Work of Fiction Library Exhibition is Fantastical Place of Literary Masterpieces by Gary Tischler It’s amazing what you can fit into a room. Upstairs at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, organizers have squeezed in an installation called “The Library at Wadi ben Dagh” into one room—a kind of ultimate “book as art” exhibition. What does the room contain? A library. An epic ode to books and literature. The sun, the moon, the stars. Not books, but rather ideas and feelings about books. Notions of fragility. A flight of fancy. “I don’t have any answers,” said the library’s creator, Boston artist M.L. Van Nice, a direct woman who speaks in unadorned fashion. “Questions—that I have. It’s a little bit about questions.” With no answers and no camera, the one-room library-exhibition is difficult to describe. It is a complete work of fiction. The fantastical place is the creation of a character named Woman Doe, who has long since flown away and is now being cared for by the presumptuous and stuffy Digby Withers. Only his notes and his glasses—no doubt once perched very high on his distant nose—have been left in various parts of the library. “I have mixed feelings about libraries,” Nice told a group of gathered docents. “On the one hand, I love the idea of being there, the books, the knowledge. On the other hand, they’re kind of foreboding places … all those rules, no whispering, no talking, no shuffling, no sleeping.” And yet, books and words are the clear inspiration for this work, which has the feeling of greatness contained in a place where they turn off the lights at night. The room is compact, which was a problem Nice said because the installation might have looked different if the space had been larger. “It’s not a complaint,” she said. “But there might have been more narrative flow.” There was room for a representation of “Alice in Wonderland” here, one that lets you peer down the hole to see imagery of rabbits and queens and the like. Similarly, the entire experience of the installation has the quality of going down the very same rabbit hole, or being in a funhouse where the distortions are about the vessels of literature. “Ulysses,” Shakespeare’s tragedies, Charles Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil” and other forms of literary genius are here. But so are hats, filing cabinets with odd little sayings that challenge authority and other oddities. It is an artful place, a whimsical place—the kind of place that Doe, who saw the library as a kind of garden, would want to revel in peace. Withers has preserved it without having a clue about its true value. “He is a stuffy toad,” his inventor said. “Listen to his language. Precise, without feeling.” “The installation forces a viewer to look at literary masterpieces in a new way,” said Krystyna Wasserman, curator of the museum’s Book Arts Department. “We find ourselves in a wonderland where everything is left to the imagination.” Wonderland indeed. Nice is of course something of a veteran at this sort of thing, if there ever was such a thing. Her works include such titles as “Works That Bind,” “Dinner with Mr. Dewey,” “A Failure of Letters,” “Dreamscapes/Landscapes,” and “The Summer Sabbatical of Asa Beadle.” “I find much of my materials at yard sales, in the trash,” Nice said. “When this is done, eventually it will be dismantled and disassembled. It’s the nature of the thing. It’s sad, but the alternative would be not to ever have done it all.” And that would be a tragedy. For a work of fiction, the “Library at Wadi ben Dagh” is remarkably real and hypnotic. And you certainly don’t need a card to borrow if not the books but the ideas, wings and dreams of this library. “M.L. Van Nice: The Library Wadi ben Dagh” runs through Nov. 6 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave., NW. For more information, please call (202) 783-5000 or visit www.nmwa.org. Gary Tischler is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.