Baragouin

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 Baragouinpresents 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.