An interesting meditation on the power and meaning of art through the lens of performance artist Marina Abramovic. This is boundary-pushing, radical art focuses on the piece "The Artist is Present" from 2010 which involved sitting at a table in silence at MoMA for 3 months with members of the audience invited to sit opposite her and contemplate. These people and their lives are the crux of the story. One is Arky Levin, a composer whose wife is in a nursing home and who has prevented him from visiting her there with a court order, despite their happy marriage. Arky is a solitary, distant person given to music but little else and at a loss visits MoMA every day and finds insight and into life, his own and theirs, in the interactions of the visitors and the artist. There is also Jane, recently widowed, and Brittica, a Chinese Art PhD student and Healayas a black art critic and former girlfriend of Arky's music partner.

It's a clever, liminal novel that straddles fact and fiction and delves deeply into art but the intense originality of each character, all of whom are remarkable and uncommon made the story feel over-contrived and effortful.

I don't know much about art but I remember reading an article about Marina Abramovic's "The Artist Is Present" and being fascinated by the concept. Heather Rose tells this story beautifully, intertwining the experiences of a host of supporting characters with the artist's own background. I found the novel intriguing, fresh and a lovely read.

Marina Abramović is a living woman whose life and work have been skilfully interwoven into the narrative of Australian author Heather Rose’s 2017 Stella prize-winning novel, The Museum of Modern Love – a book the writer describes as “a strange hybrid of fact and fiction”.

A Serbian-born performance artist, Abramović is renowned for her endurance pieces, often exploring physical limits and mental possibilities. Rose’s story orbits her 2010 exhibition, The Artist is Present, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in which she sat perfectly still at a table, in silence, for 75 days while members of the public took turns to sit opposite and gaze into her eyes.

The fictional characters in this story are those who come to participate in (or merely watch) the performance, some of whom are facing emotional challenges in their lives. Arky Levin, for instance, is a film composer separated from his sick wife, who has asked him to keep a troubling promise. Unable to settle to his work he one day wanders into The Atrium at MoMA and is mesmerised by Marina Abramovic’s bizarrely powerful installation. He begins to attend every day, simply to watch the artist and the people with whom she interacts. He meets others drawn to the exhibit, and gradually makes decisions about what he must do to move on with his life.

Others include the recently widowed Jane Miller, a middle school art history teacher from Georgia; Brittica van der Sar, a Chinese doctoral student from Amsterdam who is writing her dissertation on Abramovic; and Healayas Breen, a stunningly beautiful art critic and singer raised as a Muslim in Paris – every one of them, for a variety of reasons, susceptible to Abramovic’s unfathomable aura.

Narrated by an unknown but benevolent storyteller, Rose’s extraordinary novel raises questions about humanity, intimacy and the creative imagination. It’s a cerebral work that resonates with intense but concealed emotion and challenges the reader’s perceptions of the boundary between art and life.

This is the Australian author’s seventh novel – her first being White Heart published in 1999. The Museum of Modern Love took 11 years to write, and in that time, she met Abramović only once, although she took part in the original performance on four occasions. She sought and was given permission by the artist to her include her as a character in the book. Abramović was reportedly “pleased” with the finished novel.

This book is an ode to the power of art, as it revolves around a cast of characters who are connected to and impacted by Marina Abramović's "The Artist is Present":

(Photo)
Abramović with the last sitter, curator Klaus Biesenbach; Rights: MoMA/Marco Anelli

More than 850,000 people have come to attend the 75 day performance piece in which the Serbian artist sat opposite 1,554 visitors at the MoMA, silently looking at them. (In the picture, you see Abramović with the last sitter, curator Biesenbach; Rights: MoMa/Marco Anelli.)

The novel's protagonists are Arky, a composer whose terminally ill wife does not want him to neglect his work because of her, and Jane, a fiftysomething art teacher from the Midwest who has recently lost her husband. Both of them are grief-stricken when they meet at Abramović's show, but don't worry, this doesn't turn into some cheesy love story: Rather, Rose depicts how Arky, Jane and other visitors like a young PhD student, a radio journalist and a butcher, are affected by the performace, how art helps them to contemplate their lives and connect with their emotions, and how they - who came as strangers - find ways to connect to each other.

At the same time, Rose channels Abramović, imagines how she might feel, draws on artworks from her whole career to reveal the artist as a person and to mirror her cast of characters, talks about Abramović's family history, her love to German artist Ulay with whom she collaborated for twelve years, and introduces some other real people who have worked with Abramović, like Klaus Biesenbach whom you see in the picture above as well as Marco Anelli who took the photo. Also, prepare to be surprised by who the narrator is, which is slowly revealed throughout the novel.

If you don't love Abramović and believe in the transformative power of art after reading this book, I'm sorry to inform you, but you're probably beyond help. The only weakness of the book is that Rose sometimes tends to overexplain the impact of the works she discusses and to interpret aspects that are clear anyway or should remain ambivalent in order to give the reader some room to contemplate the art and relate to it on a personal level. But all in all, I loved this book: Rose manages to take a wonderful piece of visual art and turn it into literature, and the author's heart and her belief in the power of art shows on every page.

