Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Speaking of "making strange..."

Hey, Sam--

P.B. Shelly suggests the challenge
in making strange familiar &
familiar strange.


Where does Shelly say that?  Do you know Victor Shlovsky's "Art as Technique"?  In it, he says:

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. [This key statement has been translated different ways; Robert Scholes, for instance, renders it as: In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.

(The note is from the editor of the website I stole this from; early in this excerpt, Shlovsky's quoting Tolstoy)

Or:   ARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTART

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