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.
