Jiří Kolář
It is fairly usual to characterize Jiří Kolář’s creative stance around 1960 as a transition from written poetry to a form of visual expression viewed as a neo-avantgarde renewal of the Czech tradition of the avantgarde poem-image. However, the truth of the matter is that Kolář had been continually active as a visual artist since the 1950s—even if the works produced by him in this realm were never entirely devoid of the verbal element. In several hundreds of early-1950s collages, Kolář dissociated himself from the surrealist method of combining visual fragments into a new unity, his preferred procedure
instead being to juxtapose clippings from periodicals. During this period, Kolář was not yet employing reproductions of canonic visual artefacts but rather drawing mainly on Czech photographic journals from the 1920s and ’30s. The resulting works set up confrontations between entities that are similar in outlook yet sharply distinct in substance; for instance, one of his collages juxtaposes a group of shooters arranged in the shape of a swastika with other symbols formed by the bodies of synchronized swimmers, divers, and skiers. On the other hand, Kolář’s later collages include written poetry in the form brief titles such as “The Dream Institute,” “Entartete Kunst,” or “The Grimace of the Century.” A liminal interpermeation of written poetry and visual expression is achieved in Kolář’s “Weeklies” from around 1970, in which his goal—pursued every seven days—was to comment on a key event of the past week. Collages from the series “A 1967 Weekly” then accompanied the book publication of Kolář’s collection “Instructions for Use,” consisting of texts presented as calls for realization; in turn, the titles to be found in “A 1968 Weekly” were derived from documents, letters, and newspaper clippings that captured the state of Czechoslovak society at the moment of the country’s occupation by the Warsaw Pact armies. K.C.
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