Who exactly is Bruce High Quality? Bruce High Quality was a social sculptor who was able to produce only a limited number of works before his untimely death. The foundation exists to create work in his spirit and to disseminate his legacy.
How did you guys meet? We met in art school in New York City.
Let’s talk about your latest production, premiered at Plot 09, Creative Times’s Quadriennial that is taking place at Governors Island, Isle of the Dead. Do you think the art world will end like that? The art world will probably not end in a zombie holocaust, but it did begin that way and probably will again. After painting died, it came back to life in a strange new, oddly more self-conscious form. After the market crashed in 1987 (a couple years later for the art world), it came back to life in a new form. So we never thought of our movie as being predictive in any real sense. It’s much more about exactly where we’re at now. A zombie is just any living being hell-bent on remembering the past, and everyone is talking about the past these days. The good ol’ 60s, the good ol’ 70s. Back when junkies were visible and lofts were available and an MFA didn’t mean so much. But those who can remember the past nostalgically are doomed to repeat it grotesquely. We’re preoccupied with the artifice of history, nightmare or not, but only insomuch as it pertains to the here and now.
Did you have a good time filming? Filming is one of the least fun things we do. It involves waking up far too early, everything going wrong, and the footage not being what we expected. For Isle of the Dead, filming the scene with 300 zombies was stressful but exhilarating. It was such a stupidly ludicrous idea that it felt great to see it finally materialize.
What was your relationship with Governors Island? Can you talk about the project you did in collaboration with Latitudes during “No Soul For Sale”? Latitudes was invited to participate in “No Soul for Sale”, a sort of fair/exhibition for the not-so-commercial aspects of the art world, and they asked us if we could create a scenario for them to work in during the show. We had been spending a lot of time on Governors Island planning and filming Isle of the Dead and we discovered an abandoned Burger King complete with a bowling alley that had been used by the military and coast guard stationed there. Rain comes in through holes in the ceiling. Cobwebs and burger grease cover rusting kitchen equipment. The building is, like the rest of the “non-historic” part of the island, slated for demolition to make way for what will likely be a large public park. The idea of recycling furniture from a commercial megalith, pre-fab furniture born of a ‘60s utopian design approach, for a not-for-profit exhibition, seemed a perfect fit to us.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Rite of Spring (Groundbreaking), 2009courtesy: Courtesy: The Bruce High Quality Foundation and Cueto Project, New York.
Latitudes also invited you to be part of the exhibition “Greenwashing”, which took place at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin last year. Can you talk about Beyond Pastoral (Shroud of Turin) (2008), the project you showed there and your relationship with the environment and its perils? The piece we showed at Sandretto was a sort of relic of an earlier project. A few months before the “Greenwashing” exhibition we were invited to participate in a show at exit art titled “electric lab”. The theme of the show was electricity, and since there is a BP gas station across the street from the space, we replicated it as a 1/5 scale model, powering it with lemons and limes. The lemons and limes were arranged on the floor in the shape of the BP logo, and wired in series to work as battery cells that generated enough energy to power the gas station’s light and sound system (like a giant potato clock). As the lemons and limes began to rot, the station lost its power and the logo its color. Eventually the mould on the fruit became toxic and was removed in a toxic cleanup performance involving hazmat suits. While the piece mocked the company’s attempts at rebranding itself as an ecofriendly corporation, it also poked fun at the idea that alternative energy will somehow save the world. For the “Greenwashing” show in Turin, we exhibited a gauze cloth that had registered the imprint and color of the decayed fruit, playing off the pseudo-religious language of the Green Movement and the miracle we’d need to actually save the planet.
How do you come up with an idea? Do you collaborate on all levels, from creation to production? Our ideas are always in response to context, what we think and how we feel about some situation going on around us or directly effecting the worlds we care about. What does it mean to be an artist now? In New York? Internationally? What does the market have to do with creative action? How do art history and its agents create the present? The future? What does public art mean? What does collaboration mean? Our collaboration is an ongoing conversation. We generate ideas together and we realize them together. It matters what kind of screws go in the wall and what kind of lights go on the ceiling. Metaphors have to resist gravity just like people do.
