The Bruce High Quality Foundation
In 2009, a group of millennial artists adopting the fictitious handle The Bruce High Quality Foundation premiered a film about art world zombies called Isle of the Dead. The film presented an alternate reality in which the whole of the art world was struck down by a mysterious disaster—a global pandemic, perhaps. In the film, scores of young players are resurrected as troupes of walking dead malcontents who intone an ur-American ode—Bryan Adams’ 1984 MTV-era anthem “Summer of ’69”—for an age in which art was less commercial and more culturally important. Eleven years after debuting their film at Creative Time’s exhibition Plot/09–This World & Nearer Ones, The Bruce High Quality Foundation’s film still invites multiple readings. Among them, Ezra Pound's brass tacks definition of art: news that stays news.
— CVF, USFCAM
The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Isle of the Dead, 2009. Video. Courtesy of The Bruce High Quality Foundation. (Still image - video no longer available after exhibition dates)
“We shot a series of these pictures in 2007, notably not as part of any general campaign for a rent strike in the city, but to express anarchistic joy in the futility of a utopian call to action. That sense of absurdism was first re-contextualized four years later by the Occupy Movement, which brought socialist politics into the open in the U.S. in a way we'd never experienced. Our picture lost some of its absurdity then, if it still didn't seem at all remotely actionable. Now, thirteen years since we shot this picture, in the midst of a global pandemic, the image has completely reversed. The words describe our objective reality, while the gathered crowd describes an impossible collective desire.”
— The Bruce High Quality Foundation
About The Bruce High Quality Foundation
(formed in 2004)
The Bruce High Quality Foundation is an artist collective in Brooklyn, New York City that was “created to foster an alternative to everything.” With a beguiling blend of reality and fiction, seriousness and humor, the anonymous artists behind The Bruce High Quality Foundation have been challenging the social, economic, and institutional structures of the art world since 2004. The group has created events, performances, installations, sculptures, videos, mixed-media projects, and even an art school, founded as an alternative to the university system. Centered upon the fictional deceased sculptor, “Bruce High Quality,” the Foundation aims “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.” They have accomplished this through such puckish activities as holding their “Brucennial” the same year their multimedia assessment of America, We Like America and America Likes Us (2010), was included in the Whitney Biennial, the very exhibition they were critiquing.
Artist Instagram: @brucehighquality