A retrospective of fifty works created by the Brooklyn-based art collective known as The Bruce High Quality Foundation, which takes its name from a fictional artist named Bruce High Quality who supposedly perished in 9/11, will be presented at the Brooklyn Museum from June 28 through September 22, 2013. The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001-2013 will include a wide range of work by a group whose production has included subversive and often humorous installation art, live performance, film, and social sculpture in the tradition of agit-prop.
The stated mission of The Bruce High Quality Foundation is, "to invest the experience of public space with wonder, to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair, and to impregnate the institutions of art with the joy of man's desiring." The anonymous members of the collective, whose number fluctuates between five and twelve, employ familiar materials and objects in their work, among them cars, refrigerators, and play-doh.
In a recent interview, a member of the collective stated that the Brooklyn exhibition would contain less than 17,000 works of art. To be more precise, the exhibition will include fifty works, among them the collective's interpretation of French artist Théodore Géricault's iconic nineteenth-century painting The Raft of the Medusa. Their version, which will be presented in the form of both a photograph and a painting, depicts a group of people on a raft on the banks of New York's East River, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. More-contemporary works are not immune to their satirical take, as seen in Public Sculpture Tackle (Love), a photograph depicting a member of the collective climbing on LOVE, American artist Robert Indiana's celebrated sculpture.
The Foundation has developed new approaches to the creation and display of art, with the goal of democratizing traditional relationships between artists and the public. The members of the group view September 11, 2001, as a seminal moment in contemporary history; the ensuing wars and economic and cultural shifts have become recurring concerns in their work. Their writings and performance-based works often combine past, present, and future histories, blending fact and fiction to encourage and reframe cultural discourse.
The Foundation's spirit of collaboration and community engagement was also responsible for the creation in 2009 of The Bruce High Quality Foundation University, an unaccredited alternative to traditional MFA programs. Presented with partial support from public arts organization Creative Time, it has offered students free classes for "an education in metaphor manipulation." Lecture topics have included "Occult Shenanigans in 20th/21st-Century Art," "What is a Metaphor," and "The B.H.Q.F.U. Detective Agency." The collective has also produced a film, Isle of the Dead, a send-up of Night of the Living Dead, which chronicles the dead- and zombie-led revival of the art world.
The exhibition has been organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
