ART : Brash, Oddball Show Combines Craft, Craftiness : Conceptual exhibit: Craig Cree Stone furnishes attractive objects with comments on the connections between differing kinds of art and ways of life.

Remember the oddball in high school who always seemed to turn the teacher’s questions inside out and make her flustered? The kid who could turn an ordinary homework project into a creative event that nobody could understand? Well, I don’t know for sure what Craig Cree Stone was up to back then, but his current work has all the earmarks of that student.

“Retaining reSEMBLANCE: Artifacts of Exhibition 1979-1989,” at Saddleback College Art Gallery through Jan. 19, is a sampler of Stone’s singular work in various media. Somewhat baffling at first glance (as is the cumbersome exhibition title), these pieces combine fine craftsmanship with musings on the interconnectedness of different kinds of art and different ways of life.

A pair of what appear to be three-legged tables with angular, tilted tops are a case in point. Viewed simply as attractive objects, they’re very nice indeed. One is a ritzy affair, made of intricately carved black-lacquered wood and shoji paper; the other is a more modest, unpainted piece made from bamboo, bamboo bark and paper.

But the titles tell us that these pieces from 1979-80--collaborations with Harvey Stupler, a professor of Asian art history--are actually Japanese lamps (“No Shibui lamp” and “Wabi lamp”). Closer inspection reveals a carved wooden light bulb attached to each one. The titles and the calligraphy worked into these Japanese-style pieces allude to the Chinese painting tradition, the ancestor of Japanese art.

In the traditional manner, Stone and Stupler sign these works jointly with an artistic pen name or “persona”--either Hu Shih-Ch-’uan (“stone river”) or Michi No Kogeni (“the unknown craftsman”).

On the wall label, a quote from “The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting,” a much-revered Chinese text, implies the essential link between the crafting of a natural object, a utilitarian object (a lamp) and a work of contemplative art (a painting).

After digesting all this, you may find that the wooden light bulb makes a strange kind of sense after all. The lamps appear to be useful objects, but in fact they cannot be used; they seem to be pure craft and yet they share aspects of the “high” art tradition of Chinese scholar painters. The more you think about these works, the more they confound preconceptions about the difference between craft and art.

Stone’s other big theme is the treatment of ethnicity in the art world--the way an artist’s name often creates preconceptions about his work. During Stone’s student days at Cal State Long Beach, he made a group of works in various styles and entered each one into a juried exhibition under a different name: Jerome Leroy Washington, Stella Jumping Eagle, Martin Rabinowitz.

After tracking the success or failure of each piece, he realized that--as he says in a statement available in the gallery--the pieces with Asian influences did best when they were signed with an Asian name, the conceptual and “overtly intelligent” pieces were looked upon more favorably when attached to a Jewish or WASP name, and so forth. He concluded that “the people determining my success appeared to be using mass-media stereotypes as a basis for determining authenticity.”

He adds, tellingly, that recently “the director of a major Southern California art museum asked me to evaluate the paintings of an Indian woman as if they were made by Jane Doe. Her assumption was that the name Jane Doe did not imply anything, but it implies a lot. We really ought to get over confusing mainstream with universal. “

Stone’s choice to specialize in crafts in graduate school never precluded his fascination with conceptual issues. In fact, his own Native American-sounding middle name is a vestige of his master’s degree exhibit, for which he created a character called Cree Stone and used craft methods to make functional objects in the style of a well-known “real” artist.

Stone’s six-part piece, “Retaining Resemblance: Rietveld Represented” is another mind-cruncher, based on the style of Gerrit Rietveld, the major architect of the De Stijl movement in Holland during the teens and ‘20s.

If the central image--a triangular form with a bold black grid and slices of bright color--seems reminiscent of Piet Mondrian, that’s because he was the leader of De Stijl, which sought to translate natural forms and colors into a highly refined set of “constant elements”--among them, primary colors and severely right-angled, asymmetric compositions.

The Mondrian-style image repeats in four wall pieces that also have bracketlike components jutting from the wall. But the design becomes progressively paler and lacking in key features in each wall piece until it literally shatters in the final one, painted on a mirror.

At the beginning and end of this series are two snappily angled and curved Moderne-style sculptures that sit on the floor. They look nearly identical, except that the piece at the end has more color and a few more components.

Although the meaning of the piece is awfully obscure--and needlessly so, with all the head-scratching titles of the individual pieces--it seems to be related to the words inscribed on the mirror: “We shatter our traditions reconstructing fragments.”

In other words, it’s only by thoroughly analyzing the art of the past that we can stop worshipping it (the title of the first sculpture in the piece reads, in part, “Putting Rietveld on a Pedestal”) and begin using it fruitfully in our lives. Or something like that.

Stone swings the other way in his pseudo-sociological investigation of the role of the tie in male attire. “Masculine Ties (Male Ritual Object)” has its humorous side, but this kind of thing has been done to death already. The other work in the show, “Before and After (Investment Shield),” looks like a timely and ambitious idea that isn’t fully resolved.

I have to smile as I write this, though. As an art student, Stone once purposely made typically “unresolved” student work, graded it using “the characteristic comments of the professor” and turned it in. As he writes, “These works were student representations of student work which functioned as student works.”

You have to admire the way the guy’s mind works, even when the output is a trifle disappointing.

“Retaining ReSEMBLANCE: Artifacts of Exhibition 1979-1989” continues through Jan. 19 at Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. The gallery is open 12:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 12:30 to 5 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Thursdays and 12:30 to 4 p.m. Fridays. Information: (714) 582-4924 or 582-4747.