The Bruce High Quality Foundation, the official arbiter of the estate of Bruce High Quality,
There’s this one part where those art bloggers who came to our studio show up wearing matching Patagonia vests (like they knew a zombie attack was going to happen and they might as well be dressed for the occasion) with lots of pockets so we send them out to scavenge for supplies. And you are hanging by your hair from the crane—there’s a huge crane in the atrium that we extended out through the broken skylight as a lookout post—and you’re hanging there, and you can do all these different flips to signal what is going on outside.
is dedicated to the preservation of the legacy of the late social sculptor
And there’s a helicopter filled with zombies; we never see them but we know they’re there from the way you’re flipping around. And there are also these two Boeing 757s hovering with their noses pointed toward the museum—hovering in mid-air somehow—and there are also black SUVs filled with zombies outside and everyone is really scared, and we have to save them by using whatever we can find around the museum.
Bruce High Quality. In the spirit of the life and work of Bruce High Quality,
We’ve built this wall between one of the galleries and the main spiral out of paintings and old furniture—Chippendale, William Morris, that ugly Marc Chagall—and all these people are hiding in the gallery, the bloggers are scavenging, and we’re designing weapons and booby traps. As for everyone else this is really terrifying, but for some reason this is like everyday life for us. We’re just coming up with hilarious zombie traps, and laughing, but no one else is laughing, they trust us with their lives; except some of them think we sent the zombies as a critique of the institution—because we aren’t scared shitless like everybody else—so those people don’t trust us and they go and hide in the café by themselves.
we aspire to invest the experience of public space with wonder,
We’re setting up exhibitions of Francis Bacon paintings, but we’re tilting them all parallel to the sloped floor so when the zombies come in and look at the show they have to lean in one direction And then we roll a Harley Davidson down the ramp, and they all lose their balance and get crushed. We find this big vat of Vaseline in the director’s office hidden under his desk and we cover the railing with it so we can slide away to safety whenever we need.
to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair,
Some of the zombies in the helicopter hovering overhead start parachuting through the skylight so we install this big Eva Hesse sculpture as a net over the atrium. We paint stripes on some Armani suits and hide in the Daniel Buren paintings, and we install this Bill Viola reflecting pool video installation so the zombies get confused, trying to eat the people in the video. And there are Duane Hansen’s everywhere as decoys and were bowling the Brancusi heads down the spiral. We’re doing all these projects we’ve always wanted to do just because we can, but they also all end up helping to thwart the zombies, so everyone thinks we’re awesome. Except there are still the people hiding by themselves in the café—mostly curators and art critics for the Village Voice who happened to be there when it happened—and they are becoming more and more convinced that we sent the zombies that we’re even starting to think that we did and just forgot about it. But it really doesn’t matter now, so we send Filip disguised as a waiter down to check on them but they have all become zombies so he grabs Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death and serves it up to them.
and to impregnate the institutions of art
And then the helicopter comes down through the skylight and we have everybody throwing art books, coffee mugs, slinkys, and whatever else they can find from the gift shop at it. As it comes down the propellers slash through the Hesse net, cutting up the zombies we had trapped inside, splashing their blood everywhere and the whole building looks like a zombie blood Pollock painting, and a tote bag or the net brings the helicopter crashing down on the lobby and we all slide down the railing into the vault and there are all these Richard Prince black Barracudas there in the vault, we get in and shoot out of the museum as the helicopter explodes, and a ball of fire shoots out of the skylight.
with the joy of man’s desiring.
We’re trying to get in the building. It’s our studio. And everyone is there with us and everything has been bombed out. Next day. And we break down the door and everyone starts grabbing stuff because we have to go to the Met and fight the zombies again, except now there are more of them. So we pack everything into our bus, the generator, table saw, computers, and our tent, and crates and crates of materials, and there are all these people we know.
Professional Problems. Amateur Solutions.