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 is an artist working in video installation, photography, and text that 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.

Edward Sterrett is a writer, art historian, and educator living in Los Angeles. He is currently teaching modern and contemporary art history, and working on several writing projects that address the collection, exchange, and display of art objects.

Ella Gold is a Los Angeles-based art director and graphic designer specializing in print, publication, and identity design.

Photos of Baragouin by Ian Byers-Gamber.