HEATHER ROSE The Museum of Modern Love. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
This Stella Prize-winning novel from Heather Rose is a masterpiece of introspection. Passages linger in the mind; her evocative prose demands that we stop and ask What would I do?
Rose has wrapped this novel around the life and work of the performance artist Marina Abramović — whose approval she sought, and received — and, specifically, her performance ‘The Artist is Present’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010. Over 75 days, Abramović sat in a simple wooden chair. When visitors took the seat opposite, she would lift her head, open her eyes, and sit gazing at them for as long as they stayed. ‘Is it a staring competition?’ people asked as the queue of would-be sitters lengthened.
What is art? is a question surely as old as art itself. Abramović suggests that art is life. And just as the artist invited those who sat with her to participate in the art, Heather Rose asks us to turn inwards. We are not observers. We are participants who need to reconcile with life. The Museum of Modern Love asks us, How do we learn to see what is before us?
Rose invites the reader into the life of Arky Levin, a famous New York composer. Arky’s perspective guides us though the exhibition and he forms a companionable, though disinterested, bond with Jane Miller, a tourist and fellow gallery visitor. They are both distracted, lost and contemplating uncertainty. Jane’s husband has died, too young; her grief, one year on, is still palpable. Jane ‘has always liked certainty. It was one of the pleasures of being a teacher …’ She wants more time: time with her husband, time for her own life.
Levin is flailing. His wife, suffering an inherited degenerative condition, has removed herself from his life and admitted herself to full-time care in an institution:
She had been certainty. When everything fell apart, she would be there. It was partly why he always felt so angry when she got sick. He didn’t like that the whole world wobbled when that happened, and he felt small. Small and alone.
There were questions that terrified his sense of order. His deepest sense of how life should be lived. Ought to be lived. But should and ought were words for certainty. What words belonged to uncertainty?
Abramović, the mirror, faces uncertainty each time she takes up her position in the performance, opening the door to new knowledge. The intensity of their museum experiences forces both Jane and Levin to focus their gaze, to see what cannot be avoided. And finally Levin ‘understood with vivid clarity that the best ideas come from a place with a sign on the door saying I don’t know’.
In a further twist on the role of observer and the observed, occasionally Rose draws back and follows the participants going about their day through different narrators hovering on the edges. One is perhaps the muse, or a higher consciousness:
I drew Levin’s attention to the day outside … For all he wasn’t listening to my musical suggestions, he was amenable to an interruption … I watched him. There is nothing more beautiful than watching an artist at work ….
Yet another narrator is from Marina’s past, who shows us how a childhood of physical and emotional deprivation in times of war shaped her performance art. And we are reminded of the power that the dead have over us.
Other characters, students and commentators seamlessly integrate the artist’s background and body of work into the story, taking the reader on a journey through Abramović’s life. And Rose holds a mirror to us, the readers, through the very ordinariness of those who sit opposite, like the slumping young man who Jane ‘wanted to tell … to sit up straight’ and the ‘young woman with a tiny pair of shoulders and long lank hair…[who] appeared to be bowed under the weight of a short and exhausting life’. Some are frail, others defiant.
This is also a New York story. For those who love the city, from the residents’ style and beauty (‘three-day growth on his perfect jawline’) to the food (onion bagels get more than one mention), to the buildings, streets and avenues, every page is a delight. Levin knows that New York’s light obliterates a darkness that is both the universe and his own sense of aloneness. For Jane, the visitor, it provides a temporary haven.
Rose has written a powerful story of lives interrupted and of seeking and finding and learning. The Museum of Modern Love is about both understanding our choices and finding the strength to make them.
Heather Rose The Museum of Modern Love Allen & Unwin 2016 PB 296pp $19.99
Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. You can find her at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.
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