1973

Miralda
Coloured feast
18 September 1973
John Kaldor Fabricmaker showrooms, Sydney

Coloured bread
21 September – 4 October 1973
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

40 years: Kaldor Public Art Projects exhibition notes Miralda 1973

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It’s easy to establish a dialogue with food because it belongs to all at every level. You can communicate with children in the Communist suburbs of Paris – or with the Ninth Avenue audience in New York or with sophisticated museum people in Europe… Food is in the middle of everything and is connected with human behaviour.

Linda Montana, Performance artists talking in the eighties, University of California, Berkeley 2001

Far from the hypnotic society of spectacle, Miralda offers a participatory form of social behaviour based in the particularity of human interaction and an economics of festive exchange… For Miralda, culture is not isolated within the walls of institutions; it resides in the public domain of shared social rituals, most importantly the meal.

William Jeffet, ‘Fragments from Tastes and tongues: 13 cities (2002)’, Seacex

 Detail of Miralda's Coloured feast 1973

Miralda met John Kaldor in 1972 at the apartment of his friends and fellow artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Kaldor invited Miralda to create works in Australia in 1973 for the opening of his new John Kaldor Fabricmaker showrooms, designed by artist Mike Kitching, in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. An art event combining performance and interaction, it was attended by around 300 people. Leslie Walford described Coloured feast for the Sun Herald (23 Sept 1973): ‘The mayonnaise was purple, the sausages blue. The cauliflowers were red or pink or green. The jellies were psychedelic. The paté was turquoise, the corn on the cob sky blue.’ Was it the first work of art ever eaten in Australia?

While Miralda was still in Australia, Daniel Thomas, then senior curator at the Art Gallery of NSW, took the opportunity to present a new work by the artist in the Gallery’s entrance court. Created with the help of local bakers, Coloured bread was a banquet table of rolls and plaited breads in green, red, blue and yellow.

Read more about Miralda.

Detail of Miralda’s Coloured feast 1973 to celebrate the opening of the John Kaldor Fabricmaker showrooms in Surry Hills, 18 September 1973. Photo: Douglas Thompson Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects

 

WORLD EVENTS

US troops pull out of Vietnam

Patrick White wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Sydney Opera House opens

Mobile phone invented

Lucy Lippard publishes the book Six years: the dematerialization of the art object 1966 to 1972

Walter Benjamin’s influential 1936 essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ published in English

National Gallery of Australia controversially buys Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles

First Biennale of Sydney held at the Sydney Opera House Gallery

3rd Kaldor project Gilbert & George present The Singing Sculpture and exhibit The Shrubberies at the Art Gallery of NSW and Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria

4th Kaldor project Miralda creates Coloured feast at the John Kaldor Fabricmaker showrooms in Sydney and Coloured bread at the Art Gallery of NSW