Bunny Rogers
Mandy's Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria, 2016
Artist
Bunny Rogers
Title
Mandy's Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria
Year of creation
2016
Technique and duration
13:16 min.
Year of acquisition
2018
Columbine Cafeteria commemorates a traumatic event for American millennials: the school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. Two students shot twelve classmates, a teacher and themselves in a meticulously planned attack. With their action, they copied and quoted military commandos and first-person shooter games like Doom. To date, this rampage is the bloodiest act of its kind at a US high school.
Columbine Cafeteria is part of a cycle of works by Bunny Rogers, which also includes an installation realized two years earlier that revolves around another main scene of the shooting and the site of most of the deaths, the library. Columbine Library already referred to the characters Joan of Arc from Clone High and Gaz from Invader Zim, two of the TV series characters with whom Rogers temporarily identified. The artist interweaves these figures, filled with anger and self-hatred, with the Columbine attackers to explore the question of what female violence would look like if it were expressed and not internalized, as is so often the case.
Columbine Cafeteria presents singer and actress Mandy Moore as she appears in the episode Snowflake Day: A Very Special Holiday Special (2003). There, Joan of Arc is initially hostile towards Mandy Moore, demonstrating her deeply internalized misogyny. But on Snowflake Day, they both drink alcohol together (a rare image in animated series) and demonstrate that female friendship is possible.
In the video, Mandy Moore, dressed in a light lilac dress typical of Rogers' color palette, plays three songs by Elliott Smith on a grand piano. Next to Moore is a bottle of wine and a glass, which she fills and drinks between pieces. The setting is the empty cafeteria at Columbine High, the floor covered in snow. Rogers presents the film in a room with a grand piano and a piano bench in front of it, in which there are knitted socks - invisible to visitors. The floor of the exhibition room is also covered with snow slowly falling from snow machines. Flickering tea lights in hollowed-out apples with faces cut into them form the only source of light apart from the projection and are reminiscent of Jack O'Lantern, who was supposed to receive an apple as a executioner's meal, as well as Halloween: the night on which, according to Celtic belief, the souls of the Dead people return to their former home.
Rogers thus blends, on the one hand, the physical and fictional space, and on the other hand, the repetition of traumatic, repressed experiences that resist visualization and verbalization, and her own biographical processing of the events that took place when Rogers herself was nine years old. In her work, she combines these narrative elements with animated series and the music of Elliott Smith, which were formative for her during her own teenage years.
Anna Catharina Gebbers
