Anonymous: A Convocation by Amateurs

The Broodthaers Society of America presents CONVOCATION BY AMATEURS, an exhibition featuring a singular gathering of 100+ eagle figures culled from the noble dregs of flea markets, thrift stores, transfer stations, and the internet. Each eagle is handmade, some show signs of commercial aspirations, and all are exemplary of self-taught creative production. 
CONVOCATION BY AMATEURS is inspired by three extremely different people: Marcel Broodthaers, Geoffrey Hinton, and Jim Day. In 1965, Marcel Broodthaers titled a fresh notebook L’Art et l’Amateur and scrawled some thoughts on the topic therein. It never developed into an explicit artwork, but in 1992 Ronny Van de Velde made a facsimile and transcribed its contents into legible French. This show will present its first ever English translation.
     Geoffrey Hinton was one of the first scientists to write a self-learning computer program. In the landmark essay “Learning representations by back-propagating errors,” Hinton and his coauthors described a new learning procedure called back propagation in which a neural network repeatedly adjusts its connections based on its own evolving knowledge of the desired output.
     What does that have to do with this show? Well, 100+ eagles need to be organized in some fashion, and every curator knows the feeling of moving (and removing) a selection of artworks around the room until they arrive at the best arrangement. This is a human version of back propagation, the root and process of AI. We will be enacting it throughout the run of this show, one week organizing the eagles by material or size and the next week reorganizing them by attitude or skill.
     Which brings us to Jim Day, a self-taught artist and world-champion taxidermist who lives and works in Florence, Indiana. Day’s speciality is making  lifelike recreations of bald eagles out of the body parts of other birds. His ingenious, chimerical approach to making eagle sculptures by hand is the philosophical basis for this show.
     From Day’s extraordinary example, CONVOCATION BY AMATEURS proposes the United States as a necessarily unstable construct, one that is continually back propagated by the people who make it up.
     Now go vote.