The Museum of Modern Love

 

Like Second Place, The Museum of Modern Love was recommended to me by a fellow writer at Varuna House after I had read from my own work-in-progress (a novel about a disappeared Australian painter). Heather Rose’s work was a complete revelation. For one thing, she manages that rare genre of Australian internationalism, with the work set almost entirely in New York (specifically, the Museum of Modern Art). What fascinates Heather Rose is an extraordinary and true MOMA performance by Marina Abramović, the Serbian “grandmother of performance art” (so-named after a four-decades long career). “The Artist is Present” was held between March and May 2010, and during this time 1545 people had the opportunity to sit opposite the artist who held their gaze (and was just, one supposes, present in the moment).

Around this true event, Rose creates several characters who visit the performance regularly and whose lives are then revealed to the reader. Arky Levin is a composer of some repute whose wife, Lydia, is in a coma and has requested by legal means that he refrain from visiting her. Levin’s silence is thus an enforced one, and he seeks meaning in Abramović’s marathon achievement. Jane Miller, introduced in Chapter 3, “was not an artist” but she is a great observer of people, a teacher and a recent widow. There is also Healayas Breen, a French singer, TV personality and sensualist, “raised Muslim in Paris”; Brittika Van Der Sar, a Dutch woman of Chinese background, doing her PhD, and a narrative voice who speaks in the first person (among others).  Arky’s viewpoint centres the novel on a theme of responding to loss, but in one extraordinary chapter, Rose gives voice to the silent Lydia, who “swam in the night sky and … had no edges … The night embraced her and she was a tiny light in the great sea of lights” (p. 253). The following chapter has the “I” voice in narrative mode: “And so, at least, these two people meet in person on two chairs opposite one another” (Abromović and Levin). Here her role is defined: “memoirist, intuit, animus, good spirit, genius, whim that I am” (p. 257). There is a line here which I read with the sort of horror of a writer whose words appear like stolen fruit (written I must add, before this book was published): “But what does it take to be an artist? They have to listen” (pp. 258-259).

I listened. I found the voice/voices to be extraordinary, and I followed the feats of Marina and Arky’s search for meaning in composition and as a visitor to the gallery with interest. I liked the touches of experimentation in the narrative and also its firm grasp of an historical event and its imagined response of a variety of characters to that MOMA performance. I loved the challenges the book presents; the fact that it was success is as inspiring as one of its key messages of strength and endurance: “… because you do this, Marina, I am stronger … You are a woman and this is a fact. No matter what people make of anything else, your gender is unequivocal” (p. 206). The last lines are given to the male musician, whose heart responds to a “blank canvas”: “Every song, every painting, every book, every idea that changed the world – all these things came from the unknowable and beautiful void” (p. 278). Let those two ideas sit together: a woman’s courage and an artist’s recognition of mystery.