Dress Your House, Or, What's in a T-Shirt?

So enough theory, what about praxis?

I had this old Flaming Lips concert t-shirt lurking in one of my drawers for a few years.  Due to the passage of time and the end of the "baby doll" t-shirt trend, it wasn't getting any wear.  But I love the graphic punch and bizarre story it tells; I could never part with it.  Since it had ceased to function as a garment for humans, I thought that it might make a suitable garment for a boring old blue pillow that used to hang out in my living room.  And back in January it became one of my first weird projects of the year.

T-shirt front and back:

After cutting away excess fabric from the t-shirt (which wasn't much, it's a tiny garment), I pinned it right-sides together, and stitched along three of the outer edges, leaving a gap at the bottom.

Then I turned my new pillow cover right-side out, stuffed in the old pillow, and sewed up the bottom by hand.  Voilà...

This makes me so happy. :)

And it earned the Wayne Coyne seal of approval via twitter.

Defamiliarize It

It was Ezra Pound who famously said "Make it new."  Although even I can't seem to figure out where he said it (and I'm supposed to know about these things). As a founder of modernism, the newness inherent in the creative process would be a motivating factor in Pound's writerly aesthetic. 

It was James Brown who said "Make it funky."  Perhaps this is a less fully-formed ethos than Pound's, but on the other hand, maybe it isn't.

Finally, it is I who say, "Make it weird."  Lately I've been very interested in the potential for art to defamiliarize the world; I'm certainly not the first person to find this fascinating, and I take my definition of "defamiliarization" from Viktor Shklovsky, who explains:

"Habituation devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. . . . 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."  From Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays

But it is shocking just how little effort it takes, what a minute adjustment is required to move from blind day-to-day routine to a realization that there is a super amazing world all around us all the time.  It takes only the slight sideways shift of the eye.  So I have been everywhere trying to "make it weird" in the way I look at my surroundings, in the way I use my language, in the way I approach music and the arts.

Here's a defamiliarized tomato:  

In Medias Weird

After affectionately christening 2011 "The New Weird," a not so clever pun on the New Year, I am glad to report that the first (nearly) six months have been quite weird indeed.  Crafting, arting, musicing, writing have all been included in the "make it" part of the formulation to which this blog is dedicated.  Meanwhile wigs, wings, and a new open-minded spirit have contributed an ongoing string of oddities to the "weird."

This blog was intended to chronicle my year as I "make it weird," both in terms of things created and oddness indulged.  And while the first half of The New Weird may have already passed through my temporal fingers, I can begin with some recap posts, and continue on as the weird fancy take me.  In the meantime, check out this link to my Flickr page, where you can preview some very weird collages I've been working on, and stay tuned for future weirdness in all it's forms.

Weirdly yours,
Jess

PS Here are some disco balls that you might enjoy...