New
CONVOCATIONBY AMATEURS
An installation curated for the Broodthaers Society of America, New York
Anonymous, Eagle portrait heads (American, 21st century). Wood, cast bronze, paint, various sizes.
[installation views forthcoming]
The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present CONVOCATION BY AMATEURS, a singular body of 100+ eagle figures culled from the noble dregs of everyday life: flea markets, thrift stores, transfer stations, and the internet. Each eagle is handmade, some show signs of having had commercial aspirations, and all are exemplary (for better and worse) of self-taught creative production. The sundry portrait busts, statuettes, soft sculptures, and figurines are made of wood, brass, stone, bronze, cast iron, wax, resin, ceramic, plastic, leather, animal horn, eggshell, feathers, textiles, fake fur, and glass. In case you didn’t know, “convocation” is the proper term for a gathering of eagles, just like “rafter” is for turkeys or “school” is for fish.
CONVOCATION BY AMATEURS is inspired by the work of three extremely different people: Marcel Broodthaers, Geoffrey Hinton, and Jim Day.
In 1965, barely a year into his career as a visual artist, Marcel Broodthaers titled a notebook L’Artiste et l’Amateur and scrawled some thoughts on the subject therein. The notebook never developed into an explicit project, but its inherent tensions run throughout Broodthaers’ work. In 1992, Galerie Ronny Van de Velde made a facsimile of the notebook as part of a show with another great amateur, James Ensor, and transcribed its contents into legible French. This show will feature the first ever English translation of The Artist and the Amateur.
Geoffrey Hinton’s name may be familiar because he was one of the first scientists to write a self-learning computer program. In the landmark essay “Learning representations by back-propagating errors,” which Hinton coauthored with David E. Rummelhart and Ronald J. Williams, they described a new learning procedure called back propagation in which a neural network repeatedly adjusts (goes back and changes) its network connections. It does so based on its own evolving knowledge of the difference between its current output and the desired one. Hinton, now known colloquially as “the Godfather of AI,” is one of the leading voices regarding AI’s inherent dangers.
What does Geoffrey Hinton have to do with this show? Well, 100+ eagles need to be organized somehow, and every curator knows the feeling of moving (and removing) a selection of artworks around the room until they arrive at what they think is the best arrangement. This is a human example of back propagation, the root and process of AI. We will be enacting it throughout the run of CONVOCATION OF AMATEURS, 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. Day is 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, an endeavor that at first glance should not be possible. Taxidermy by definition requires the skin of its subject (from the Greek taxis ‘arrangement’ and derma ‘skin’), but possessing the body parts of bald eagles is severely restricted in the United States. Day gets around federal law by constructing his artworks out of the body parts of other birds. His ingenious approach to making eagles is the philosophical basis for this show.
In the spirit of Day’s chimerical craftsmanship, CONVOCATION BY AMATEURS expands to consider the United States as a necessarily unstable construct, one that is continually back propagated by the people who make it up.
The Artist and the Amateur, by Marcel Broodthaers
Laziness and Marcel Broodthaers