![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/BHQF-Hi-res.jpg\")
Bruce High Quality Foundation, Self Portrait (The Bruces), 2001-2012. Shadow, box, mixed media. 41.91 x 33.02 x 8.89 cm. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts. Photo: Oto Gillen<\/p>\n Bruce High Quality Foundation, Self Portrait (The Bruces), 2001-2012. Shadow, box, mixed media. 41.91 x 33.02 x 8.89 cm. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts. Photo: Oto Gillen<\/p>\n
Art, activism, and education the Bruce High Quality Foundation Way.\u00a0 New Yorkers have a thing about conceptual art collectives. Gorilla Girls, COLAB, Art Club 2000 and\u00a0The Bernadette Corporation paved the way, but the Bruce High Quality Foundation are the most\u00a0contemporary manifestation of this group mentality. When they originally emerged a decade ago there was an element of petulant teenage humour in their approach to art making. This was partly due to the subversive political angle of their works and perhaps exacerbated by their relationship with dealer Vito Schnabel (Julian\u2019s son), who dragged the rich and famous to their openings. A decade on, however, BHQF are proving themselves to have substance behind the stunts.<\/p>\n The pseudonymous collective bubbled up in 2004, allegedly around a group of Brooklyn-based\u00a0Cooper Union graduates who joined together to make a giant plaster head and audition for gallerist\u00a0Jeffrey Deitch\u2019s \u201cArtstar\u201d reality TV show. From the start their work was an obvious critique of the mechanisms and structures of the contemporary art world.\u00a0<\/p>\n The \u201cart by committee\u201d they have created since has included films, collages, paintings, performance\u00a0lecture, installations, blowup sculptures, alternative bienniales and an art school. \u201cIn most ways the Foundation is still forming itself. It has been important for us to never pin it down, to never say explicitly that it is one thing. We rely on the mystery to help guide us. Anonymity is a tool that allows\u00a0us to change,\u201d they explain by email from New York (a face-to-face was obviously out of the question). \u201cWe don\u2019t really think of ourselves as a collective. We think of it as a Foundation, both in its institutional framework, and in its capacity to ground a practice, to provide a base for the building of the new.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n BHQF base their practice around a fictional artist, one \u201cBruce High Quality\u201d, setting themselves up as a foundation to honour the history of the artist who died during 9 \/ 11. \u201cWe needed a character,\u00a0a namesake. We needed a myth. Actually, we only needed the idea of the myth. There are no stories about Bruce High Quality. There is nothing known about him beyond the fact that he died. Everything we do is to preserve his legacy, but the legacy is based on nothing. Bruce is a ruse that provides us a framework for thinking through what we do.\u201d The group state 9 \/ 11 as the date when they began to create work \u2013 and there is obviously a political significance to its date as well as their use of twin towers imagery in their work. \u201cIt\u2019s a historical marker, the moment America lost its innocence, it\u2019s our generation\u2019s assassination of JFK or MLK or RFK,\u201d they suggest. \u201cIn truth we don\u2019t know what it means. It\u2019s just the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n Other more obvious political works have included an installation based on a BP gas station, where \u00a0an illuminated scale model was powered by limes and lemons which disintegrated over the course\u00a0of the exhibition and were eventually sanitised in a \u201ctoxic clean-up performance.\u201d They have reworked the blow-up rat sculpture which used to represent scabs (workers who break a picket line) at union protests into talking sculptures. \u201cThe Bruce High Quality Foundation is a social sculpture \u2013 it\u2019s literally a work of art constructed from the relationships between people. In that sense, politics are inevitable,\u201d they enigmatically observe. Before politics in the wider sense, however, BHQF\u2019s work is more about the politics of the art world. Much of their work draws on, plays with, prods, reimagines and recreates art historical references. At times literally \u2013 performance reconstructions of Robert Smithson\u2019s \u201cFloating Island\u201d drawing and G\u00e9ricault\u2019s \u201cThe Raft of the Medusa\u201d, for example. At other times this is physical, such as the dumb but enchanting \u201cPublic Sculpture Tackle\u201d (2007) where a BHQF member threw himself on to and climbed over Manhattan\u2019s public sculptures. Meanwhile their 2009 performance lecture, which parodied Joseph Beuys\u2019 \u201cHow to\u00a0Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare\u201d, was where they raised the question of imagining an alternative art\u00a0education system.