🌷🔑Schoolgirl Romance🌷🔑
Romance novels marked for exploitative tropes and locked in a painted cabinet. After the secured Staff Reading cabinet in the library of my high school.
The most mediocre libertarian has dreamed of oriental princesses; every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet, 2025
59 x 55 x 16 cm
Metal, wood, glass, romance novels, Wenzhou paper, acrylic paint
The Librarian, (2013-16) Interactive installation of wood, glass, paper, metal, acrylic paint and plastic. Dimensions vary.
Critical readings of second-hand regency romance novels in French, German and English revealed the following themes, which are classified and page-marked by colour:
💛Heteronormativity - the assumption that heterosexuality is the only sexual orientation
🩵Rape - sexual assault of a character in the novel
💚The ethnicised Other - eroticisation of racialised characters in the novel
🩷❤️Love-making - consensual erotic contact between characters in the novel
In the realm of historical / 'regency' romance, each of these themes is warped; their intractability from the genre is symbolised in the novels' typical commissioned cover artwork.
This cabinet's 'cover-painting' excludes the genre’s usual tropes of an embracing couple (a woman suppliant, a man brutally impassive) and castles or great houses (implying that true romance is only possible for those wielding fealty, wealth; colonial power), focusing, instead, on the blossoming and dispersion of delicate flowers (priceless virtue; virginity).
Bereft of human figures and architecture, what remains is eroticised landscape.
LORE
At some point in my schooling, possibly in a rare lull when my class was not preparing for an exam, I staged my first heist of a locked cabinet containing recent bestsellers & explicit romance novels.
Using a large paperclip to pick the cabinet‘s flimsy lock, I carefully extracted a maximum of 7 novels, fanning out the remaining books so as not to leave noticeable gaps. A system developed whereby I speed-read the books, marked the saucy bits with a dog-ear or pronounced spinal crease and distributed these marked novels to a select group of friends. Having the erotic pages marked helped ensure a rapid return of the books and thus a swift turnover; necessary as I was neither a patient nor benevolent ringleader. One classmate – an outsider who was frequently bullied by the rest of the class, including myself – got to know of the operation that I was running. This was its undoing.