Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A User's Manual

A User's Manual

Kolar, Jiri
Scott, Ryan
Kolar, Jiri

Hardcover

Series: Image to Word, Book 4

European ArtGeneral PoetryIndividual Artists

Publisher Price: $24.00

ISBN10: 8086264548
ISBN13: 9788086264547
Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press
Published: Dec 2 2019
Pages: 142
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.70 Depth: 8.30
Language: English
Written in the 1950s and '60s, the action poems comprising a A User's Manual were published in their complete form in 1969 when they were paired with the 52 collages of Weekly 1967, the first of Kolař's celebrated series in which he commented visually on a major event for each week of the year. Taking the form of directives, largely absurd, the poems mock communist society's officialese while offering readers an opportunity to create their own poetics by performing the given directions. The collages on the facing pages to the poems are composed of layered documents, image cutouts, newspaper clippings, announcements, letter fragments, reports, or decontextualized words, oftentimes forming concrete patterns or the outlines of figures, to create a sort of evidential report on the year. Text and image taken together, the volume displays Kolař's enduring interest in extracting poetry from the mundane to demolish the barrier separating art from reality, or even to elevate reality itself through this dual poetics to the level of art. What art historian Arsen Pohribný wrote about Weekly 1968 equally applies to Weekly 1967: it shocks with its abrupt stylistic twists and is a Babylonian, hybrid parable of multi-reality. The volume also includes the complete Czech text as an appendix.

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