Art Metropole

#16589

Golden Pavilion Notebook

Artist

Barbara Balfour

Designer

Elizabeth Hobart

Price

$25.00

Date

2025

Publisher

Self-published

Format

Artists' Books

Size

10.5 × 15 × 0.5 cm

Length

72 pp

Genre

Contemporary Art, Architecture

Ostensibly about Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion located in Kyoto, Japan, this artist’s book is at the same time a reflection on impermanence: nomenclatural, architectural, familial. Balfour’s connection to this pavilion is inextricably linked to her late father’s documentation of it in slides, dating from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

As a print-based artist fascinated by the dynamic between the original and the copy, with the copy not being considered inferior, Balfour became intrigued by Kinkaku-ji’s iconic image repeated endlessly in travel guides, the site’s webcam, postcards, and tourists’ digital images – almost always inherently doubled by the temple’s reflection in the nearby lake.

The key material substance referenced in this book is gold, in its many iterations: on Japanese folding screens, in dentistry, and as gold flakes on soft ice cream. Despite its featherweight delicacy, gold is resilient in that it doesn’t oxidize, rust, or tarnish.

This is a book in the form of a notebook, where you will encounter such things as:
various names changes
a conflagration
the start of the story
a few false starts
more of the same
duplicates, replacements, facsimiles
slides, carousels, postcards
clichés
disappointment
Japanese breakfast
a family chestnut