“Don’t say can’t. Say canarchy.”
Such is the motto of Bruce High Quality Foundation University — a school (of sorts) that opens tomorrow at 225 West Broadway in collaboration with (drum roll … ) Creative Time. I’ll reserve my commentary until this Saturday’s talk on Governors Island, but until then, here’s the rhetorical masterpiece of a press release that arrived in my inbox just now. Feel the ennui.
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BHQFU 9/11
Don’t say can’t. Say canarchy.
Creative Time presents:
THE BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION UNIVERSITY
Opening September 11, 2009 225 West Broadway, 3rd floor
6 - 10pm
(September 10, 2009 New York, NY) Creative Time is pleased to announce the opening of the BHQFU, a free, collaborative school opening September 11. Located at 225 West Broadway, the university will host several courses at its outset and will grow in the coming months. Admission is based on a peer-recommendation system, and select programs will be open to the public.
A message from The Bruce High Quality Foundation:
PROLEGMENA TO ANY FUTURE ART SCHOOL
Something’s got to give. The $200,000-debt-model of art education is simply untenable. Further, the education artists are getting for their money is mired in irrelevance, pushing them into critical redundancy on the one hand and professional mediocrity on the other. Blind romanticism and blind professionalism are in a false war alienating artists from their better histories.
At root, it’s a form/content problem. Arts education is divided between the practical problems of form (e.g., money: how to get it, raise it, administer it, and please the powers that control it) and the slippery problems of metaphor (e.g., education: how to learn, what to learn, why to learn).
Artists are the people who spend their time figuring out how best to resolve form and content problems. That’s what we do when we stretch a canvas, edit a video, implement a social space, and develop a history. It is both reasonable and generatively ridiculous to believe that artists ought to be figuring out how arts education should work. This is the premise of BHQFU: that artists can figure this thing out.
BHQFU IS:
A university, a space for higher education and research, a community of scholars; an expansion of the BHQF practice to include more participants (that’s where U come in);
and a “fuck you” to the hegemony of critical solemnity and market-mediocre despair. The BHQFU will be located at 225 West Broadway, 3rd floor. Students may not apply to BHQFU—they are admitted on a rolling schedule based on a system of peer-recommendation. Public programs will be presented alongside the private classes: please see www.bhqfu.org (live after the university’s opening) for a full schedule of programs open to the public.
PRINCIPLES
We believe in the artistically educational possibilities of collaboration. Collaboration, as we mean it, means a group of concerned people come together to hash out ideas, try to figure out the world around them, and try to take some agency within its future. That’s the why and how of The Bruce High Quality Foundation. BHQFU is an attempt to extend the benefits of this collaborative model to a wider number of people.
We believe that income shouldn’t be a barrier to metaphor. We aren’t interested in providing an economic justification for arts education (which we’ll generally define as an education in metaphor manipulation). There is something far more important at stake: our ability to reason, to resist hegemony and oppression, to participate adeptly, skeptically, humorously in the political minefield of society. So if we aren’t going to justify BHQFU economically, we can’t expect participants to do so either. Let’s not parse the margins; BHQFU will be free to attend.
BHQFU is unaccredited. Let’s just drop the bullshit altogether. Even when they deal with markets, even when they wear suits and go to meetings, even when they act professionally, artists are not professionals. So we aren’t granting degrees or certificates, we aren’t claiming to prepare anyone to become another piece of human capital. It’s simply not a lens on life that needs anymore looking through.
Students are teachers are administrators are staff. We believe in the value of shared creative experience and responsibility. That is why the first class we are implementing is B.Y.O.U. (Build Your Own University), a weekly class to discuss and develop admission procedures, rubrics of success, governance, etc.
CURRICULUM
At the outset BHQFU will offer two kinds of classes, histories and critiques.
HISTORIES are collaborative research projects intended to create new histories of art. The class will be expected to make “an original contribution to knowledge,” to speak in the old style, whether that means a set of texts, a book, a video, performance, or otherwise.
CRITIQUES are an opportunity for participants to present work made outside of class and get feedback.
UNIVERSITY RESOURCES
Housed at 225 West Broadway, BHQFU participants will build a publicly accessible library from works created in the history classes. Additionally, the school will host events, exhibitions, and presentations, many of which will be open to the general public.
