Guggenheim Gallery Chapman: Benjamin Lord & Kim Schoen

With <Product>: or how I learned to stop <doing something> and love <idea>, Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery is thrilled to celebrate two works drawing from the pool of art history and visual culture, each in their own way related to translation and authorship.

Kim Schoen’s work Baragouin (2021) (Baragouin, from French; unintelligible speech) gives voice to copies of sculptures whose origins range from Buddhism to Rococo to Neoclassical to Modernism. The video takes us inside the now-closed retailer Stones & Gifts Inc., a business for domestic and garden sculptures formerly located in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, and delineates the tableau of some four dozen figures of what western culture perceives as archetypical images of humans and animals.

The work, created in collaboration with the art historian Edward Sterrett, and voice actors who imitate the sounds of languages from around the world in different ways, presents sculptures that all seem to “speak” in tongues which refer to the provenance of their originals