Ponderous ‘Postopia’ Could Use Playful Touch

At the recently reopened Craft and Folk Art Museum, a group exhibition titled “Cranbrook: Postopia” provides a worthwhile, if uneven, introduction to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a small yet seminal graduate institution in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., whose artists approach traditional practices of fine art, craft and design with equal amounts of reverence and radical innovation. Cranbrook alumni and former artists-in-residence include Charles Eames, Florence Knoll, Carl Milles, Harry Bertoia, Maija Grotell and many others who have significantly influenced 20th century art and design.

The exhibition is divided in two parts; one gallery highlights new work in various media by each of Cranbrook’s 12 current artists-in-residence (who also serve as department heads), while a separate reading room provides a wealth of useful background information on Cranbrook Academy and the history of 20th century art and design.

Officially co-founded in 1932 by Detroit philanthropist and newspaper baron George Gough Booth and Finnish architect-designer Eliel Saarinen, Cranbrook was conceived as an artists’ community centered around atelier-style workshops. Following the ideas of William Morris, who pioneered the Arts & Crafts movement of the mid- to late 19th century, Booth and Saarinen fought against the glut of mass-produced industrial designs and instead championed a return to handcraftsmanship, which bespoke the visual eloquence of natural forms.

“Postopia” demonstrates that Cranbrook’s Arts & Crafts legacy continues to influence its artists, even (and perhaps especially) in those instances in which individual stylistic expression is downplayed or eliminated entirely. The exhibition begins with a symbolic nod toward Cranbrook’s history and its present direction. A portion of the exquisite brass gate Gary Griffin designed for the academy’s new entrance and outer wall has been installed in the gallery (the entire length is shown in a scale model). The effect is breathtaking: From a slight distance, the gate’s black, striated metalwork looks like a delicate spider web writ large.

Griffin’s gate suggests the need for balancing of microcosmic and macrocosmic views, finite details and infinite possibilities. Also constructed according to principles of balance is Peter Lynch’s scale model for a proposed monument to Idlewild, once the largest African American summer resort and jazz venue in Michigan. Built atop a large square box filled with sand, Lynch’s design employs concentric rings to invoke the idea of past and present overlapping in cultural memory.

Many Cranbrook artists use computer-aided technologies as an ironic means of bridging the gap between traditional handcrafts and contemporary digital manipulation. Steve Murakishi’s ink jet prints present a fictionalized rock documentary about “The VelVettes,” a garage band started by four teenage boys in 1969 and re-created 30 years later by the original members’ teenage daughters. Murakishi’s elusive photo-narrative suggestively imbricates real and fictional histories, but it never adds up to anything beyond its disparate parts.

Similarly, although Carl Toth’s enlarged xerographic collage makes persuasive links between family photography and folk picture making, the image itself is visually uninteresting (not to mention inscrutable). Peter Stathis’ video showcases his design for a mutable chaise lounge in which expressive flourishes are eliminated in favor of bland ergonomic utility.

Cranbrook artists persistently question contemporary art’s place within a field of other discourses, including science, technology, music and folk culture. Yet problems arise when artists rush to provide answers to such questions, as if works of art were merely mathematical equations for viewers to “solve.” For example, Tony Hepburn uses a potter’s wheel to create handmade ceramic versions of a Japanese typographer’s computer-generated, three-dimensional alphabet. These somewhat convoluted conceptual goals contrast sharply with the suggestive sensuality of his simple, stacked piles of clay vessels.

Cranbrook director Gerhardt Knodel drills tiny holes into folded sheets of polycarbonate plastic, peppering its surface with images of devils playing musical instruments. Heather McGill transforms commonplace designs into unfamiliar, Pop-industrial hybrids that employ paint techniques similar to those used in customizing hot rods. McGill’s convex wall sculpture looks like a giant slice of orange Swiss cheese, but its whimsy feels forced and it never successfully leaps from the wall to the imagination.

P. Scott Makela & Laurie Haycock Makela’s video projection and wall-length photo-collage challenge viewers to locate themselves within a disorienting glut of filmic and graphic images. Beverly Fishman’s high-gloss wall painting and Jane Lackey’s concave textiles also engage in the search for identity, this time amid a sea of genetically coded cellular information.

Works like these feel ponderous, and are a bit too obsessed with locating their own place in the world--something that may have more to do with Cranbrook’s geographic isolation than with institutionally bred solipsism. Like the show’s portentous, tongue-twisting title, which means, roughly, “where Cranbrook stands now” (but instead brings crunchy breakfast cereals to mind), Cranbrook’s artists miss countless opportunities to integrate playful open-endedness into their conceptually minded work. On the whole, they are in too much of a hurry to provide answers to their own questions, which ultimately leaves viewers out in the cold.

* “Cranbrook: Postopia,” City of Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 937-4230, through April 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.