Word: kol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Texas Tech University laboratory were given some musical entertainment. One group of newborn rat pups was exposed to selections from Mozart-The Magic Flute, Symphonies 40 and 41, the Violin Concerto No. 5. A second group audited an equivalent daily dose of Arnold Schoenberg-Pierrot Lunaire, Verkldrte Nacht and Kol Nidre, among other compositions. The third set of rats, appointed as a control, heard nothing but the whirring of a ventilation...
This week West Germans will have an opportunity to examine yet another side of Kolář's talent at Bremen's Overbeck Gesellschaft Gallery, which will display 180 examples of his "poems of object." The show will move on to Ulm and Munich, and Manhattan's Willard Gallery plans to exhibit his work this spring. It is memorable not only be cause Kolář reveals himself as a gifted collagist, but also because contemporary artists with any degree of originality at all have conspicuously failed to develop in Communist countries...
Mosaics of Rubble. Nine years ago, Kolář, who was primarily a symbolic poet, abandoned formal verse altogether. Now he spends nine hours a day gluing tiny fragments of newsprint and photographs onto plaques, bas-reliefs, house hold objects and sculpted forms. "I am still a poet," he says, "in the sense that I am a shaper of symbolic meanings from information spewed out by our technological civilization. But I'm using the poetry of objects because I feel that the irrational logic of our time cries out for fresh expression...
...essence, Kolář glorifies the printed phrase while simultaneously reducing it to mosaics of decorative rubble. A basrelief of a butterfly is emblazoned with syllables from a 17th century Latin text on the natural sciences, together with scraps of the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa. A bust of Queen Nefertiti is studded with bits of picture postcards, advertising folders, magazine illustrations and postage stamps...
Many admirers of Kolář's poetry are still furious with him for having abandoned the pen for the pastepot. But Czechoslovak Art Historian Jiři Padrta suggests that Kolaf's word-cluttered collages have contributed more to a "latent freedom of writing" than his poems ever did. Nothing proved the point so well as the Russian invasion of Aug. 21. All the walls of Prague and all Czechoslovak towns blossomed with writing-defiant slogans, protests and simple anti-Russian graffiti. Then, says Padrta, "the main squares were like one giant Kolář collage...