Tragedy Strikes, video documentation
Mary Brōgger
June 7, 1991
Creative Access Description
Colour analogue video of a piece of performance art. The video opens with a man with longer curly hair wearing white sneakers, jeans, a leather jacket over a purple t shirt, and a tan coloured newsboy cap standing in a gallery space introducing the performance. He exits the stage and the audience briefly applauds. The lights drop.The camera tracks to the side and upward to where a television playing a a blurry video rests on a ledge above the audience. A person crouches in front of the television adjusting the settings, then recedes into the darkness. The music and sound effects of a campy marital arts movie play and the indiscernible image dances about the screen. The audience giggles nervously as the volume increases before suddenly cutting. The figure on the ledge moves away from the television climbing down into the dark room. A recording of a masculine voice plays, reading aloud William Shakespeare's sonnets Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? and How Do I Love Thee?. After a short pause a similar recording of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself read over a solemn piano scale plays.
Footsteps sound in the dark and a white woman with long hair tied back, wearing a white t shirt, an olive green flat brimmed Stetson hat and matching jodhpur riding pants in the style of a park ranger enters the stage. The lights come up and a car honks loudly outside the room. She introduces herself as an employee of the Field Museum of Natural History and begins an educational presentation on animal life. She activates a slide projector with a hand held remote, which projects a series of images of museum animal dioramas onto a white plinth on the stage. Going through the images one at a time, she describes the birds and other animals pictured through with humorous anecdotes and fun facts, often mapping the characteristics of the animals to the human experience.
Finishing her presentation, the woman steps aside, the lights go down, and a recording of Ray Charles and Betty Carter's Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, a jazzy number with slow piano and swelling strings, plays. The woman moves about the room in the low light, the camera following her past the slide projector before stopping on the wall where an image of a woodchuck standing on its hind legs is projected. The song ends and the camera pans to another projected image of a cormorant as the audience applauds.
Description
Video documentation of Mary Brogger's Tragedy Strikes performance. Shot by Mike MacDonald.Identifier
1991.0607 TRA V001Extent
1 Hi-8 tape, 00:17:29Tape Number
91-012Language
Videographer
Mike MacDonaldArtist
Mary BrōggerPerformer
Mary BrōggerRelated program
Tragedy Strikes (Related)In copyright. For uses outside of Fair Dealing please contact grunt gallery.