Charley Radtke’s “Contained” exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum
Descriptors like “exquisite” and “impeccable” are the critical equivalent of holiday China; they should be saved for special occasions, so they stay shiny and effective. Cedarburg-based furniture maker Charley Radtke’s first-ever retrospective, “Contained,” at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) through Aug. 25, rises to that level of special distinction, so it’s time to start shining up the flatware and dusting off the superlatives.
For the sake of full-disclosure and, even better, parallel structure, I have to admit that I eat my annual Easter ham off a Charles Radtke dinner table at my in-laws’ house. I’ve watched both my daughters wipe pimentos on its underside, and I have probably dripped gewürztraminer on its flawlessly planed and shellacked surface more than once. I would be more hesitant about mentioning such a personal connection if the work wasn’t so nakedly exquisite.
It doesn’t take an art critic’s powers of interpretation to recognize his masterful woodworking or precision joinery. Radtke uses no superfluous structural hardware and the deftly articulated integration and interlocking of elements in each work is spectacular. The craftsmanship on its own is worth the visit to the Bradley Family Gallery at MAM, but his furniture offers more than technical curiosities. Radtke considers himself fundamentally a cabinet maker, and his magnificent “cabinets” are conceived as meaningful containers, hence the show’s title. They are containers of personal meaning for Radtke and eventually become reliquaries for those who finally get to live with them.
The elaborately subdivided and compartmentalized interiors of his dazzling chests belie their relatively clean exteriors. Opening a door to one of the cabinets is like walking into an opulently updated farmhouse expecting an open concept condo. Little rooms and crannies honeycomb the interior of each relatively modest superstructure. Hidden doors and compartments, all supremely crafted and considered, form the frameworks of what are essentially kustkammers only waiting for the personal kunst.
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Esthetically, his designs remind me of the architecture of Michael Graves, with clean-line modernist roots conversing surprisingly with eclectic embellishments that willfully upend any sort of van der Rohe-ian orthodoxy. But it’s fairly clear Radtke’s works are uninterested in a postmodern critique. His is visual, not theoretical eclecticism. And perhaps practical, too. Radtke employs as much locally harvested wood as possible, supplementing it with other species in an elegant patchwork manner. The grain of the wood often functions formally, emphasizing symmetry and, at times, borders on actual imagery.
As acknowledged, Radtke produces objects other than cabinets, though these are the soul of his work. Diving into the minutiae of describing specific pieces in “Contained” seems like a rabbit-hole that would do less for the spirit of the show than treating it as a single organism. It is, after all, a retrospective of an artist with singular vision. In this case to simply encourage one to visit the show, which is packed with work, and to find those particulars on their own, just as they might one of his spider-legged curiosity boxes, is enough.
What makes something fine art or craft has provoked many heated debates in classrooms and coffee shops over the years. Suffice it to say that the nature of those disagreements is less a result of anyone’s failure to identify an elusive universal truth than because of the fluid nature of the terms themselves. Still, it’s worth noting, because it unpacks an issue I confronted while viewing “Contained.”
Radtke’s work is the best-of-the-best within a culture that excels at fine craftsmanship and woodworking, but when such skills are so abundant, they often feel less exotic than they would in, say, Malibu, Calif. This undeniable truth makes me more comfortable calling him a visual artist who happens to have impeccable craftmanship rather than a furniture-maker or master craftsman. Because it’s true, and because it will make Easter more fun knowing I’m eating a spiral ham off a sculpture rather than an exquisitely make dinner table.
