Marcus Herse

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. Alternating between slow pans and steady views, between close-ups of faces and bodies, and overviews of groups, the video invites the viewer to linger at this strange and ambiguous gathering of characters. Playfully oscillating between suggested narrative and documentary, it dramatizes the display throughout the afternoon and into the evening, while reflections of the shifting sun and the headlights of passing cars illuminate the showroom. 

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. In Baragouin, both language and image are imitations and translations, visual and verbal approximations that nonetheless communicate in unpredictable ways. These replicas, together with the echoes of the languages ascribed to them, stimulate reflection on the emergence of artistic forms as expressions of specific traditions and cultures. The work asks about accessibility to these qualities in a world determined by commerciality, in which surfaces are perceived as essential while being separated from their original ground like a bouquet of flowers.

Benjamin Lord's monumental work The Golden Jackal (2023) consists of over 300 images that narrate a cluster of fictional scenarios in and around Venice, Italy. A mob of hooded figures arrives at the train station and infiltrates the city, setting it ablaze. A dance party at a museum gala turns violent. In an elegant penthouse apartment, a bearded figure chain-smokes, watching the spectacle unfold. In a bracketing scenario, an unoccupied gondola from the city drifts out into the neighboring lagoons, where a field of glasswort blooms bright red. The title character, a wild European wolf-like canid, appears at various junctures, wandering in and out of view. The work is presented at the Guggenheim Gallery as a sprawling installation of unframed photographic prints hung in salon-style groupings.

All the pictures in The Golden Jackal were created using Dall-E 2, a recently released artificial intelligence service available on the Internet that can create realistic images from text-based descriptions or "prompts" written in natural language. The resulting images are not selected or cobbled together from an existing database but generated inferentially using what is called a digital "model" using a complex technical process called "diffusion". The resulting new images, while not intelligent per se, codify and extend the patterns, habits, and biases of the massive digital image set that the model was trained on.

The manual copying of works of art has probably existed since there were works of art themselves. Movable type made the copying of the written word affordable and swift. The technologies of photographic reproduction radically accelerated the copying of images, disseminating low-cost pictures globally. We have reached a watershed moment with the arrival and ever accelerating development of digital computation. In the past thirty years, internet culture fostered by the ubiquity of personal computing has propagated the social expectation of free (or nearly free) copying, resulting in radical transformations to the culture industry. In the latest development (which builds unmistakably upon the previous), computer programs freely generate complex and novel texts, sounds, and images based on relatively minimal initial human input. This art-historical moment, while long predicted by technologists and media theorists, has nevertheless arrived somewhat ahead of schedule. The crisis of authenticity, one of the theoretical hallmarks of what was called postmodern art, thus returns to the stage with new intensity.

The questions posed by these two works are broadly disquieting. What is authorship? How do the geneses of digital and analog works inform their reception? What are the future domains of expression, originality, provenance, and meaning in a globally networked world?

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.

Kim Schoen (b. Princeton) received her MFA in Photography from CalArts in 2005, and her Mphil from The Royal College of Art in 2008. Her work has been exhibited at LACMA; MMoCA; BAM, Brooklyn, New York; Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Kleine Humboldt Galerie, Germany; Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma; Whitechapel Gallery, South London Gallery, and MOT International, London; The California Museum of Photography, Moskowitz Bayse Gallery, Young Projects and Richard Telles Fine Art, 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.

Benjamin Lord’s work explores the poetics of the mediated subject, with a particular regard for the relationship between photography and fiction. Spanning the techniques of printmaking, sculpture, drawing, the artist’s book, and the occasional performance, his work often presents situations in which old and new worldviews intertwine or collide, with harmonious, comic, or tragic results.

Lord began as a painter, studying at the University of Chicago with Vera Klement. He began making large photographic prints after college, in the early days of ubiquitous digital image editing. He received his MFA at UCLA. He has since exhibited his work internationally. His work is in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Los Angeles County Museum. He lives and works in Los Angeles.