SFAQ_issue_sixteen

BUNNY ROGERS
By JACKIE IM & AARON HARBOUR Co-directors of Et al.
In a series of photos titled Pones, the artist is posed on all fours, like a pony, in various
outdoor scenarios: on a large rock, in the forest, next to a truck, in a tree. Anyone relatively
immersed in contemporary visual culture, specifically online culture, recognizes
all the tropes of a meme. Which is to say, whether or not these images do or don’t
represent something a mass of people are doing and sharing, it certainly could be. The
visual cues here are repetition and ease of realization. A missing link might be imagined
between performance art, with its body-as-object and repetition, and youth culture’s
fondness for quick, humorous, sharable actions. Bunny Roger’s work in both the visual
arts and, as a poet, flirts with the hazy area between historically recognized art praxis
and the common.
From her Cunny Poem blog:
Mar 10, 2014
Are u pr6ud
Men who can see right through me
Tell that I’m just scared fuck you
Give me one example of a man using
his sensitivity for Good
These words sound as if at the crossroads of riot girl singer and high school journal
keeper. Her poems are not innovative or novel formally, and neither is her manner of
performance; she recites the words in a deep, dry, not quite monotone voice. What
is surprising and a bit off-putting is her willingness to share and to overshare. There is
temptation to read performance art between the lines of any poetry reading. While an
argument can be made in the general case, to single out Roger’s reading as somehow
more so would be a disservice to the artist’s intentions to approach the various strains
of her practice with a fealty to (rather than an ironic remove from) form.
The Internet is an expediter of experience. It is an apparatus of mass melancholy—it
magnifies feelings of connectedness and loneliness, that feeling of being alone in a
crowd. It is misleading to describe online existence as somehow more false in its endless
profile creation and identity maintenance. We are always a version of ourselves: to
our family, to our friends, to a bus driver, on Facebook. Online this process is amplified.
Online you can be both an introvert and extrovert simultaneously. You can create a
visualization of your interior dialogue and hide it in plain sight. The difference between
finding and making is negligible. There is so much of Rogers online because she is
online all the time.
Timescales vary wildly across Roger’s practice, with time-intensive object-making and
exhibition preparation, and the immediacy of her social media presence. Presence is
key—Roger’s practice keeps the artist dangerously present at all times. Self Portrait
(mourning mop) (2013) is a mop leaning in a corner. On its handle, a large, pale-pink
bow, as might be seen worn by Rogers in a video or performance. The mop head is
dyed, fading from a deep purple or indigo to a pink slightly brighter than the bow. Has
this object been used to clean up some magical fluid, or has it received a reprieve from
its function? The conflation of domesticity and the feminine comes to mind, but the
work also feels less general, as if she has placed herself in a corner. This self-portrait is
on display, it has been made special, or maybe it has been cast off, left behind.
When Hal Foster and Drake announce, “The Return of the Real” and “The Real is on
the Rise,” respectively, they are only half right. The R in IRL is in the foreground, but
has had the rug dragged out from underneath it, hovering, groundless. Our digital lives
become ever more real. That we build a public archive of our thoughts and experience
is both kinds of thrilling—a wonder and a nightmare all at once.
[this page] Pones, ongoing performance
series. Photograph by Filip Olszewski.
Courtesy of the artist.