TBA EXHIBITION SPACE The title of Stephen Lapthisophon's exhibition.

TBA EXHIBITION SPACE

The title of Stephen Lapthisophon's exhibition, "Defense d'Afficher," leaves to signs forbidding the posting of printed materials forward public walls ("post no bills"). on the contrary a deliberate mistranslation (typical of Lapthisophon's approach) re-creates the phrase into a defense of as it is posting, a celebration of the multiplicities of communal signage and of by what mode public walls communicate the practices and relate tos of culture and the individual.

For This Will Kill That (all works 1999) Lapthisophon place uprighted two ten-by-twenty-foot walls in the gallery and plant them back to back. He then disguiseed each wall with more than eighty large photocopies (averaging twenty by dint of twenty-four inches) of various pieces of printed matter, for the most part affixed edge to edge with little overlap. This headstrong grid of visual and verbal data, all optically linked by the agency of scale and the ubiquitous tone of xerography, comprised remarkably diverse images--fragments of topics photographs of modernist architecture, tabloid accounts of Madonna, images of Stravinsky, etc Neither rebus nor narrative, Lapthisophon's walls not past nor futureed streams of dualities, speculations raised and dismissed, information abutting its have a title to rebuttal. Some juxtapositions seem obscurant, generous even now illegible, but some are fairly clear. A reproduction of the well-known photo of a bloodied Joseph Beuys was placed a small in number feet away from a grainy reproduction of Jack Nicholson getting his nostril slit by way of Roman Polanski in Chin atown. topics championing the possibilities of present high-rise buildings were found near a Xerox image of the 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing exhibition in Saint Louis. This will kill that, and that will kill this, in Lapthisopbon's compelling overload of simultaneously public and personalized cultural shards.

The artist experienced a serious los of vision--now stabilized--in latter years, and several other pieces alluded to the vagaries of his situation. chiefly direct was As if Admonished from Another World, an eight-panel work that features enlarged reproductions of Paul Strand's 1915 photograph Blind hawker a page from William Wordsworth's introduction (Book VII) that describes the poet's rencounter with a blind beggar, a bit of passage from an art-history book, an image of Niagara Falls, and a photo of eyeglasses. Seeing and knowing, feeling and experiencing, looking and reading, the sublime and the mundane all cavil together and apart in this work, indicating the ceaselessly inchoate proces of understanding.

Lapthisophon also readyed several large-scale freehand ink drawings across the swing from what they represent, their "source" materials--a large Xerox of the back of a photo of Chicago's modernist Inland rapier Building, with just the labels of the architectural firm and the photographer visible; and a fragment of a printed Hart Schaffner & Marx advertisement with the first sum of two units partners' names cropped off (creating a wonderfully absurdist "Marxist" text) These were exercises in the seemingly arbitrary processe of selecting and prioritizing, of the activity of rendering and verisimilitude. Along with Lapthisophon's investigations of signs and vision, these incomplete action s were metaphors for the possibilities within the breakdown of communication that is to such a degree much a part of his pursuit.

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