“And so, in order to return the sensation of life, to feel things, to make the stone stony, there exists what we call art. Art’s purpose is to give us the sensation of a thing as seeing rather than as recognizing; art’s device is a device for the ‘estrangement’ of things, a device of complicated form that increases the difficulty and duration of perception, because in art the perceptual process is self-purposive and should be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the making of a thing, but the thing made in art is not important.”
I’ve always loved the first half of this quote (taken from a reviewer’s translation on Amazon) by Viktor Shklovsky. I don’t love the second half, where he says that perception is the end in and of itself of art, if I’m understanding him corrrectly.
But I do want to make art that makes the stone stony again.