Ostranenie as avant-garde theory

In his essay "Art as Technique" (1917), Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky argues that our day-to-day perceptions become algebrized and automatized, whereby things are replaced by symbols (Shklovsky 11). Shklovsky contends that art combats this tedium. Art's purpose, according to Shklovsky 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'. . . (Shklovsky 12). Contrary to those who believe art should clarify the unknown by means of the known, Shklovsky proposes that art should so the reverse—make the familiar unfamiliar (Shklovsky 6). Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, or making strange disrupts the mundane and everyday, allowing that which has become familiar or automatic to be seen anew. (More information on Shklovsky's theories of defamiliarization available here)

Disruption, discontinuity, juxtaposition— these notions of artistic and literary deformation underlie much of the avant-garde project. In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger writes that for the avant-garde, shocking the recipient becomes the dominant principle of artistic intent. . . . [D]efamiliarization thereby does in fact become the dominant artistic technique (Bürger 18).

Mashups as avant-garde practice

Digital media has simplified the ability for artists to sample, détourne, and defamiliarize others' work. Mashups are one way in which familiar songs and videos can be sampled and blended, creating new works that reverberate back into the old content/contexts. Often containing the word "versus" in their titles, the mashups posit a battle among their original materials. The more disparate the songs and videos that are combined, the more "shocking" their union. Justin Timberlake versus Siouxsie Sue. Nirvana versus Rick Astley.

Despite the wholly new work that is (usually) created with a mashup, major record labels have largely frowned on the practice, frequently challenging mashup artists, as in the well-publicized case of EMI's response to DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album. (Available for torrenting here: http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html). More often, mashups simply disappear from YouTube without much fanfare or outburst.

Of course, the music industry's protection of its creative material is part of a business practice of defending copyright -- ostensibly for intellectual and creative integrity but more obviously for profit. But mashups, if they are indeed part of an avant-garde legacy, their attacks are aimed not merely at the economic "bottom line," but meant foster an insurrection at the level of representation and Art itself. As Greil Marcus notes in Lipstick Traces, his book that traces punk rock's roots to the political avant-garde, defamiliarization was a politics of subversive quotation, of cutting the vocal cords of every empowered speaker, social symbols yanked through the looking glass, misappropriated words and pictures diverted into familiar scripts and blowing them up (Marcus 179).