Making Strange

Garden Fish. © 2000. Oil on panel. 33" x 27" 

The Russian Formalists of the early 20th century proposed a theory of "making strange." By offering the viewer something that does not readily simulate or evoke or call to mind natural images or other referents, poems (and, by extension, other literature and paintings) seem strange and, at first, meaningless. The theorists (among them, Shklovsky, Jakobson, Eichenbaum, and others) developed the concept of otstranenie ("making strange") in literature, and they asserted that poetry pushed forward unusual imagery and such devices as rhythm, meter, and rhyme—which were not commonly evident in ordinary speech—in order to wrench their subjects from their habituated invisibility or routineness in everyday experience and, by "making strange," bring them to the awareness of the listener or reader.

Every mental association can be untied from its original context and connected to another context--that is, given a new "meaning." Empirical science is premised on the notion that natural objects follow regular "laws" or behaviors, which can be reproduced with a specified degree of exactness and certitude. Words, of course, are far more profligate and randy and move around among many "meanings" with almost no qualms or hesitancy. Words and images, principally, and a few facial and bodily gestures, are mapped onto experience in a way that reflects the "meanings" that others agree upon.

The fashion of things, from clothing to cars to colloquialisms, follows a trajectory from the arrival of the noticeably different form, to the widely accepted and admired use, and thence to the noticeably passé state. The actual form did not change, just our awareness of it, first as new, unusual, and sanctioned. Then its formal aspects—what it looked like or sounded like—became ubiquitous and popularly repeated. But in a few short weeks or months, another style for the same situation arose and displaced the current fashion, which soon slipped into the "old" or "out" look, and once again became easily discernible as style. Movies are very good examples of this phenomenon. It is quite easy to look back at an old movie, say, from the 50s or 70s and immediately recognize the cinematic styles and tropes (i.e., not merely the cars and clothing and hair styles), which in their time were adopted (usually) as a means of camouflaging the artifice of the moviemaking in order to enhance a sense of verisimilitude or realism, which prevailed for a while until the techniques themselves became formulaic to the point of rigidity, at which point they were replaced by newer manners of portrayal.