldor Fabric Showrooms;
Coloured Bread, 21 September – 4 October, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The following article by Daniel Thomas, "Miralda", appeared in Art & Australia, June 1974, pp384-86:
Antoni Miralda, a young Spanish artist, born in 1942, now living in New York, was brought to Sydney for a few weeks in 1973 by John Kaldor, the businessman-patron of avante-garde art, who also brought us Christo, Harald Szeeman and Gilbert & George.
Miralda is a sculptor whose medium is food, but since extravagant 'edible sculptures' are an ancient tradition as part of such universally known ceremonies as weddings, he is a deviser or 'festivals', 'processions' and 'ceremonies'.
His ceremonies have been commissioned in Paris where he lived from 1966 to 1972, not only by official art museums and by private patrons from the worlds of fashion and business, but also by Communist city councils in working-class suburbs of Paris. Miralda has worked also in Germany and America, and it pleases him that his art is especially appreciated by the town-hall level of taste, by the experienced providers of popular entertainment: Munich, for example, which commissioned a ceremony for the last Olympic games.
In some societies funerals as well as weddings still incorporate sculptural food into their rituals, and Miralda is conscious that his art has powerful associations with death as well as fertility, sexuality and birth.
In Sydney no major ceremony was produced, though there were unsuccessful short-notice attempts to organize a 'procession' up the long walk at the University of New South Wales, a ceremonial space that especially attracted Miralda.
Mr Kaldor's purpose was simply a 'Coloured Feast' to celebrate the opening of the new showrooms for the fabrics he produces. The long, white table laden with coloured food was in fact in a large, bare room above the glossy showrooms designed by the sculptor Mike Kitching.
Being a 6 p.m. cocktail party for the textile , fashion, public relations and art crowds, the food was standard cocktail canapés. Taste is unaltered by the vegetable dyes which Miralda adds to the food though guests were inclined to choose colour harmonies rather than familiar taste and texture sensations.The same dyes were added to white wine for a choice of coloured drinks.
More permanent and more sculptural elements, less likely to be eaten and therefore likely to last throughout the cocktail party, we large areas of coloured rice, heaped loaves of bread, and towers of corncobs.
Loaves were intended to be souvenired and Miralda was delighted to sign and date those that were taken away. It has been found that Sydney mice prefer the black and red portions of Miralda's loaves.
The 'Coloured Feast' of 18 September 1973 was, of course, available only to its invited guests, so Mt Kaldor commissioned additional loaves of bread for a 'Coloured Bread' sculpture as a gift to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where the general public was able to see it for two weeks from 21 September.
Butler's Family Bakery, Northbridge, Sydney, made the bread under Miralda's supervision. Pencil drawings were made by Miralda as charts indicating the sequence of coloured doughs. Drawings of this sort and photographs of the installation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales were combined by Miralda in a screen-print produced at the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College.
