A Review of Heather Rose’s “The Museum of Modern Love”
Art for Art’s Sake
What is art? That’s sort of the question behind Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love, a tale of an artist being inspired into action by another artist. The story is a mix of fact and fiction. The fact part is that it is set in New York City of the year 2010 where real-life performance artist Marina Abramović staged an exhibition where she sat sit for 75 days, and invited art patrons to sit with her. Fiction is blurred into this with the character of Arky Levin, a film composer struggling with a little bit of writer’s block whose wife has had a stroke. She is now residing in a palliative care home outside of the city, and has instructed Arky (prior to her incapacitation) not to visit her. He is lured to Abramović’s exhibition and manages to come back for days on end, fascinated with it. He meets a widow named Jane, and while you might expect a romance to blossom, especially given the novel’s name, it disappointingly doesn’t and Jane returns to the state of Georgia to live her life without her husband.
The novel is told from multiple viewpoints, including Abramović’s dead mother. The narrator, though, is an unseen, age-old presence, a spirit that is probably as old as art itself. Thus, questions of God and spirituality and how you can find it through art are raised. In the end, this is a novel about a lot of things — how to live without the presence of your spouse being one of them — and the result is that The Museum of Modern Love, while enjoyable enough, is a bit muddled. In a sense, by blurring the lines of reality and truth, maybe this is a novel about what is real and what is artifice? I don’t really think so, but it’s a curious and experimental move on Rose’s part. However, what she’s trying to get at with this book is a little unclear.
In fact, the book is a bit of a bore, save the Arky parts, because it is all about abstract art. To me, this kind of art smacks of pretentiousness and is highly academic, so it is of no use to me. There are no explorations of pop culture, aside from references to films that Arky would have liked to have scored (The Lord of the Rings trilogy being chief among them), and there really isn’t a meditation here on the value of low art versus high art, which would have made the book more interesting. In its place, we get reams of pages on previous Abramović artworks — probably to set things in context — and, after finding out that some of these works are probably real (one involving the choice of an audience member to shoot Abramović), it just seems so outlandish that one would think it would probably work better as fiction.
Again, Arky’s story is the most interesting of the batch. He is clearly lonely and the book’s publicity materials cite him as being “unlikable” (which I didn’t really find to be the case) and it’s interesting to see how he uses his art — and the art of Abramović’s — to make sense of what’s going on in his life. His daughter is estranged from him, and though he tries to repair the relationship, it’s not clear by novel’s end if he has, in fact, done so. Still, you wind up cheering for Arky and hope that something good happens to him that doesn’t involve the breaking of his heart — which is probably why the aforementioned romance doesn’t really work out or transpire as such.
Other than that, The Museum of Modern Love is murky at best. We see things through the eyes of an ex-wife whose deceased husband was a colleague of Arky’s, as she’s something of an arts journalist, but her role in the book seems superfluous, and is just there to contextualize the work of Abramović. There is so much Abramović in this book that one wonders if it would have worked just as well with a fictitious artist in her stead. In fact, this book really feels like a short story that’s been padded out to novel length. Not much of interest really happens other than what’s happening with Arky, so one wonders if the volume was shorn of its accruements, if it would have worked better.
As you can tell, I’m a little on the fence with this work. As a book that’s about art, it is seemingly very extremist and puts a value on the type of art that few people can really understand. As a book about love, well, no love really exists in this world — aside from the love one has towards another who is either dead or is about to be. As a book about spirituality, I found the whole concept of sitting still with another person who is entirely still to be a bit hokey, though I have to admit this is something I sometimes do by going to a meditation circle — but that, at least, isn’t about art as it is about inviting the spiritual in.
In the end, The Museum of Modern Love is a bit of a disappointment, a squandered opportunity — though it is readable enough. Aside from Arky, I didn’t really care much about any of these characters as they all seemed rather hoity-toity and self-absorbed. The really interesting characters have lost something — though the word “interesting” doesn’t really extend to Abramović, who becomes something of her own character in the second half of the book. We get little insight into the artistic process, or what makes artists tick. This is a bit of a surprise for a book about art. This is a flawed, somehow ultimately non-absorbing tale — and its relative brevity as a novel is either its strength or something of a weakness because a lot more could be said. Maybe this just wasn’t the type of book for me. Still, I found The Museum of Modern Love to be a bit of a disappointment because of the things it lacks. It may have a soul, but it seems rather empty. Put another way, why raise the prospect of this being a book about love, when the only love to be found is through art? The title is, therefore, misleading — which pretty much sums up how I feel about this lightly-written but all too serious book that is kind of interesting, but doesn’t have the light touch that the title promises.
Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love was published by Algonquin Books on November 27, 2018.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands’ icon below) and share it with your followers.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