In case you want to know more about 2010's "The Artist is Present", here's an article written by Colm Tóibín who also sat with Abramović: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/04...
There's also a documentary about the performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcmcE...

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose is about performance art and it weaves together fact and fiction.

‘A human life is short and yet filled with moments of wonder and convergence.’

I don’t get performance art. I just don’t. I’m the kind of person who would say to Tracey Emin: ‘just tidy the bed, for goodness’ sake.’ I did a lot of reading up about Marina Abramovic before I started this book and a little part of me shuddered. And then I read the book – and was blown away by it. Go figure.

Heather Rose blends fact and fiction: based around Abramovic’s 2010 art piece ‘The Artist is Present’, where Abramovic sat for 7 hours a day over 75 days and invited people to come and sit opposite her to stare at each other, wordlessly, there are ‘real’ characters and fictional ones who are caught up in the event. Central to the narrative is the figure of Arky Levin, a film composer whose wife Lydia has become seriously ill and has banned him from visiting her in her care home, and his daughter Alice, who cannot understand her father’s distance and seemingly unwillingness to fight for his wife. Levin has been commissioned to write the score for a Japanese animated film, and so we have another strand in the creative process at work, as well as musings on different cultures. Then we have Brittika van der Sar, a Dutch Ph.D. student who is doing her research on Marina Abramovic; there is Jane Miller, a recently widowed woman who has come to visit New York from her home in Georgia; there are art critics and Abramovic’s entourage; there is the ghost of Abramovic’s mother watching over proceedings. And there is a narrator, an ‘I’ who pops in and out of the story, and who seems to be some sort of Muse or angel: ‘I am assigned to stand beside them – memoirist, intuit, animus, good spirit, genius, whim that I am.’

As the various characters meet and interact, the novel poses searching questions about the nature of art and its purpose in today’s society; about the role of the artist him/herself; and about love, and relationships, and family, and the simple fact of being a human being. To return to my opening points: I don’t get performance art, but whether you view the mass-viewing of Abramovic’s piece as a semi-religious, quasi-cult happening, or genuine art, you can’t fail to be caught up in the sheer vitality of the atmosphere. This is a slow, languid book, which doesn’t attempt to do anything other than match the passing of time unfolding over the course of the 75 days. It is a book that deserves to be read slowly, appreciating Heather Rose’s extraordinary lyricism and compassion. It is a novel full of characters who are changed, transformed, altered by their shared experiences, where lives converge and moments of wonder are glimpsed.

I absolutely fell in love with this book, and will shamelessly badger my friends and family to read it. It took a while for it to be published in the US and UK after its 2016 release in Australia, where it won the Stella Prize (for writing by Australian women in all genres) but I’m so glad it’s now widely available to all. A meditative, bold, moving journey into art and the deepest human emotions, I can’t recommend this enough. Totally deserving 5 stars from me.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

I'm sorry but I really did not connect with this book. It is fiction based around a real life art installation, where an artist sat at a table and engaged non verbally with memebers of the public. In the narrative our observer spends time watching and describing and speculating about individual gallery visitors and their lives. Not for me.

Good read. Enjoyed it.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Orion Publishing for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review

Based loosely around the real life performance artist, Marina Abramovic, this weaves fact and fiction together to create a very readable story/discussion around ideas of performance art, music and art in general.
Art can be difficult, and I sensed as I read that some people might really dislike so much fuss over Marina's performance which was, at it's essence, a woman sitting on a chair day after day looking at other people coming to sit with her. But Rose manages to explain and describe many of the feelings people have around her performance, and the responses we see different characters have to the performance seem believable and genuine. Performance art can seem ridiculous, silly or not-real-art, but Rose deals with it sensitively, and I felt I came away with a real appreciation for what Abramovic was doing.
I liked the mix of characters, and although it's talking about artistic concepts, and music composition, it's a book that is very easy, and moving, to read.

The Museum of Modern Love is a masterpiece about a work of art. It's straight into my top ten favourite reads.

Heather Rose has written an achingly clever novel of ideas and passions, perfect for anyone who has ever felt unable to explain their feelings of love, hate, loss, lust, confusion, joy, incomprehension, admiration and/or the need for a nice meal out somewhere. I can't promise you will be any better at explaining your feelings after reading this, but I'm quietly confident you will at least leave the Atrium with an overwhelming sense of belonging. It's like having an MOT on your humanity and being sent off with the roadmap to where your tribe is hanging out.

The thing which astonished me most is how long it has taken for The Museum of Modern Love to reach the UK market. Highly recommended to anyone who has ever enjoyed reading a novel. Beseechingly recommended to anyone who, like me, loves Siri Hustvedt, Peter Carey and Francesca Jakobi.

With many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for allowing me to see an advance copy of this book.