![\"SarahWalko_Drennen1\"](\"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/SarahWalko_Drennen1.png\")
<\/a>Image courtesy of Samson Projects<\/p><\/div>\n
Out of Tune<\/strong><\/p>\n Beckett\u2019s quote on failure, professional basketball and The Bard of Avon all mingle together inside the studio of visual artist Craig Drennen. This unusual framework and language shaped his recent exhibition \u2018Poet and Awful\u2019 at Sams\u00f8n gallery in Boston, Massachusetts (October 31st\u2013December 24th, 2014). The work consists of paintings, sculptures and performances and is based on the list of characters in the Shakespearean play Timon of Athens. The exhibition combined the characters in the play with the vernacular language and value system of basketball.<\/p>\n The play Timon of Athens is centered around the character Timon, a wealthy man in a thriving affluent city who spends his entire fortune frivolously on friends who later turn against him until he becomes a misanthrope. If you have not heard of Timon of Athens, despite what you may have considered a good working knowledge of Shakespeare, you are not alone. Some consider the play his weakest moment while others consider it his most difficult play. It was never produced during his lifetime and many scholars find aspects of the play unfinished and the many adaptations that have been performed have not proven to be among his popular works. The first character in the play is Poet. Poet says hello to everybody he meets and is embodied in Drennen\u2019s paintings and sculptures. The second character in the exhibition is a mean-spirited philosopher who humiliates people in public with his superior wit. This character is embodied in a performance where Drennen (or a stand in performer) plays a Courtney Love song called \u2018Awful\u2019 over and over again using different instruments while wearing a large paper mache mask sculpture of a likeness of Drennen\u2019s own head blown up to four times its size.<\/p>\n Drennen first came across the play after he read a passing reference to it in 2003 and then began to notice it in unexpected places. For instance, in Nabokov\u2019s Pale Fire, titled after a term lifted from a speech in Timon of Athens. Drennen currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia in close vicinity to the Philips Arena where daily he sees the \u2018Hello, welcome to Atlanta, home of the Atlanta Hawks\u2019, sign. He made this literary structure a decided springboard for the characters in this series of works and influenced by this daily encounter with the arena, he made all of the Poet pieces say \u2018hello\u2019 in various degrees of loudness or friendliness or colorfulness of a sporting event. This is how these two languages were married to birth this character within the exhibition.<\/p>\n When we are young, we are often introduced to sports and told it is our participation rather than our performance that is the most important thing. But, we get older and those who excel and continue with it learn that practice, skill and performance are absolutely necessary. Drennen brings up that in both sports and art, there\u2019s repetition, \u2018And usually that repetition happens in isolation before you\u2019re ready to go public with whatever you\u2019re doing\u2019.[1] He explained a big influence on his work method was the great humanist thinker-philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam who believed that the true sign of intelligence wasn\u2019t necessarily logic or memorizing data; it was being able to say something as many different ways as possible and in doing so to have the mental agility to intuitively have empathy for the situation and who your recipient is. This is sort of the opposite of the famous phrase that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It is stating that intelligence is doing the same thing over and over again and inventing different results working within context and timing. And it is not dissimilar to what actors do when, for example, performing the same play night after night for new audiences.<\/p>\n Drennen has stated he takes great solace in absurd things and this is quite clear. Viewing his work invoked a memory in me of when I first read Franz Kafka\u2019s The Trial; Kafka\u2019s novel that was published posthumously. In the story the character K. is arrested but not detained. He is told, \u2018You are under arrest, certainly, but that need not hinder you from going about your business. Nor will you be prevented from leading your ordinary life.\u2019 The sentence made me laugh out loud and I remember thinking, I am going to like this book. I also have vivid memories of my introduction to Shakespeare. I was in a drab unromantic back room of a library in my high school. Each play we read aloud as a group and a different student was assigned each role. There were daily occurrences of long pauses that ended with my teacher letting out loud exasperated sighs and calling out character names\u2014\u2019Mercutio? Mercutio? Who is Mercutio????\u2019\u2014because the student playing that particular role had fallen sound asleep on an open book. And we were in the good mainstream Shakespearian stuff, nowhere near Timon of Athens. Work that plays with varying levels of absurdity or plays on the parody of logic to enter into more serious discussion is work that I\u2019m naturally drawn to. The word itself derives from the Latin absurdum that means \u2018out of tune\u2019, which seems fitting for Drennen\u2019s \u2018awful\u2019 performances. But the genuine similarities between sports and Shakespeare outweigh the differences and the absurdity: the \u2018prize\u2019 competed for, planning and chance, desire, fear, social structure and limitation, recognition, mastery, confronting death, wanting a place in history, and of course love in all of its comic and tragic forms. These more serious topics rise in the Poet and Awful exhibition, once you get past Poet\u2019s \u2018hello!\u2019<\/p>\n