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

Art in America, July, 1993 by Simon Taylor

Devon Dikeou's Library Persona Non Grata was an interactive installation based on Summer, Edith Wharton's female bildungsroman of 1917. The heroine of the story, Charity Royall, works as a librarian in the small New England town of North Dormer, Mass.: after a steamy love 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, but Summer has nevertheless been interpreted as a proto-feminist novel for two reasons: it admits the existence of female sexuality, and it reveals the extent to which women are constrained by 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 devoted to one of the novel's main characters. On entering the space, the viewer approached a large reception desk that bore a label reading "Harney" and displayed a volume 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. One could watch the videos in a white booth in the center of the gallery. This viewing room was surrounded by 11 book stands labeled "Charity," which contained a variety of paperback romance novels. On an adjoining wall were three framed portraits, taken from turn-of-the-century cigar boxes, representing Charity, Harney and Royall. These were accompanied by a bronze plaque that explained the characters' roles in the novel.

Visitors could become members of the library and take the books and videos home with them, so long as they agreed to lending rules requiring late fees for overdue items. As in a school library, the names of the borrowers were written on cards attached to the books 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 out the ways that social rules structure our everyday lives and how 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 seemed to raise many questions about gender, sexuality and class, but without any satisfying synthesis. Dikeou's supporting textual material indicated that she wanted to show how the Social Register, Harlequin novels and porn videos symbolize the subjugation of women as ornament and chattel. If there was an element of protest in this installation, though, or a critique of women's status in society, they were ultimately as tenuous as those of Wharton's Summer.