| The events known as "rituals" began in 1969 and continue
today. It is in this evolution from object to event that Miralda began using what was to become
one of his favorite materials: food. This gave him the opportunity to turn his art into a broader
experience. Although the visual aspect continued to play the leading role, Miralda placed it in
settings where touch, taste and hearing were an inseparable part of the whole. Music composed
especially for the occasions, the sound of foot steps, and accidental occurrences were gradually
introduced..."
Bartomeu Mari "Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it. Or rather, they have lost the religious sense of the feast and have tried to replace it with something else...I believe that Miralda, with his performances, tends to restore the feast as a disciplined ritual that ends in accordance with a plan. One can and should light fires, eat bread, and enjoy physical beauty, but calmly and with disciplined serenity. His feasts seem to be an encyclopedic synthesis of countless age old liturgies: flower rituals, processions, picturesque banquets, cults of metamorphosis, self-cannibalism, edible landscapes, prehistoric itineraries toward the sun, the evocation of rainbows, of birds, and of banners, of nature and culture, of the raw and the cookedóa true kermess of recovered human civilization..." Umberto Eco. "In our post-modern and post-industrial society, the problem of popular
culture is essential (...) If you think it over you realize that Miralda is really the Peter Pan
of this culture. His presence, his politics, are totally free (...) The purpose of the modernist
people in our period of transition towards post-modernity is really to establish and develop the
cultural activities of the industrial society. Miralda´s concern is very simple: it´s
the idea of inner logic in human expression. For Miralda popular culture is not something which
must be glorified, which must really be considered as an achievement of man. For him, popular
culture is a sense of life, a culture of life (...) This spontaneous direct existential approach
toward what we may call popular culture today is really the problem Miralda is dealing with in
his work, the real recipes of his sense of freedom. "Extracts from a series of interviews by Jordi Torrent for the Monuments in Love video: Pierre Restany "Antoni Miralda acts specifically in this context: he opens art up
to anthropology, finds subjects in local cultural operations, associates comprehensible languages
and ritual elements which often originate from popular events such as festivals, handed down from
one generation to another, which makes it possible for part of the population from a place or
region to meet around his art. François Burkhardt "...Honeymoon proves that all of Miralda´s previous production was
premeditated and contingent upon a certain plan, a voyage along paths the artist needed to explore,
rejecting some and pursuing others that led to new, significantly different proposals. Honeymoon
is a summary of all his earlier work, proof that his entire process of creation is exceptionally
consistent and coherent in terms of both semantics and linguistics... Looking back over the years
on his frenetic and prodigiously imaginative activity, it becomes evident that Miralda´s
creative process is governed by certain coordinates. It contains a set of meanings, a guiding
thought which is expressed in his visual art: an eloquent evocation of a free, peace-loving, festive
world that simultaneously ridicules all types of violence, aggression, power or any other form
of domination of one human being over another. It is, in short, an ethic. Maria Lluïsa Borràs "Eating a sandwich while inside a sandwich isn´t something you can do just anywhere, anytime. But, then, El Internacional isn´t just anywhere, anytime. The restaurant mingles many times, many eras, just as it combines many pieces, many nations. The menu, ranging from, say, a sandwichóthat purportedly British invention best had anywhere but Great Britain and called an entrepa (between bread) in Catalanóto one of Montse Guillen´s celebrated Catalan dishes, based on ingredients as elemental as the earth and sea from which they come and the fire over which they are cooked, waves flags of varied cuisinesóa kind of United Nations sub-committee, meeting in very special session, without too much ethnic precision..." Ronald Christ "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... 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." César Trasobares "...what should interest us is how Miralda´s art has contributed
towards shaping both collective memory and shared amnesia. Miralda has more or less consciouslyóand,
indeed, I would say unconsciouslyóbased his work on features of civilization which civilization
itself has hypocritically uprooted from 20th century culture. He has brought back to the visual
arts some features which were banished from the celebrations and festive events that had been
appropriated by the political and economic powers, and have now become part of the language of
the authorities. By this I mean rituals of representation which are on the borderline between
subversion and alienation, rites that link aspects of individual subjectivity to features of the
subconscious mind. Bartomeu Mari Miralda´s concern with the formal structure of his work has a pictorial character. His attention to color, to formal distribution, the importance attached to the graphic elements that surround his events (videos, sketches, posters, procession designs, drawings, manufactured objects, "improved food" also place him in a different realm. Vicent Todoli "...Miralda is interested in history as a system of signs that constitute the spectacle of life. ultimately this language will culminate in the form of a celebration, a total performance, where the viewer of life (i.e. TV culture) is suddenly projected into participation through art. It is this sense of a participation reality that is at the core of Miralda´s statement as an artist." Robert Morgan "Miralda comes from another unusual city, vibrant with a culture all
its own, particularly in the way it mixes influences from everywhere else through time... Philip Yenawine "Miralda has always represented the position that spectacles are celebrations
inspired by love, not detachments removed from life. In contrast to the pragmatism indigenous
to the United States, Miralda has always seen spectacles as ideas made manifest through extravagant
display. Ideas are not divorced from the excess of decorum or from the rampart overindulgence
of the information age. For Miralda, the romantic is not so much antithetical to concepts as it
is contingent upon them. To think in relation to the spectacle is an alternative to the involuntary
seduction of the image that so completely encapsulates our time. Television is the most obvious
and omniscient example of this pandemic phenomenon. Robert Morgan |