She is swimming in sensations, thoughts, memories and awareness like everyone else, but while this happens she looks into the eyes and hearts of strangers and finds a point of calm. It is her metier to dance on the edge of madness, to vault over pain into the solace of disintegration. [p. 58]
Set in New York, in 2010, around the real performance The Artist is Present by Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art. Abramović sat for seventy-five days, up to nine hours a day, and looked into the eyes of whoever was sitting opposite her. Heather Rose's work explores the impact of the event on a number of people: a widowed, grieving art teacher named Jane; Brittika, a PhD student with pink hair; Marco, the official photographer; Abramović's dead war-hero mother ('She has been dead for three years and she finds death rather as she found life—an inconvenience'); an omniscient narrator who may be a kind of muse; and, centrally, film composer Arky Levin, whose wife is in a nursing home and has taken out a court order prohibiting him from visiting.
I found Levin an interesting character, because I disliked him intensely -- he is self-centred, arrogant and self-pitying -- but still felt compassion for him. The unnamed, genderless narrator steers him towards Abramović in order to reawaken his creativity: his changing reactions to the artist, and the art, are the focus of the novel. Like many of the other characters, whether or not they sit with her, Arky is transformed by Abramović. Is his transformation more momentous than Jane's, or Brittika's?
I didn't wholly connect with this novel: I wonder if that's because of the distancing effect of the narrator's viewpoint. We are given insight into the thoughts and emotions, and the pasts, of various characters, but there's little tonal difference, and no sense of engagement: because the Muse, or whoever is telling the story, is more interested in the art that any of these characters have created or might create than in the pain that catalyses that art. ('pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on', [p. 38]) This is art in its broadest sense, the opening out, the sense of connection. Rose portrays this beautifully, but still with that disconnect.
The Museum of Modern Love is a love letter to an artist, a kind of print retrospective of her career. Abramović's courage and dedication to her art is intense. (I found some of the descriptions of previous performances quite unsettling!) There's an interesting essay by the author here, concerning the evolution of the work. Abramović gave permission for Rose to centre The Museum of Modern Love on her art and her story, and is reportedly very pleased with the result.
Petty gripe: reviewing my notes, I was annoyed all over again by the jarring 'house elf' at a pivotal moment.
"...at last, these two people meet in person on two chairs opposite each other. Marina Abramović and Arky Levin. I am assigned to stand beside them—memoirist, intuit, animus, good spirit, genius, whim that I am. House elf to the artists of paint, music, body, voice, form, word. I have acquired the habit of never saying too much." [p. 257]
Read for the Reading Women Challenge 2020: this fulfils both #5, 'A Winner of the Stella Prize or the Women’s Prize for Fiction', (it won the Stella Prize in 2017) and #10, 'A Book About a Woman Artist'.
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