In 1917 Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian formalist critic, coined the term ostranenie, translated as defamiliarization. A way to look at art beyond its literal form. In his work Art as Technique, Shklovsky argues that art exists to make the familiar strange. To make an object strange is to pause; to pause is to perceive; and to perceive is to begin to understand.
I think it would do us good to see the world this way sometimes, and to dwell in the absurdity of it all. Especially in a world this extraordinary that we still take for granted.
In his words:
And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works,
clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole
complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives
are as if they had never been.” And art exists that one may recover
the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the
stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as
they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art
is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase
the difficulty and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is
a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.
You can read his full essay here.
This page will be an internet version of my notesapp for defamiliarizations I like.
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere.’ I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
—Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I, Lecture 3
“On a cosmic scale, wood is rarer than diamonds”
Cleopatra died in 30 BCE. By then the Great Pyramid had been standing for 2,500 years. Apollo 11 was only 2,000 years away. She lived closer in time to Neil Armstrong than to the masons who built the pyramid she would have called ancient.
Share your favorite ones!
P.S. I’m experimenting with more notes-appy posts. This also means the topics will range pretty widely. And all of them are things I find fun so I hope you do too :)
P.P.S Shklovsky is a mirror image of my friend Eghan. Might he be reborn…?