Some of your projects are very much related to the art world itself: Heaven Forbid, a reaction to Ugo Rondinone’s Hell Yes! sign attached to the New Museum façade; The Gate, Not the Idea of the Thing But the Thing Itself on New York’s Waterways, Fall 2005, in which you followed Robert Smithson’s Floating Island with a tiny boat made out of an orange gate of Christo, and Public Sculpture Tackle, an assault on public sculptures throughout the city of New York. Can you talk about that, also in relation to possible future evolution of your work? The future of The Bruce High Quality Foundation is about expansion. We believe that fiction is a regenerative force that has the potential to transform the art world and we hope to practice fiction at every level of the system. The next wave of projects for us focuses on arts education. Contemporary arts education is a nebulous thing. It’s easy to understand how technique can be taught, but that’s not all that is going on. That other part, the part where the possibilities of expression are driven to a crisis point, is very much how we understand the potential of art itself. So we’re making a metaphor – founding a university, BHQFU, to allow art and education to service each other.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Cats, 2007courtesy: Courtesy: the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Cueto Project, New York.
It seems that your work is extremely performative. How do you relate to white cube space? Do you prefer the public domain or the commercial? There is a tension set up between “public space” and “commercial space” that oversimplifies what is going on. In New York, for instance, there is very little actual public space. Generally, somebody owns it. And if it isn’t a private company, it’s still regulated municipally. There is something exhilarating about doing something without permission, creating an audience out of whoever happens to be there. But moving those projects into exhibitions in “art world” spaces and publications affords us the possibility of intervening in history, complicating the public record, and opening fissures for the future. History requires precedents be set, and we hope our practice will be a platform for future artists to take license from.
Let’s talk about Empire. Can you tell me how you came up with the idea behind the exhibition? How was it articulated throughout the gallery space? Like all our work, Empire was a response to what was going on around us, in this case, the trouble on Wall Street. New York is the Empire State, so we decided to look at the way our city has represented itself as an empire and how that connects to historical cycles. A central resource for us was the Thomas Cole painting cycle, “The Course of Empire”, so we divided the show into five rooms, but didn’t follow his narrative program. His paintings show empire as a steady progression from a utopian pastoral state through the height of empire to war and desolation.
We wanted to portray those aspects of empire in an non-mutually exclusive way. In a sense, everything is always wonderful and screwed up at the same time. For one room we recreated the Thomas Cole series, but invited artist friends to collaborate on the paintings, adding and editing material as they saw fit. Another room contained Pizzatopia, an 11-foot diameter model of Manhattan covered in cheese. It’s utopian, dystopic and consumable all at the same time. In another room we showed Hooverville, a photograph of Depression era hobos warming themselves over a barrel fire in the middle of a giant scale model of New York City (we shot it on location at the Queens Museum’s Panorama). The photograph was flanked by an aging army of miniature terracotta ATMs.
Do you have any confirmed upcoming projects? Yes. We’re opening a free school, BHQFU, this September 11th. There will be classes and talks and critiques and performances. The idea is that the school will create itself over time, develop its own curriculum as it goes. As an aspect of BHQFU, we’re doing a lot of public educational projects this fall. We’re developing presentations and videos about the relationship between the art market and arts education, the metaphor of seduction in patronage, and the misunderstood legacy of irony in art history. We’ll be showing these on September 10th at Macy’s Department Store, on September 16th at an exhibition in the Cooper Union School of Art, on October 2nd at Prelude 09, October 3rd at PS1, and then we’ll be doing a solo show at Susan Inglett, opening December 4th. In the Spring, we’re planning to take BHQFU on a cross-country tour, assuming we can raise some money.
