From Pen to Pastepot

When Czechoslovakia eased travel restrictions about five years ago, Western intellectuals ventured there with the wary air of men exploring some dark continent. They were surprised to dis cover that many Czechs were familiar with the plays of Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee, and had kept abreast of other Western cultural developments. If they dropped into Prague's Cafe Slavia around 4 p.m. any afternoon, they could have encountered several of the reasons why. A group of artists and writers who meet there have for years been assiduously importing and translating Western books, plays and art publications. One of their leaders is slender, Jiri Kolar, now 54, essayist, play wright and, by general acknowledgment, Czechoslovakia's leading poet.

This week West Germans will have an opportunity to examine yet another side of Kolar'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 Kolar 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, Kolar, 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."

In essence, Kolar 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 Kolar's poetry are still furious with him for having abandoned the pen for the pastepot. But Czechoslovak Art Historian Jiri 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 Kolar collage."

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