The School of Brancusi visits the Undersea Sculpture Garden of Piet Mondrian

In 1977 I had a sculpture exhibition in San Francisco. Because of the weight of the work, which was made of laminated plate glass combined with concrete or wood, I had decided to produce it there rather than ship it cross country. As there were only a few sales, when the show closed I was faced with crating and shipping a lot of heavy sculpture back home.

At that time the Golden Gate Bridge was notorious for suicide jumps. I thought of creating an underwater sculpture garden by dumping my work in the Bay under the bridge: the world's first sculpticide. Not only would this save a lot of trouble and expense, it would bring the joy of an artistic experience to the suicides' last moments.

I hardly need say that this plan never took off. But the idea of an underwater sculpture garden was a persistent worm in my brain. So, at last, here it is (so to speak).

For many years the subject matter of my work has been art itself. I have focused on individual works, on art galleries, museums, and most recently, museum gift shops - always with an element of humor, irony, or satire. While my work often plays fast and loose with some very serious stuff, it embodies an element of appreciation, even admiration of many artists, institutions, and artworks it references. In this installation at the New Britain Museum, the work of Brancusi and Mondrian, two giants of 20th century art - and two of the most serious artists one can imagine, is appropriated, transformed, converted, decontextualized, immersed (some might say, corrupted!) to serve as a "raw material" for my work.

The fish are pretty straight replicas of Brancusi's fish, of which he made several, though never a school. I don't know of Mondrian having made sculpture, though other in the De Stijl group made some three-dimensional objects, notably furniture, using similar formal elements: primary colors and rectilinear shapes. But not under water.