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Around that time, Bruce High Quality Foundation first set up their own free university. It ended\u00a0up disbanding after two years but returned in a more established, larger and much more resonant\u00a0form on September 11 2012. This was during the background of the protest and votes of no confidence at Cooper Union, where its traditionally free education is being replaced with tuition fees. The university classes take place on the third floor of 34 Avenue A on the edge of the Lower East Side. The single-room space at the top of steep-as-hell stairs is filled with makeshift chairs and stools, made by hand from found materials. Under the painted metal Victorian ceiling, the school has brought together a fascinating roster of classes including \u201cYou Watching Me Googling You\u201d, about surveillance and documentation, \u201cMath Wipe\u201d, on the beauty of science, and a visiting lecture series which has included people like iconic Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello. The programme, organised under the auspices of BHQFU Dean Haley Mellin, is conceived collaboratively at the start of each term to keep things experimental and relevant.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBHQFU was really born from wanting to extend the collaborative experiment of BHQF to more\u00a0people. We had a lot of friends looking at MfA programmes because they felt the need for a\u00a0critical community to really grow their practices. We felt that there would be a way to do that without\u00a0putting artists in debt and without reinforcing a \u2018professionalised\u2019 approach to what an artist\u2019s life\u00a0is.\u201d The school is open to anyone \u2013 though some of the courses need to be applied for \u2013 and 300 people or so come to the space each week for events and courses. The interesting \u2013 and you could say admirable \u2013 thing about the university is how the group is putting their money and time where their mouth is. Rather than just posing as rebels, they are creating a viable alternative to the system they critique using their own income.<\/p>\n Artist and writer Brad Troemel organised and oversaw BHQFU course \u201cChat Room\u201d, which brought influential art pioneers like Seth Price, John Kelsey and Boris Groys into the classroom. His aim in running a course at BHQFU was to foster conversation in a more productive way than on a Facebook comments board. \u201cArt historian David Joselit had this really great quote \u2013 \u2018use\u00a0it, don\u2019t lose it\u2019 \u2013 referring to the flow of capital in America. Rather than opt out of it, this flow of energy, make that into something better,\u201d Troemel explains. \u201cI applied the idea of \u2018using it not\u00a0losing it\u2019 to the Bruce High Quality Foundation itself. They are using this money to create something\u00a0entirely new in New York \u2013 an opportunity for people that could potentially serve to counteract\u00a0the very system of debt that got all of us there in the first place. \u201cI see this is a really interesting,\u00a0enlightening and positive approach of how to figure out problems. As somebody\u00a0 who \u2013 at Pratt Institute and elsewhere \u2013 works in these art departments, I think it would be easier to start from scratch than reform a pre-existing upper art institution. New institutions may be one of the only ways to answer questions of debt and the over-influence of gallerists and museum trustees.\u201d<\/p>\n In recent years BHQF have broken beyond out of hipster ghettos and shown at respected international galleries such as Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin and Galerie Bruno Bischofberger\u00a0in Zurich, while a retrospective of their work takes place at the Brooklyn Museum this summer. It\u2019s\u00a0easy to look at their visual work and berate it for its sense of lazy rebellion: their CFA show was full\u00a0of classic downtown hipster humour, for instance a Warhol- like series of prints of the twin towers, a\u00a0salon hang of found images covered with Tipp-Ex-white comedic naive faces, entitled \u201cSelf Portraits\u201d. Yet behind the pop humour is something more serious, stirring at the intersection of\u00a0politics, performance and philosophy. The \u201cHigh\u201d in High Quality signals high intentions: their myths and stunts that increasingly betray a serious desire for social, and perhaps even economic, rearrangement.<\/p>\n The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001\u20132013 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bruce High Quality Foundation, Self Portrait (The Bruces), 2001-2012. Shadow, box, mixed media. 41.91 x 33.02 x 8.89 cm. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts. Photo: Oto Gillen Art, activism, and education the Bruce High Quality Foundation Way.\u00a0Text by Francesca Gavin New Yorkers have a thing about conceptual art collectives. Gorilla Girls, COLAB, Art Club 2000 and\u00a0The…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[906,907,288],"class_list":["post-10359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brooklyn-museum","tag-bruce-high-quality-foundation","tag-francesca-gavin"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
Text by Francesca Gavin<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/board.jpg\")
BHQFU curriculum planning notes. Courtesy of Bruce High Quality Foundation<\/p>\n
A retrospective<\/a><\/strong> at the Brooklyn Museum<\/strong><\/a>
Until 22 September, 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n