Dona i Ocell (1983)
There are doubtless many reasons to love Joan Miró's 22-metre high concrete sculpture known in English as 'Woman and Bird' and located in the park named after the artist in his hometown of Barcelona, not far from the Plaça d'Espanya; not least of all the brightly coloured ceramic tiles added by his friend and collaborator Joan Gardy Artigas.
But for me, what interests and amuses most is that this work deconstructs conventional gender binaries as well as the phallogocentric pretension and arrogance of the steel and glass office blocks that have since been erected by the architects of global capitalism across from where Miró's now tiny-in-comparison sculpture stands in all its pagan and primitive - yet modernist - perfection.
The Repsol Building (1993), the Allianz Tower (1993), and the Edificio Tarragona (1998) might all be taller and shinier - and they are certainly more functional - than Miró's final piece of public sculpture, but they lack the fourfold unity that Heidegger identifies as belonging to the really great works of art.
Miró's Dona i Ocell gathers together earth and sky, divinities and mortals, and it sets something free within us in a way that the aforementioned sky-scrapers do not. For they simply bring together a work force and liberate flows of money. If they tell us something about the truth of commerce, they don't tell us much, if anything, about the truth of being.
That said, Miró was certainly not averse to accepting paid commissions from big business, as his famous logo for "La Caixa" illustrates.
