Baragouin is an artists’ book by Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist Kim Schoen. The book is a companion piece to a video work of the same name, filmed in a now-closed residential sculpture showroom in Los Angeles. The video Baragouin presents these sculptures—which are copies of copies of original works of art—as an important collection of art and records their “voices”—a pastiche of verbal nonsense and phonetically imitated sounds of languages from around the world. The sculptures range in style and geographic origin from Buddhist to Rococo, Neoclassical to Modernist. Baragouin, the book, catalogs these sculptures as a fictional collection and gives them each a clear art-historical provenance based on morphological resemblances. Baragouin is designed by Ella Gold and includes an essay and “provenance” work by Edward Sterrett. Kim Schoen’s work in video installation, photography, and text engages the rhetoric of display. Her absurdist, experimental approach takes on objects and language that try to persuade or convince us of something, using them as raw materials to say something new. Schoen has exhibited her work at MMoCA; Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles; Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma; BAM; South London Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, MOT International, London; Kunstverein Springhornhof; Kleine Humboldt Galerie, Berlin; and Young Projects and Richard Telles Fine Art, in Los Angeles. Her work is included in private and public collections, and has been written about in Artforum, Mousse, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, and Hotshoe International. Her own writing (‘Cracking Walnuts: Nonsense and Repetition in Video Art’, ’The Serial Attitude Redux', 'The Expansion of the Instant: Photography, Anxiety, Infinity') can be found in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Kim is also the co-founder, publisher and editor of MATERIAL, a journal of writing by artists.
