Stephen Lapthisophon's toner transfers at Conduit Gallery are elegant, sensitively installed transpositions of the enduring into the ethereal, seemingly ephemeral works on paper that manifest the fragility of transmission.
Lapthisophon's use of the archive, more precisely in his thematization of the use of the archive, is particularly striking. In the toner-transfer pieces in this exhibition, and in Hotel Terminus and The Bells as well, this use of the archive seems analogous to the end of The Name of the Rose, after the abbey has burned, after Adso has grown old and returned to Italy [which seems of late the practice of aging modernists; aging postmodernists, on the other hand, go to Hollywood, or at least go Hollywood.] Adso cannot resist the temptation to revisit the site of the abbey. The edifice is in ruins, looted, decayed, but among the ruins Adso finds scraps of parchment, with parts of an image, bits of words, sometimes sentences. He collects the fragments, filling two sacks. Later, in Melk, he studies the fragments, attempting to reconstruct from them a lesser remnant of the lost great library. He concludes at last that there is no coherent content in these remnants, that they are random parts, incapable of yielding a whole. And yet, even if this is so, even if like Adso we "no longer know what it is about" yet "stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." [Steadfast rose of earlier name, the bare name we hold.] we also retain art if only as a nominal denotation. If deDuve is right, and the term and concept 'art' can only be nominal for us, then as Adso's fragments of the past so also art, now, when after the end of art history (in Danto and Hegel's senses) art is "whatever." Yes, but. Pace Kundera, modernism may have come to the end of the road, but this need not entail an endless, aimless, milling about the village square by artists qua epigones waiting to be told which past style to re-employ this year. Rather, in gathering these fragments, the ground is cleared, and the eloquence of the fragmentary is disclosed. "The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future," as Derrida urges in Archive Fever.
This, it seems, is the situation of the artist now, situated (as always one is) between retention and protention: we know all of that, the archive, and the canon, and why the canon is problematical, the discourses in which the sedimented practices of the past are embedded, and yet we have to go to the studio and go on with the enterprise, even if our practice shares nothing but the name with the previous practices subsumed by 'art.' And we know, or should know, that this situation is not novel, even if its thematization perhaps is, and that we share this situation with those in other disciplines, particularly with those in the disciplines once called humanitas, with which Aullus Gellius, reflecting on his education in Greece, translated paideia, glossing with "institutionemque et eruditionem in bonas artes." What is striking in Lapthisophon's works, no less than in Eco and Kundera and Aullus Gellius, is the elegiac undertone, which yet results in a new work that transcends what it retains. If this is Hegelian in suggesting that the structure of a dialectic operates beneath these works, this should not surprise: it was after all Hegel who urged that the owl of Minerva takes wing only at dusk. As Rosalind Krauss has urged, it is not a small ambition to make visible the operation of the dialectic.
David Newman
Dallas, 2003