Miralda’s Multiple Marianne(s): Unpacking the Archive
One of Miralda’s sustained undertakings is his collection/archive of food-related objects and documents that he has gathered over more than four decades. Although established in 2007 with longtime collaborator Montse Guillén as the FoodCultura Museum, since the 1980s this collection/archive has functioned as a discursive structure that both feeds and is fed by Miralda’s multifaceted practice. Going beyond a mere collection of objects or an archive, the FoodCultura Manifesto describes it as “a market and a stomach, a library and a mouth, a center of exchange and a brain, a laboratory and a language (…) an organic archive where the links between aesthetics, food and culture are rewritten (…) a dense web of events, performative actions and artistic proposals, a great ritual that invokes autochthonous memories, cultural experiences and human identities (…) a network of international and cumulative collaboration, a sensitive parliament, an agora of flavors, a public square where miscegenation processes are debated and manifested.”[1]
Miralda packs and unpacks his living, organic archive across multiple operations: performative actions, participatory projects, field work, research, and the rethinking of cultural processes, from identity formation to transculturation through an anthropology of food and the artifacts related to it. In itself, as the manifesto states, FoodCultura is a language that gives form to many of Miralda’s cultural/culinary explorations, and it is its interaction with Miralda’s personal archive that informs the representation of the works in the exhibition space. Fittingly, his first solo gallery show in New York since his 1991 exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery features two recent multiples made by Miralda that function as an index of his production from the 1960s to date, and more specifically provide a context, in the form of an encapsulated archive, to the series of drawings and collages presented in the adjacent galleries.
At the center of both multiples is the figure of Marianne, the icon who embodies the ideals of “freedom, equality, and fraternity” that guided the French Revolution and the subsequent foundation of the French Republic. The Marianne Caganera is rendered here as a caganer (small, defecating figurines placed in nativity scenes in Catalonia) in two versions, “métisse/mulatta” and “blanche/white”, emblematic of Miralda’s explorations in cultural hybridity. Both boxes, Marianne M and Marianne B, contain objects, ephemera, and publications that span five decades of the artist’s production.
Both Marianne and her American counterpart, the Statue of Liberty, occupy an important place in Miralda’s visual and conceptual repertoire, as the iconographies of freedom, liberation, and, to some extent, those of war and peace, are central to Miralda’s production. His first bodies of work in the 1960s, prompted by his stint in the compulsory military service under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, featured plastic toy soldiers rendered in drawings and assemblages. Some of these, from the series Soldats Soldés (1965-1973) and Cénotaphes (1969-1975) are included in the Marianne M and Marianne B boxes, as well as series of drawings from that period (Cuaderno Castillejos, Botas Bomba, Bien/Mal, Permutaciones, Hazañas Bélicas). It was also in the late sixties, with his continued interest in military and war iconography, that Miralda started working on the Cénotaphes series of maquettes/assemblages, today presented collectively in the form of an installation[2], and also projects for commemorative funerary architectures, inspired by those of Étienne-Louis Boullée, which were ironically dedicated to the exploits of “generals”, which ranged from their mistresses to their hunting trophies. The Cénotaphes were early explorations of the monument, which he would subsequently extend to different bodies of work in the 1970s and 1980s. Another work that satirically reflects on the military monument was La Cumparsita, a film made in 1972 with Benet Rossell in which a giant toy soldier was paraded around Paris looking for a pedestal where it could finally settle down.
During his stint in Paris, Miralda also collaborated with fellow Catalan artists Jaume Xifra, Joan Rabascall, Benet Rossell, and French artist Dorothée Selz, on different experiential projects, collective feasts and happenings, most notably the Cérémonials (1969-1973), which highlighted sensory experiences of color, taste, sound, and movement. The ritual was central to the Cérémonials, and other later works such as Feste Für Leda presented at Documenta in Kassel in 1977. These pieces, indexed here in the Marianne boxes, combined popular mythology and symbols, ceremony, procession, and celebration where the offering of food played a fundamental role. Miralda’s collaboration with Muntadas, Sangría 228 West B’way (1972), similarly relied on the experience of color and taste through the offering of food in a banquet for the senses which took on a public dimension as it was taken from a loft space to the streets of New York.
