After nearly fifty blog posts, I should probably confess something: most of the time, when I open my word processor, I stare at the blinking cursor with absolutely no clue what to write. It blinks once, twice, a little like a dare. But I don’t worry much: the carte blanche Archivorum gives us every three weeks to write on this platform seems to spare me from any writer’s block, or worse, performance anxiety. Maybe that’s why I’ve always treated this blog less like a stage and more like a notebook, a place for half-formed reflections and sudden detours. I rarely know where my thoughts are heading us.
Yet, always, an idea emerges, striking like a lightning or the first spark born from a quick flick of the hand lighting a match. I draw from the week’s readings, from casual conversations with peers, or from what I’ve stumbled upon the Internet (my favorite idea-generator) to give life to these texts. That’s more or less how it went today. Lacking inspiration, I thought of a conversation I had a few days ago with my dear high school friend Nakisha. We were at the Concordia University library when she told me about something she had just encountered in her film studies class: the thought of Viktor Shklovsky and his theory of estrangement.
She turned to me and said something like: “You’re in art history, so you must know him, right? We had a class on this guy.” I froze. “Wait, who? Estrangement?” Clearly, I had never heard of Viktor (and you?).
I’ve only taken a little time to tell you much about myself here, but for those who know me, even if only from an hour’s conversation, you’d know that I’m a lover of the strange. I love things that derail the eye, disturb routine, make you stumble for a second. So you can imagine: a theory linking art and the strange did not slip past me. As we say back home, it did not fall on deaf ears. So let us use this post as an exercise: unpacking this strange theory of the strange.
Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “estrangement,” or ostranenie in Russian, is a key idea in the literary theory of Russian formalism. He introduced it in 1917, in his essay Art as Technique. For him, art is not about reproducing reality as we know it, but about making the familiar strange. Showing objects, gestures, and everyday ideas in unusual, even complicated, ways, in order to “de-automatize” our perception: this is the process that makes art, art. It’s like opening the curtains of a room we thought we knew by heart, only to see light slip across the walls in an entirely new way. Shklovsky invites us to step out of “autopilot” perception. He’s not only speaking of literature: he’s speaking of awakening, of a soft jolt that makes what seemed fixed vibrate again, what habit had left dormant./
Shklovsky explains that ordinary language functions like a well-oiled machine: everything runs smoothly, straight ahead, but nothing resonates. Faced with this ordered world, art offers detours. It slows perception, makes it difficult, disturbs the comfort of the already-known, and forces us to breathe in the air of the new.
There’s something generous about ostranenie. The poet who describes a tree as a giant hand, the writer who lets us see the city through the eyes of an animal : they’re all playing this game of displacement. The artwork hands us a distorting mirror: we laugh, we question, and suddenly routine fades away. And this principle traveled: from novels to theater, cinema to painting, each medium reinvented it. Dadaists, surrealists, cubists : all understood that reality needs to be shaken in order to be seen anew. Brecht, in theater, developed Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), closely tied to ostranenie: the audience is no longer lulled into illusion but abruptly shaken awake, invited to think and to feel differently.
Because I encountered this artwork this week while reading about Surrealist works, I feel that Marcel Duchamp’s To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918) beautifully resonates with the idea of renewing the gaze by forcing viewers to abandon habitual ways of looking. Duchamp requires (forces?) them to peer through glass, with one eye, up close, and for an unusually long time. This direct challenge to passive viewing mirrors Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement, disrupting automatic perception and transforming the act of seeing into an active, reflective experience. Duchamp’s work makes the act of looking itself strange and deliberate, reminding us that art can awaken us from routine and open us to perceiving the familiar in radically new ways.
Now I may ask, what is estrange in your daily life? Or, better, how do you make estrange? Perhaps it starts with noticing the patterns we take for granted, the gestures, phrases, and routines that slip by unnoticed. Estrangement is not about rejecting the familiar but about shifting perspective enough to see it differently. It could be the pause you take when you realize a familiar street looks different at night, or the moment you reconsider a routine conversation and hear the words as if for the first time.
In the context of art, this act of defamiliarization becomes both a tool and a challenge. Nil Yalter’s work demonstrates this clearly: fragments, layered objects, and displaced narratives force the viewer to confront what might otherwise remain invisible (I think Temporary Dwellings is a beautiful example here). Estrangement asks for active attention, critical reflection and a questioning gaze. It is a subtle resistance against automatic perception, a method of thinking and seeing that refuses passivity. By practicing it, even in small moments, we train ourselves to question what we accept as normal, to examine what escapes notice, and to acknowledge the multiplicity hidden in the ordinary.