Art as Technique

an essay, a translation, and a personal manifesto of sorts

“If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.”
— Leo Tolstoy

“If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness – thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous “I”.”
— Joseph Brodsky.

“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”
― Joseph Campbell

In 1917, Viktor Shklovsky published an essay “Art as Technique”, or “Art as Device”, or “Art as Method” in other translations. In that essay, he analysed the role art plays in our perception of the world and how it can affect it. For me, the main idea was this: when objects, events, ideas become familiar to us, we stop paying proper attention to them, stop seeing their true essence, stop appreciating them, start taking them as granted. The general law of perception is if something becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Compare riding a bicycle, typing on a keyboard, or speaking a new language for the first time versus doing it after a few years of practice. I took Tolstoy’s quote at the beginning from a fragment of his diary written in 1897 (it’s in Shklovsky’s essay, too), and it perfectly sums up this idea:

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