Defamiliarization

 

When my son Mickey was little, we went to the ICA for one of the children's events one Saturday. After our morning of making art inspired by the exhibit, we were walking back along Sansom Street to our parking spot.

 

wires.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/addieplum/17492229/in/set-526949/

 

As we walked, we remarked on the overhead wire tangle spanning and lining the narrow street, marveling that we had never before noticed its striking visual pattern. Mickey then explained the phenomenon to us, "It's because we're looking at the wires with museum eyes." Museum eyes. I have used this concept in my thinking and my teaching ever since. For me it represents what is special about art, why we read literature: our experience with art changes our relationship to the world around us. Aristotle can keep his catharsis as far as I'm concerned; my goal is "museum eyes."

 

Years later, I discovered that Victor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist critic, talked about "museum eyes" as well. He said, "Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. ... 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" (quoted in Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, by Bert O. States, p. 21).