Bruce High Quality Foundation
Encyclopedia
The Bruce High Quality Foundation is an arts collective in Brooklyn
, New York City
, the United States
, which was "created to foster an alternative to everything." The collective is made up of five to eight rotating and anonymous members, most or all of whom are Cooper Union
graduates. The group have attracted attention with the subversive, humorous and erudite style of their work and operate an unaccredited art school, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University.
. The group is named after a fictional artist, "Bruce High Quality", who supposedly perished in the 9/11 attack.
In 2005, the Whitney Museum collaborated with Minetta Brook, Robert Smithson
's estate, and James Cohan Gallery
to sponsor the construction of Robert Smithson's "Floating Island", a floating island of parkland tugged around New York Harbor
, inspired by a 1970 drawing by Robert Smithson
, entitled "Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island". The island, complete with living trees, was pulled by a tugboat
. The Bruce High Quality Foundation responded to the event with their own performance, titled "The Gate: Not the Idea of the Thing but the Thing Itself", in which members of the collective pursued the Smithson island in a small skiff
carrying a model of one of the orange gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude
that had been displayed in Central Park
earlier that year.
"Public Sculpture Tackle", an ongoing work begun in 2007 and documented on video, features one of the members of the collective, wearing "quasi-football gear", climbing, hurling himself against or hanging from various public sculptures in Manhattan. In the fall of 2007, when Ugo Rondinone
displayed a rainbow-coloured sign saying "Hell Yes" on the New Museum, the Bruce High Quality Foundation suspended a similar sign saying "Heaven Forbid" from the building opposite.
The collective's first show in a commercial New York gallery was "The Retrospective" in 2008, employing "an implicitly satiric, reactive style". The collective has produced a film, Isle of the Dead, which was shown in 2009 at the "Plot/09 – This World & Nearer Ones" exhibition organized by Creative Time
on Governors Island
. A send-up of Night of the Living Dead
, the film chronicles the death and zombie
-led revival of the art world.
The group's December 2009 show in Miami was curated by Vito Schnabel
, son of the artist Julian Schnabel
, and attended by New York's rich and famous, guests including the shipping heir Stavros Niarchos III, newsprint billionaire Peter Brant, actor Stephen Dorff
and John McEnroe
. The Bruce High Quality Foundation will be among the artists represented at the 2010 Whitney Biennial
.
' 1965 performance, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare", with the dead bull in the title representing economic recession. Although accompanied by humorous and irreverent slides, the lecture had a serious intent, examining the current relationship between contemporary art, the art market and art schools, and ended with the question: "How can we imagine a sustainable alternative to professionalized art education?"
In the fall of 2009, the group presented its own answer, by founding an unaccredited art school, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, where "students are teachers are administrators are staff." The school is located in downtown Manhattan, in premises made available by an unnamed benefactor. Presented with partial support by public arts organization Creative Time
, it has offered students free classes for "an education in metaphor manipulation", the main focus of the curriculum being on art history and studio critiques. Lecture topics have included "Occult Shenanigans in 20th/21st-Century Art", "What’s a Metaphor?", "The B.H.Q.F.U. Detective Agency" and "Edifying".
, writing in the New York Times in September 2009, said that the group "has been best known for a sharp, well-aimed and unusually entertaining form of institutional critique." Julia Chaplin, also writing in the New York Times, said in December 2009 that the group was known for its "subversive performance art, humorous videos and conceptual sculptures all infused with Ph.D. quantities of art history references" and had "become the darlings of the art world".
Bruce High Quality Foundation was ranked 99 in ArtReview's guide to the 100 most powerful figures in contemporary art: Power 100, 2010.
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, which was "created to foster an alternative to everything." The collective is made up of five to eight rotating and anonymous members, most or all of whom are Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
graduates. The group have attracted attention with the subversive, humorous and erudite style of their work and operate an unaccredited art school, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University.
History and work
The collective was formed in 2004. Its members remain anonymous, in protest against the "star-making machinery of the art market", but it is known that they are a group of mostly men and some women, and that some of them met and became friends while studying art at Cooper UnionCooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
. The group is named after a fictional artist, "Bruce High Quality", who supposedly perished in the 9/11 attack.
In 2005, the Whitney Museum collaborated with Minetta Brook, Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
's estate, and James Cohan Gallery
James Cohan Gallery
The James Cohan Gallery is one of the prominent contemporary art galleries based in New York. Since 2008, it has also had premises in Shanghai.- History :...
to sponsor the construction of Robert Smithson's "Floating Island", a floating island of parkland tugged around New York Harbor
New York Harbor
New York Harbor refers to the waterways of the estuary near the mouth of the Hudson River that empty into New York Bay. It is one of the largest natural harbors in the world. Although the U.S. Board of Geographic Names does not use the term, New York Harbor has important historical, governmental,...
, inspired by a 1970 drawing by Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
, entitled "Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island". The island, complete with living trees, was pulled by a tugboat
Tugboat
A tugboat is a boat that maneuvers vessels by pushing or towing them. Tugs move vessels that either should not move themselves, such as ships in a crowded harbor or a narrow canal,or those that cannot move by themselves, such as barges, disabled ships, or oil platforms. Tugboats are powerful for...
