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: