Responses * Kafka's Prague

Unable to publish in communist Czechoslovakia, Jiří Kolař saw Responses first appear in 1984 with the exile publishing house Index based in Cologne, Germany. The text discusses his influences and wide variety of collage techniques as well as art and literature in general. He pairs it with "Kafka's Prague," a series of color crumplages of Prague's buildings, streets, squares, and gardens accompanied by short extracts from Franz Kafka's work, which was also banned by the regime, as a sort of homage to the city whose artistic vitality was being snuffed out by communist repression. The result is a fascinating document akin to an artist's book that captures Kolař's creative flux at a particular moment in time. Crumplage is a technique developed by Kolař in which a sheet of paper or reproduction is crumpled at random and then flattened out and pasted onto a backing, creating a deformation of the original image or a new image.