. The Bruce High Quality Foundation responded to the event with their own performance, titled "The Gate: Not the Idea of the Thing but the Thing Itself", in which members of the collective pursued the Smithson island in a small skiff
Skiff
The term skiff is used for a number of essentially unrelated styles of small boat. The word is related to ship and has a complicated etymology: "skiff" comes from the Middle English skif, which derives from the Old French esquif, which in turn derives from the Old Italian schifo, which is itself of...
carrying a model of one of the orange gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a married couple who created environmental works of art...
that had been displayed in Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
earlier that year.
"Public Sculpture Tackle", an ongoing work begun in 2007 and documented on video, features one of the members of the collective, wearing "quasi-football gear", climbing, hurling himself against or hanging from various public sculptures in Manhattan. In the fall of 2007, when Ugo Rondinone
Ugo Rondinone
Ugo Rondinone New-York based, mixed-media artist whose works explore themes of fantasy and desire. Many of his pieces coax the viewer into a meditative state like the blurred, brightly-colored, concentric rings of his target-shaped paintings; or his strictly black and white landscapes of gnarled...
displayed a rainbow-coloured sign saying "Hell Yes" on the New Museum, the Bruce High Quality Foundation suspended a similar sign saying "Heaven Forbid" from the building opposite.
The collective's first show in a commercial New York gallery was "The Retrospective" in 2008, employing "an implicitly satiric, reactive style". The collective has produced a film, Isle of the Dead, which was shown in 2009 at the "Plot/09 – This World & Nearer Ones" exhibition organized by Creative Time
Creative Time
Creative Time is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization. It was founded in 1973 to support the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged works in the public realm, especially in vacant spaces of historical and architectural interest...
on Governors Island
Governors Island
Governors Island is a island in Upper New York Bay, approximately one-half mile from the southern tip of Manhattan Island and separated from Brooklyn by Buttermilk Channel. It is legally part of the borough of Manhattan in New York City...
. A send-up of Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent black-and-white zombie film and cult film directed by George A. Romero, starring Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea and Karl Hardman. It premiered on October 1, 1968, and was completed on a USD$114,000 budget. After decades of cinematic re-releases, it...
, the film chronicles the death and zombie
Zombie
Zombie is a term used to denote an animated corpse brought back to life by mystical means such as witchcraft. The term is often figuratively applied to describe a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli...
-led revival of the art world.
The group's December 2009 show in Miami was curated by Vito Schnabel
Vito Schnabel
Vito Schnabel , the son of Julian Schnabel and his first wife, Jacqueline, is an art dealer based in New York City.He represents Theo A. Rosenblum, René Ricard, Vahkn Arslanian, Terence Koh, Dustin Yellin and Ron Gorchov and has shown his artists at Nicholas Robinson Gallery and in Richard Avedon's...
, son of the artist Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates....
, and attended by New York's rich and famous, guests including the shipping heir Stavros Niarchos III, newsprint billionaire Peter Brant, actor Stephen Dorff
Stephen Dorff
Stephen Dorff is an American actor, best known for portraying Stuart Sutcliffe in Backbeat, Johnny Marco in Somewhere, and for his roles in Blade and Cecil B. DeMented.-Early life:...
and John McEnroe
John McEnroe
John Patrick McEnroe, Jr. is a former world no. 1 professional tennis player from the United States. During his career, he won seven Grand Slam singles titles , nine Grand Slam men's doubles titles, and one Grand Slam mixed doubles title...
. The Bruce High Quality Foundation will be among the artists represented at the 2010 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...
.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation University
In July 2009, four members of the group gave a lecture-performance at the Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York, entitled "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Bull". The title mimicked that of Joseph BeuysJoseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
' 1965 performance, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare", with the dead bull in the title representing economic recession. Although accompanied by humorous and irreverent slides, the lecture had a serious intent, examining the current relationship between contemporary art, the art market and art schools, and ended with the question: "How can we imagine a sustainable alternative to professionalized art education?"
In the fall of 2009, the group presented its own answer, by founding an unaccredited art school, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, where "students are teachers are administrators are staff." The school is located in downtown Manhattan, in premises made available by an unnamed benefactor. Presented with partial support by public arts organization Creative Time
Creative Time
Creative Time is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization. It was founded in 1973 to support the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged works in the public realm, especially in vacant spaces of historical and architectural interest...
, it has offered students free classes for "an education in metaphor manipulation", the main focus of the curriculum being on art history and studio critiques. Lecture topics have included "Occult Shenanigans in 20th/21st-Century Art", "What’s a Metaphor?", "The B.H.Q.F.U. Detective Agency" and "Edifying".
Reception
Art critic Roberta SmithRoberta Smith
Roberta Smith is an art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art.Born in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Smith studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her career in the arts started in 1968 while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in...
, writing in the New York Times in September 2009, said that the group "has been best known for a sharp, well-aimed and unusually entertaining form of institutional critique." Julia Chaplin, also writing in the New York Times, said in December 2009 that the group was known for its "subversive performance art, humorous videos and conceptual sculptures all infused with Ph.D. quantities of art history references" and had "become the darlings of the art world".
Bruce High Quality Foundation was ranked 99 in ArtReview's guide to the 100 most powerful figures in contemporary art: Power 100, 2010.
External links
- The Bruce High Quality Foundation website
- The Bruce High Quality Foundation University website
- BHQFU – BHQF video on the Foundation and its University
- The Bruce High Quality Foundation's Photostream, flickr.com
- The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Isle of the Dead, Creative TimeCreative TimeCreative Time is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization. It was founded in 1973 to support the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged works in the public realm, especially in vacant spaces of historical and architectural interest...
interview