Tuesday 8 January, 2019
An Artist Who Explores Emotional Pain Inspires a Novel That Does the Same
Heather Rose’s novel, “The Museum of Modern Love,” is apart-fact, part-fiction tale of art, love, grief and convergence.
Nov. 26, 2018
Credit Joe Wigdahl forThe New York Times
SYDNEY, Australia — Heather Rose checked into the ChelseaHotel after a long-haul flight from Hobart, Australia, flung her bag in herroom and sped to the Museum of Modern Art.
This was the spring of 2010, and Rose had a mission: tostare into the eyes of Marina Abramovic, the Serbian-born performance artist,in the atrium of the gallery.
“I thought I could just walk up and be the next person,”said Rose, the novelist whose new book, “The Museum of Modern Love,” will bepublished by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing,in the United States on Nov. 27.
“I’d never seen people running for art,” said Rose, 54, whor*members people racing to get to the front of the line.
Rose was one of 850,000 people who attended Abramovic’s75-day performance, “The Artist Is Present,” in which visitors waited for hoursto take a chair opposite the then 63-year-old artist and share a meditativegaze with her for any length of time. People described transformativeexperiences. Many wept through their mute encounters.
Marina Abramovic’s art performance, “The Artist Is Present,” is where the lonely characters of “The Museum of Modern Love” all independently arrive.
Marina Abramovic’s art performance, “The Artist Is Present,”is where the lonely characters of “The Museum of Modern Love” all independentlyarrive.
Credit RuthFremson/The New York Times
“It was as if they were seen in a way they’re not normallyseen,” Rose said. She returned every day for three weeks. She watched thecrowds and saw others came back, too.
This atrium and this exhibition, with the silent Abramovicat its heart, is where the lonely characters of “The Museum of Modern Love” allindependently arrive. Just as Rose was, they are inexplicably drawn to thisrefuge of unspoken, intimate connection and stillness in Midtown Manhattan.
This part-fact, part-fiction tale of art, love, grief andconvergence is Rose’s fourth adult novel (she is also a co-author of the“Tuesday McGillicuddy” children’s series under the pen name Angelica Banks) andwon Australia’s Stella Prize in 2017.
The characters — including Arky Levin, a film composer whohasn’t visited his ill wife in months; a widow taking the vacation she and herhusband always meant to take together; and a grieving art critic finding solacein an affair with a married man — move through New York yearning to be seen.
In one desolate moment, Arky believes his estranged wife hasleft her toothbrush on the sink and searches high and low for his own,realizing days later it was his toothbrush he had seen and that he “onlyrecognized it in relation to Lydia’s.”
Questions of loss appear throughout the book, but Rosedoesn’t feel the need to resolve them. “It’s not trying to be definitive,”Professor Brenda Walker, the chairwoman of the 2017 Stella Prize judging panel,told me. “It’s trying to be open and thoughtful.”
CreditPatriciaWall/The New York Times
The book is narrated by an unnamed artist’s “muse,” anincorporeal angel-like being that’s assigned to watch over artists. Differentmuses have visited Rose for each of her books, she told me recently over dinnerat a Sydney restaurant. This one was patient, thankfully, as the novel took her11 years to write. (Other times, she said, it’s a little old woman with abamboo stick whacking her on the back, saying: “Write harder! Write longer!”)
She had become used to writing “around the edges of thedays,” juggling family and running an advertising agency she co-founded in1999. Thanks to various book prizes and a grant from the Australia Council in2017, Rose is now writing full time.
As a proud sixth-generation Tasmanian, Rose orders theTasmanian pinot noir with our meal, and effuses to me about the landscape: “Wehave thebestclouds in the world!”
This novel is her first not set in Tasmania, but she spiesunlikely connections between Manhattan — another island, she points out — andher home state.
Island culture “gives us a sense of identity, and maybe thatmakes us more robust in our creative output,” she said. “Big Apple, littleapple,” she affectionately calls Manhattan and Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.
The spark of the book came five years before “The Artist IsPresent.” Rose had never heard of Abramovic until she encountered photographs ofthe artist’s previous performance works at the National Gallery of Victoria inMelbourne, Australia, in 2005. She saw images from the 1988 work, “The Lovers,”in which Abramovic and her partner, Ulay, each walked more than a thousandmiles from different ends of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle andend their relationship.
Heather Rose was deeply moved by Marina Abramovic’s 1988work, “The Lovers,” in which Abramovic and her partner, Ulay, each walked morethat a thousand miles from different ends of the Great Wall of China to meet inthe middle and end their relationship.CreditThe Marina Abramovic Archives
“Instantly I thought, there’s a character for a novel,” Rosesaid. How could someone be so brave and courageous, she wondered, yet sovulnerable and romantic?
She tinkered with the idea for years (she published herthird novel, “The River Wife,” in the meantime). But it wasn’t until she satopposite Abramovic in MoMA that she realized she couldn’t fictionalize her.
“She’s too powerful, she’s too magnetic,” Rose said.“Nothing I could imagine would be more interesting than what she’s done withher life.”
Rose nervously wrote to the Sean Kelly Gallery, whichrepresents Abramovic, and got the artist’s blessing. Rather than relief, itbrought a fresh wave of anxiety for Rose. “I didn’t want to let her down in anyway,” she said.
Abramovic was not let down. “I really loved the story,” shetold me recently, and she wrote a glowing blurb that appears on the back of thebook.
Rose never interviewed Abramovic for the book (“It’s a bitlike breaking the fourth wall,” she said), but researched her lifemeticulously, thanks largely to the collection of materials belonging to DavidWalsh, the owner of the MONA gallery in Hobart.
While immersed in Abramovic’s four-decade career, Roseunderstood another reason she was drawn to the woman who had made an art out ofenduring extreme pain.
Rose has had an inherited arthritic condition sincechildhood, which has, many times, left her unable to walk for weeks. She’snever talked about it publicly.
“So actually, writing is really painful for me,” she said.“And so pain is one of those things I’ve had to befriend. I think of it as ahouse guest that’s stayed way too long.”
She ponders how much of herself she poured into the bookwithout even realizing it. Rose’s marriage ended six months before the novel’srelease in Australia, yet she had instinctively populated her book withresilient female characters rising above grief, suffering and recurringillness.
“I feel in retrospect that what I was writing was a kind ofblueprint for the sort of life I needed to live beyond the marriage, eventhough I had no idea the marriage was failing at the time.”
The book is launching with an event this week where it allbegan: at the atrium in the Museum of Modern Art, with Abramovic herself.
“I couldn’t quite believe that, honestly. I thought, she has a huge life, and this is just a little novel written by a Tasmanian,” Rose said.
“I’m still nervous to meet her,” she said, laughing. “I’m ahuge fan. The funny thing is, I wasn’t a fan when I first started. I was justcurious.”
Follow Tacey Rychter on Twitter:@taceyrychter.
