Bunny Rogers
Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles Through January 6, 2019
It could almost be any cafeteria in the world: molded plastic chairs ring a big round table, railings for the trays hug one corner, and linoleum tiles turn the floors into an institutional gray-green. But then there’s the snow. White paper flakes drift all over furnishings and floor from perforated drums above each doorway, and meanwhile, in a video projected in the rightmost room (Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria, 2016), a CGI girl dressed in jagged rags plunks out solo piano renditions of hits by suicided singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. It’s snowing in her world, too – computerized drifts hugging the piano and soaking up the wine she sloshes from a green bottle. Such maudlin surrealism lets us know this is more than an ordinary set; this is Columbine, site of America’s most notorious school shooting. Rogers’ show, “Inattention,” situates a handful of videos and sculptures in a loose, bloodless mockup of the auditorium, cafeteria, and hallway familiar from CCTV footage of the 1999 massacre. This is by turns macabre and cheeky – until you realize that Rogers is pointing to a time, not a place. It’s more than a sales pitch to note that the artist was born in 1990; the Columbine works deal less with a real event than with its mnemonic fallout. It’s not 9/11 but Columbine – a tragedy both ethically self-immolating and politically unmotivated – that defines the end of the American century. Clasped to one of the cafeteria rails is an oversized, medieval-looking padlock, a reminder that this scene functions to serve memory, not food. The rooms are dark, lit mostly by clusters of LED tea lights in little jack-o’-lantern cups and by the light reflecting back from the projections. In the leftmost of the three galleries, another animation features Rogers’ avatar singing a whispery, wordless version of “Memories” from the musical Cats. A flute player stands in the offing and Mandy accompanies on the piano, but while the Elliott Smith tunes ring in the cafeteria like no one is listening, this rehearsal for a recital is quaveringly aware of an audience – us – pushing back the room’s heavy curtain to enter or to leave. To either side of the “auditorium” entrance stands a wooden ladder, painted one thin line at a time with peach and lavender gel pens of the type popular in the 1990s. It’s not just the ladders: every work here meditates on the trauma of America’s periodic murder-suicides with the same teenage solipsism that causes them.