{"id":3759,"date":"2012-02-13T17:39:22","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T22:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=3759"},"modified":"2012-02-13T22:12:07","modified_gmt":"2012-02-14T03:12:07","slug":"on-style-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=3759","title":{"rendered":"On Style 7"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Surfing<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

Surfing Squirrel<\/em> by Maria K. Lemming<\/a> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I Know What I Like — Or Do I? Part Three:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I may not always know why I like a given work of art, but I can usually tell when a given piece makes me simultaneously smile and think.<\/p>\n

So, I’m on more sure footing on this outing. In the two previous posts, reflecting on work by Jennifer Stewart<\/a> and Tina Oloyede<\/a>, I was travelling in dim light without much of a trustworthy, critical GPS. I knew I didn’t much like the road fractal art is currently on: creating beautiful objects for their own sakes and systematizing such empty eyecandy as the apotheosis of fractal art through both Fractalbook<\/a> high-schoolish clique commentary and the mostly prettified gunk<\/a> factory-made<\/a> by "winners"<\/a> of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The fractal art I find exciting is often consciously processed in the direction of representation and can, broadly speaking, be "read" as a visual text — usually through the avenues of perceiving a narrative structure or through aesthetics via close scrutiny of how the piece utilizes design elements.<\/p>\n

But there’s another puzzle piece crucial to today’s post, and it takes the form of a simple question. Why is fractal art ordinarily so humorless? Seriously. I mean, if it’s not bludgeoning viewers<\/a> with strum und drang<\/em>, it’s drably overreaching for profundity by being saddled with befogging titles<\/a> that sound heavy but are merely an unfathomable or obscure lexicon. This predilection for sobriety and graveness also extends to the work of many new wave 3D fractal artists as well. Why do so many 3D affictionados seem content to staidly rebuild the halls<\/a> of Montezuma or plumb the mecha-guts<\/a> of steampunk machinery? Buoy up, boys.<\/p>\n

Writer Anne Lamott<\/a> once noted that "laughter is carbonated holiness." I think it’s time to pop the top<\/a> and get real gone — somewhere past giggly but just outside spiritual.<\/p>\n

~\/~<\/p>\n

I’ve been a smiling fan of Maria K. Lemming<\/a>‘s fractal art since I first chanced upon it on Usenet in the late 1990s. No one else currently working in the discipline possesses a comparable and keen sense of recherché<\/em> whimsicality. If, as Lenny Bruce<\/a> once claimed, that laughter is "the only honest art form," then Lemming might be our purest genius.<\/p>\n

Take Surfing Squirrel<\/em> above (please!). The addition of a googly eye to the rodent form should come off like digital quackery; our own eyes should roll in response. Instead, the laugh lines around my eyes crater<\/a> even deeper. The resulting transformation is beyond silly. It’s become somehow archetypal with the staying power and viral qualities of an Internet meme<\/p>\n