Beautiful Progress to Nowhere

Posted on January 25, 2012

by Joseph Grigely

 There haven’t been many shows like these over the past 15 years that I can recall seeing. But an unforgettable one was Stephen Lapthisophon’s show With Reasonable Accommodation at Gallery 400 of the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2002. Lapthisophon isn’t as well known as he should be. His show took as its premise the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, and toyed with the question of what constitutes ‘reasonable’ accommodation under the act. It’s an absurd legal concept that can be unremade at will – where the reasonable, the practical and the meaningful are always at odds with each other. In Lapthisophon’s show, paintings were turned against a wall; an audio piece spit out fragments of a track about broken bones and prostheses, but the track was so fragmented it simply fell apart as static; there was a wheelchair ramp – so beautifully symmetrical, solid and minimal that it could have been made by Ellsworth Kelly – deliberately and inconveniently positioned to lead into a wall. It was a ramp to nowhere, pointedly reflecting how the ADA is legislation to nowhere: the red tape, the stigmatising burden of making requests for accommodation, and the sometimes absurd judicial decisions rendered by the Supreme Court have made the ADA much less provident than it was intended to be.( 6) Yet Lapthisophon’s show is so subtle and understated there’s little didactic undertow. In a review published in frieze in 2003, the late Kathryn Hixon described Lapthisophon’s work as ‘post-politically correct’, and it’s an accurate assessment. What Lapthisophon shows us is that there are no easy answers about disability, and no easy answers for disabled artists. We make progress where we can, even beautiful progress to nowhere, straight into a wall.