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Beauty in the banal

Revealing the miraculousness of the 'unnoticed world'
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
August 13th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Kolařová uses many small, simple elements to create large effects.
Běla Kolářová


at Museum Kampa Ends Aug. 24. U Sovových mlýnů 2, Prague 1-Kampa Island. Open daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Czech female artists working in the 1960s through the ’80s were generally overlooked by critics and their male colleagues. Even today, only a handful of women, such as Adriena Šimotová and Alena Kučerová, have achieved the recognition that their male peers enjoy.
One of the most overlooked Czech artists of either gender is Běla Kolářová (born in 1923), the wife of the Czech visual poet-artist Jiří Kolář (1914–2002). A retrospective at Museum Kampa showing more than 80 of Kolářová’s photographs, drawings, collages and assemblages should help to rectify the standing of this extraordinary artist.
While her husband was renowned as a visual poet, a disassembler of words and texts, Kolářová is a discoverer and re-assembler of small objects and colorful ornaments, reveling in the artifacts of daily life. From the beginning of her career, she showed a methodical interest in revealing or realizing the beauty of ordinary — even boring — objects, things that are overlooked yet irreplaceable in our daily lives.
In the anteroom to the main section of this show are two noteworthy works from the 1980s: Swatch of Nooses (1983) is an assemblage of small pieces of colored rope coupled with L-shaped carpenter nails, while Swivel and Resistors (1983) uses the parts named in the title to create a red-and-silver labyrinth. Also in this space are photos of assorted hand tools, arranged as assemblages, from a series titled “Alphabet of Objects” (1964).
In the main room is Kolářová’s largest work in the show, A Large Fastener (Scattered) (1971). Resembling a graphic print, it is actually a large assemblage of black fasteners of various sizes, loosely arranged in the shape of a fastener.
Nearby, there are more beguiling works made from fasteners, including variations on spirals and swirls from the 1982 series “A Biography of Snap Fasteners.” Individual pieces have subtitles such as “Mandatory Celebration” and “Fabled Mt. Olympus” — both of those in the shape of huge cat’s eyes decorated in jewels — and “Blue, White, Red,” which has tiny specks of far more colors than its title implies, and is the most delicate in its ornamentation.
Beside these are eight mesmerizing photograms/light drawings from the early years of Kolářová’s career (1962–63), when she was most influenced by avant-garde photographers such as Man Ray, Jaroslav Rössler and Lázlo Moholy-Nagy. In this period, she was struck by the sentence, “The whole world has been photographed!” which she came across in a photo magazine.
This declaration caused her to pay more attention to the world unnoticed by popular photographers. In an essay she wrote in 1968, she recalled her epiphany: “In what way are we to capture such small objects, all those byproducts of nature and of civilization? They are too small: too everyday and even too ugly, and they do not seem to suit our brilliant photography of today, achieved with the help of perfect machines.”
Kolářová devised a way to extract the unique beauty of her found objects by making two types of artificial negatives. In the first — which she called vegétages, or photo-collages — the subject is laid on celluloid and then placed under the lens of an enlarger, and finally projected onto bromide paper. The second type — which she called traces — is finished by imprinting the subject into a layer of paraffin, which is spread onto celluloid.
There are more of these “photographs without a camera” in the smaller second section of the exhibition, located in the museum’s main building. This section contains her most colorful works, such as Parisian Heaven (1991), an assemblage of colorful spools of thread with strands winding over digital color prints of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and works using makeup, lipstick and fingernails, such as Seekers of Lice (1976).
Here, too, are works that are the starkest in their beauty, such as her series of photos of tangled hair clippings and hairpins. Other pieces in this section include experimental photographs, photograms and rollages from the 1960s, and her series of assemblages of razor blades (1960s–90s).
Overall, the standouts in the show are the large assemblages made of paper clips, such as If We Could Talk, The Clip Clipped and Solution for Clips (all from 1969), as well as works made from safety pins, washers, hooks, rings and fasteners.
Also notable are Kolářová’s hypnotic, seemingly kinetic drawings from the series “Radiogram of Circles” (1962–63), which she made by rotating paper in a circle and thus creating finely shaded lines or concentric circles, like vortexes that seem to have traces of rhythm or a rotating movement of their own.
Kolářová devoted her life as an artist to drawing attention to the beauty of the ordinary, producing work that has been sorely neglected. Yet as this retrospective shows, there’s a symmetry in her career, built on quotidian objects overlooked much in the same way that what she made of them has been. Until now.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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