Craig Drennen, installation view.
Craig Drennen’s exhibition Mistresses, Apemantus, and Flattering Lords at Gallery Stokes is a tour de farce of conceptual brilliance and painterly bravura (its lack of actual “painterliness,” notwithstanding). The brilliance lies in the exhibition’s aesthetic translation of Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare’s most difficult and obscure play (though a very loose “translation,” consisting of painted assholes and flowers).
Craig Drennen, Third Mistress, oil on canvas + black line on wall, 2008
The play documents the initially optimistic nature of Timon, a young wealthy philanthropist who soon discovers the artificial and nonreciprocal dispositions of his friends. Timon then spurns his friends with rocks and water and takes to a cave in the wilderness, where he devises a plan to spread venereal disease to his urban foes, thereby assuming a special role in the verdant history of literary misanthropes. Vacillating into and out of favor with Timon are Flavius, Alciabadis, and Apemantus, a sort of ghost of Christmas future who not only foreshadows Tymon’s transformation into a man-hater, but also functions as an unconscious id communing with the audience on the vulgarities of real life.
Craig Drennen, Chorus, clocks and vinyl letters, 2009.
Taking the narrative as a cue, Drennen introduces his adaptation with a row of clocks in the front room of the gallery. They dubiously document the time in major cities and time zones, including Stratford-Upon-Avon. The clock presentation imbues the exhibition with a creepy into-the-looking-glass quality, reflecting the double nature that Shakespeare’s words would have yielded on stage. Further simulating plot and character development, Drennen circumscribes the gallery with directional black dashes that terminate in quaint hyper-real paintings of human sphincters and flowers. Two painterly signs support the wry ironic presentation. They read: “I’M WITH STUPID” and “I’M A FUCKING GENIUS.”
The ironic tone of the show reemphasizes Drennen’s interest in various converging strains of contemporary discourse on irony, linking Shakespeare with authors like Vladimir Nabokov and Charles Dickens—both of whom use varied and bracketed forms of representation to address social issues as well as the essential issues of representational media. Adding to the complexity, Drennen explains that the impetus to use Timon of Athens—and the film Supergirl, which inspired his last series of work—derives from both narratives’ obscure quality. Drennen claims that the “empty bandwidth” of both narratives’ cultural presence allows him to presumably make a neutral, contemporary statement using a baggage-laden history within a value-saturated world.
Untitled (For Apemantus), acrylic on paper + black line on wall, 2009
Like most art of its type, this conceptual approach attempts to recreate a reality that captures the isolated affectation and ecstasy of a personal world, without rehashing or making explicit the values and messages of the world it represents or critiques: Irony in a nutshell. However tautological, irony can be a difficult subject to address. Drennen’s refreshing irreverence for materials is somewhat at odds with his maybe overly forthcoming conceptual layout. Brilliant as the show’s premise may be, its reliance on explanation makes the show predictably contemporary, though a minor complaint given the show’s timely and well executed virtues.
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(Photos courtesy Gallery Stokes)
Mistresses, Apemantus, and Flattering Lords will remain on view at Gallery Stokes through May 16.
