Making Strange
Making Strange, also known as de-familiarisation was a part of Russian Futurism, a short-lived art movement that captured the imagination of a generation of Russian artists during the first 20 years of the 20th century.
This was a movement steeped in imagination with a desire to use art to create a better world. The Winter 2023 Edition of Source magazine is devoted to the role of imagination in photography. The editorial states: ‘if you cannot imagine a different world you cannot begin to make it’. Alejandro Leon Cannock makes an eloquent case for this in the lead article ‘How to Imaging a Better World with Photography’.
Major events in the early 20th century saw the world order turned upside down. The magnitude of the upheavals irrevocably shaped Western art and culture. World War I was primarily a war between Western nations and millions of their colonial subjects who also fought and perished. Other paradigm shifts occurred due to the Russian Revolution, the rise in fascism, and the recognition of women’s rights to equality. In science, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity led to a fundamental change in our understanding of the Universe. The world order was broken and a new one was being forged.
In art and culture, there was a move away from Romantic ideals and beliefs towards new forms of artistic expression. Anti-sense, irrational, reverential art movements came about including Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism most of which foreshadowed modern arts such as abstract and conceptual arts.
Futurism in Russia captured the imaginations of leading artists across the spectrum. Viktor Shklovsky was a leading figure. He developed the concept of Making Strange, expressed in terms of de-familiarisation:
The end of art is to give a sensation of the object as seen, not recognised. The technique of art is to make things ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.
Russian Futurism is not easily defined. It was ideological and an intentionally flexible umbrella that accommodated diverse artists and practices. Futurist artists believed that Romantic ideas of pure vision and Karl Marx’s idea of false consciousness [about the ways in which we see and represent the world] could also help to change it and in this art had a role to play. These artists shared a passion for exploring new modes of expression in poetry, visual art, music, and performance and importantly they wanted their art to help create a better society. Their imagination was a potent tool.
A working definition
In 2022, I gave a talk to the Ealing Group of London Independent Photography. The aim was to describe the socio-political context that gave rise to this art movement, explore the ideology and look at some works from the period and be inspired to make our own. The definition used was:
Making strange is the artistic technique of presenting common things, in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar.
We looked at works by leading Russian Futurist including Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova and Aleksander Rodchenko. Rodchenko experimented extensively with photography and sought to establish a programme of specific photographic laws which could release the spectator from his or her preconceptions. He was particularly weary of the limits of pictorialism.
Making the familiar strange
Making Strange was about breaking conventions and established rules, and looking for different ways of thinking and representation. Ways that would prolong interest, delay recognition, and have layers of meanings. It involved experimentation and non-objective representation of the real world. You can also look at Brecht’s alienation effect or the juxtapositions found in the Fluxus movement. All these methods were innovative and included the following:
Photomontage – free associations and strange juxtapositions
Ambiguity - images which would delay recognition and conjure several meanings
Shock power – unusual juxtapositions
Distortion – of perspectives and use of unfamiliar angles
Extreme close-ups – creating unfamiliar and uncomfortable views
Unusual shadows – to project moods and associations
Aspect ratios, negative and positive spaces – to depart from pictorialist aesthetics
Multiple exposures and ‘intentional camera movement’ methods – even in paintings
Disrupted images – to disorient and shock
Points of view – up, down, inside out, outside in
Other methods that followed in the wake of Futurist art are burning, scratching, tearing, nailing items and decaying materials.
Black Square by Kazimir Malevich
Black Square by Kazimir Malevich
Black Square is a 1915 oil on linen canvas painting Kazimir Malevich. He described this as his breakthrough work and it was the first time anyone had made a painting that was not of something. His intention was to completely abandon depicting reality and instead invent a new world of shapes and forms. In his 1927 book The Non-Objective World, Malevich wrote: ‘In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.’
The Cyclist by Natalia Goncharova.
The Cyclist by Natalia Goncharova.
Cyclist is often regarded as one of the archetypal works of Futurist painting, both in Natalia Goncharova’s oeuvre as a whole and in the Russian art of the early 1910s in general. It embodies such typical features of Futurism as constant repetition, dislocation of the contours of the figure, which seems to be recorded in temporal and spatial sequence.
Shukhov Tower by Aleksander Rodchenko
Shukhov Tower by Aleksander Rodchenko
The Shukhov Transmission Tower was a radio tower in Russia that Aleksandr Rodchenko photographed in 1919. This photo was taken during the period of Constructivism that Rodchenko helped to establish. Constructivism was also a futuristic movement to perceive art as more than just a painting, sculpture, or photo but as an extension of reality.
My experiments
Expressionist art can provide interesting methods for photographic exploration of basic human characteristics such as joy, fear, dreams, otherworldly and anxiety. I like to create abstract images where for me the process of creation is as exciting as the outcome. A question that I often get asked is ‘What is that?’ In response I often ask back ‘what does it mean to you?’ and then a conversation starts. This may involve associations, emotions and feelings, nostalgia, fear and worry. For me as an artist, it is truly rewarding to be let into viewers' minds.
Some of my attempts at making familiar unfamiliar are shown in the eight images in the gallery.
Relevance now
Making Strange was driven by imagination. It was a group of artists imagining a better world and using their art in different ways to help create it. They broke with conventions and used subversive methods to jolt spectators to wake up to new ways of seeing. There are parallels with our current world order, with the one that gave rise to Futurist art at the beginning of the 20th century. We have war and devastation across the Globe, climate change, mass migration and displacements of communities, loss of faith in political and economic structures and loss of truth which is fundamental to trust between people and communities. On the scientific front, we have genetics and Artificial Intelligence posing deeply ethical and existential dilemmas.
Against this backdrop, photographic de-familiarisation has enormous potential to create works that offer visions of a better future by keeping viewers engaged against a background of mundane obfuscating noise. It is worth looking at work by Vivian Maier, Francesca Woodman, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Roger Ballen for inspiration.
Legacy
By the end of 1930’s Futurism had fizzled out but it left a lasting impact on a new generation of European and American photographers; Andre Kertez, Cartier-Bresson, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and Franz Roh to name a few. They continued to experiment with new perspectives, angles, lighting and shadows to show their own unique insights, and through de-familiarisation methods.
Making Strange possessed an ideology that implied that social contradictions could be made accessible to the eye through visual surprise. This was flawed and eventually Making Strange was assimilated into mainstream European photography giving rise to a new type of pictorialism.
Detail from a Blue Rider exhibition painting; Tate Modern
Tate Modern’s current exhibition, Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider explores the work of a circle of friends known as The Blue Rider who in the early 20th century came together with a vision to transform modern art. The desire to use art to change the world lives on and one can see Futurist influences in this excellent exhibition. It is well worth a visit.