Miralda’s participatory works engaged public space in different ways. In New York, the street took center stage and became the place where celebration, feast and parade converged. More than just taking to the streets, Miralda mobilized a set of constituencies, addressing urban issues in a city that in the 1970s was in a downward spiral of urban blight and decay and in the midst of an economic recession. The Movable Feast (part of the 9th Avenue International Festival, 1974), was one such project, a parade co-organized by Miralda, the residents and small businesses of Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood that despite its reputation for crime was an example of the ethnic and cultural diversity of New York. The project demanded that Miralda negotiate with the inhabitants of the area, the local businesses and also the public administration, building a network of collaboration that made it possible. Here, the notions of participation and social agency acquired a new dimension in Miralda’s work. This aspect of his practice preceded by decades initiatives, such as Creative Time, which commission social practice projects in the public realm.
In 1984, with chef, partner and collaborator Montse Guillén, Miralda embarked on one of his most complex projects, El Internacional, in what had formerly been the upscale Italian restaurant Teddy’s run by Sal Cucinotta in the 1950s and 1960s, and frequented by celebrities and the mafia alike. El Internacional can be inscribed in the tradition of artist-run restaurants such as Gordon Matta-Clark’s Food in nearby Soho and Allen Ruppersberg’s Al’s Café in Los Angeles a few years earlier. More than a restaurant, El Internacional was a laboratory for artistic, culinary, cultural, and social experimentation, and indeed an incubator for the future FoodCultura Museum. While the exterior and interior of the building were restored to reflect the original atmosphere of Teddy’s restaurant, Miralda’s unique architectural intervention in the façade of the building immediately became a landmark of the city. On July 17, 1985, Miralda staged the “Tribeca Coronation – A Gift From Miss Liberty”, permanently installing a to scale replica of the Statue of Liberty’s crown on the top of El Internacional, marking the beginning of Miralda and Guillén’s next enterprise, the Honeymoon Project (1986-1992).
Planned to coincide with the 500-year anniversary of the discovery of the New World, The Honeymoon Project celebrated the hypothetical marriage of Christopher Columbus to the Statue of Liberty. It was a tribute to the union of Old and New Worlds, to miscegenation, immigration, and cultural hybridity, that would take on different forms through different events and incorporate large-scale elements, to culminate in a wedding parade down Fifth Avenue. Today, this work in its entirety only exists in the form of a remarkable group of drawings, as the full parade, with the exception of the Wedding Bedspread Parade (1989), never came to fruition due to its ambitious scale and lack of funds.
The inventory of the Honeymoon Project’s iconography for the Liberty bride and her cortège includes the Sevillana, Carmen Miranda, and the figure of Marianne, which graces the two multiples that constitute the backbone of this exhibition as condensed iterations of Miralda’s archive. The Marianne M and Marianne B multiples not only index Miralda’s production since his beginnings as an artist in the 1960s, but also present an opportunity to unpack his archive with the presentation of drawings and collages produced between the mid 1960s to the 1990s that account for what James Wines has described as Miralda’s unique “fusion of architecture, sculpture, graphic design, archaeology, feast, performance, ritual [and] technology” that is also a “fascinating thermometer of social change.”[3]
[1] See http://www.foodcultura.org/en/history-2/
[2] See collection of Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía. https://www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/obra/cenotaphes-cenotafios
[3] James Wines, “La cocina como contexto. Miralda, el arte ambiental y El Internacional.” In Miralda Made in USA, exhibition catalogue, Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2016. James Wines is an architect and artist, founder of the environmental design and architecture organization SITE.
Miralda (1942, Terrassa) is a multidisciplinary artist most known for his sculptures, drawings, films, photographs and public art installations. His early works were largely inspired by his experience as a conscripted solider of the Spanish military and consisted of sculptures and drawings featuring toy soldiers. Since 1962, a majority of his works have been centered around food. Miralda began creating “food sculptures” that were made of food and other organic materials and spoke to popular culture and the culture of food within different societies. These works gained popularity and through collaborations with other artists, Miralda’s small, public demonstrations became large public spectacles surrounding food, rituals and color. In 1971, Miralda moved to the United States and has since been creating art installations between Europe and the U.S. In 1979, he was a fellow for advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. The artist is now based between Miami and Barcelona.
Miralda’s works have been shown at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1966); Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (1969); Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris (1969); Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York (1972); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1975); Documenta 6, Kassel (1977); Palazzo Grassi, Venice (1978); Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (1981); Museo del Barrio, New York (1984); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (1988); 44th Venice Biennial, Spanish Pavilion (1990); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990); Centre de Cultura Sa Nostra, Palma de Mallorca (1994); Fundació la Caixa, Barcelona (1995); Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (1996); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (1996 and 2016); Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas (2004); 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006); Artium, Vitoria Gasteiz (2008); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); among others. He is represented in the collections of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Collection Centre National des Arts Plastiques - Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and Artium, Vitoria Gasteiz, and more.