Devon Dikeou at Dooley Le Cappellaine - interactive art installation; New York, New York

Devon Dikeou's Library Persona Non Grata was an interactive installation based upon Summer, Edith Wharton's female bildungsroman of 1917 The heroine of the story, Charity Royall, works as a librarian in the small of recent origin England town of North Dormer, Mass.: after a steamy regard with affection affair with big-city architect Lucius Harney she finds herself abandoned and expecting a child. She eventually marries her undesirable guardian, the lawyer Royall. Charity's ultimate submission to this father-figure hardly makes her a paragon of feminism, on the contrary Summer has nevertheless been interpreted as a proto-feminist novel for sum of two units reasons: it admits the existence of female sexuality, and it reveals the amplitude to which women are constrained by means of a patriarchal social order.

An ironic updating of the fictional North Dormer library, Dikeou's Library Persona Non Grata was divided into three sections, each devot to individual of the novel's main characters. upon entering the space, the viewer approached a large reception desk that bore a label reading "Harney" and displayed a convolution of the 1992 New York Social Register. To the right of the desk labeled "Lawyer Royall," was a stack of gay and straight porn videos with titles like A Girl and Her Dildo and Tight Jeans. individual could watch the videos in a white booth in the center of the gallery. This viewing scope was surrounded by 11 work stands labeled "Charity," which contained a variety of paperback romance novels. upon an adjoining wall were three framed portraits, taken from turn-of-the-century cigar boxe representing Charity, Harney and Royall. These were accompanied by dint of a bronze plaque that explained the characters' characters in the novel.

Visitors could become members of the library and take the volumes and videos home with them, in like manner long as they agreed to lending governments requiring late fees for overdue items. As in a gymnasium library, the names of the borrowers were written upon cards attached to the volumes and videos. (Only a quarter of the items borrowed were actually returned) While the parallels Dikeou sought to establish between the novel's characters and the sections of the library were problematic (why was the "pedophile" lawyer Royall linked to the porn videos?), the installation was effective in pointing without the ways that social directions structure our everyday lives and in what way individuals are constituted by what they consume

After my initial enthusiasm for the interactive and slightly anarchic aspects of the installation, not to mention its incorporation of taboo materials, I was left with the nagging question of what this exhibition had accomplished. It looked to raise many questions about sex sexuality and class, but without any satisfying synthesis. Dikeou's supporting textual material indicated that she wanted to present to view how the Social Register, Harlequin novels and porn videos symbolize the subjugation of women as ornament and chattel. If there was an uncompounded body of protest in this installation, granting or a critique of women's status in society, they were ultimately as tenuous as those of Wharton's Summer

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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