Making It Strange

Many years ago, I visited the studio of an artist I often collaborated with to check on the progress of their new book, a self-published catalogue of recent works. As I walked in, I found my friend in high spirits. “Take a look at this!” they said excitedly, handing me a mock-up of the publication. It was a bright yellow softcover volume, roughly A5 in size.

As I began leafing through it, I noticed that the first dozen or so pages were completely blank. After this puzzling start, images and text did appear, but seemingly without rhyme or reason, as if they had been scrambled at random. The overall effect was visually striking, but it seemed to contradict the publication’s interpretive purpose.

My friend explained that they wanted to challenge readers’ expectations. They were particularly amused by the inclusion of blank pages, which, they joked, was a clever way to make an otherwise slim book - it was under 100 pages - seem more substantial. I also laughed when I learned that the distributor had suggested shrink-wrapping each copy in cellophane. That way, they argued, prospective buyers, drawn in by the eye-catching cover, wouldn’t be able to inspect the contents. Indeed, people often do judge a book by its cover.

The layout of the book exemplifies the avant-garde principle of making it strange. Viktor Shklovsky, a central figure in Russian Formalism and Futurism, was the first to theorise the aesthetic concept of defamiliarisation (ostranenie) in art and literature. The idea is simple: our perception of reality grows dull through over-familiarity. While we may recognise things, we no longer truly see them - we overlook their perceptual richness.¹

Ostranenie has long become the convention of the anti-conventional. Any first-year art student knows that their only rule is not to follow the rules they internalised before enrolling. The widespread acceptance of defamiliarisation doesn’t necessarily diminish its power, but it does make it paradoxically vulnerable to overfamiliarity. Making something strange is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for creating successful avant-garde art, whatever we now mean by that term.

The uncritical use of ostranenie becomes especially questionable when combined with other typical avant-garde devices, such as chance and deskilling.

Chance has always played a role in art, as accidents inevitably punctuate the creative process. Sometimes, these accidents are seen as mistakes and corrected; other times, they’re embraced and incorporated into the final work. What distinguishes the avant-garde is that it deploys chance deliberately, as a method for generating unexpected results that the artist accepts as a fait accompli.

Deskilling is closely tied to the "conceptual turn" in modern art, which involves, among other things, rejecting craftsmanship and the Modernist ideal of being “true to materials.” Conceptualism often reduces art to pure ideation, sidelining the interplay between hand and matter.

Yet deskilling takes many forms. Rosalind Krauss, a leading American art theorist, argues that even in “post-medium” and “post-studio” art, materials and technique still matter.² Concepts, after all, must assume a physical, perceptual form to be experienced and communicated. Artists cannot fully escape the material dimension of their work. Still, some openly reject craftsmanship, at times theatrically, like Martin Kippenberger, who flaunted his technical ineptitude as a statement.

The problem is that defamiliarisation, chance, and deskilling are too often combined haphazardly, as if their mere convergence were enough to produce innovative and valuable work.

During my undergraduate years, I co-managed a contemporary music venue in Rome, where I encountered a wide range of musical styles. Among the most grating was a late offshoot of free jazz known as “Creative Music” - perhaps the least imaginative name ever chosen by an artistic movement. Some of its proponents believed that learning to play an instrument was unnecessary for expressing musical ideas. They saw technical skill as a bourgeois constraint that stifled the free creativity of ordinary people - an attitude reminiscent of Joseph Beuys’ slogan, “everyone is an artist.”

The result was predictable: unlucky audiences had to endure the formless, cacophonous "creativity" of performers who couldn’t even play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in tune. I still recall with dread our nearly empty venue and the pained expressions of the few patrons who felt obliged to support the latest trends in “progressive” music.

What Beuys, the Creative Music crowd, and many others failed to grasp is that being creative is not the same as being an artist or a musician. Ask a business consultant about creativity, and you’ll get a torrent of talk about “disruption,” “challenging the norm,” and “blue-sky thinking.” And when avant-garde business creativity fails, there’s always creative accounting to fall back on.

In truth, what most needs disrupting are not old methods of doing business, but the very foundations of contemporary global capitalism - like the cult of efficiency for its own sake and the pursuit of endless economic growth. Defamiliarisation can indeed contribute to this more radical critique by reinvigorating our sensory experience and confronting us with our ingrained assumptions. As any seasoned lawyer or judge will tell you, our perception is deeply shaped by preconceptions and ideological filters.

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has built his entire body of work on the premise that the power relations that structure our communities are based on biased sensory perception. For him, this makes politics an aesthetic phenomenon.³The term is misleading, though, since in English “aesthetic” is usually associated with taste or beauty, rather than with sense experience as such. This semantic slippage has caused a lot of confusion, even, arguably, for Rancière himself.

Nonetheless, his point stands: in social relations, appearance is reality. What you see is what you get. In this sense, defamiliarisation isn’t just a new lens for viewing society - it’s a means of changing it.

I’m not entirely convinced that Rancière’s argument holds to its fullest extent, but it contains an important truth. Consider the care we now take in using inclusive language to describe groups that have historically been marginalised. Many now-offensive terms were once merely descriptive; even the "n-word" originated as a corrupted form of negro, the Spanish word for “black.” The toxic power of that word - and many others like it - has accumulated over time, shaped by repeated use in discriminatory contexts

We now find these terms offensive because we understand, instinctively, that language and imagery it evokes don’t just reflect social relations—they produce them. To call a Black person a “n****r” today is not merely to use a slur; it’s an attempt to summon and reinstate a world we’ve fought to leave behind.

1. Shklovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique." In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1–14. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.

2. Krauss, Rosalind. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000

3. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004