The Museum of Modern Love

August 1, 2018

In 2010, over a period of 75 days, real-life performance artist Marina Abramovic presented The Artist Is Present, in which she sat on a wooden chair at a table in the atrium of New York's Museum of Modern Art and stared into the eyes of the participants who lined up to sit across from her. This is not so much her story as it is that of the exhibit's fictional participants. Prominent among them is Arky Levin, a film composer seeking inspiration for his latest project, whose wife has moved into long-term care after suffering a stroke. Sitting nearby is recent widow and art teacher Jane Miller, who came to New York seeking solace and is mesmerized by the performance, by other audience members like Levin, and by the sitters, many of whom are moved to tears by the experience. VERDICT This captivating work explores the meaning of art in our lives and the ways in which it deepens our understanding of ourselves. As Hannah Rothschild did in The Improbability of Love, Australian author Rose also combines intriguing characters with a laser-sharp focus on art to produce a gem of a novel. [See Prepub Alert, 5/14/18.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 24, 2018
Rose’s clever, genre-bending hybrid of fact and fiction is an exploration of love and convergence set against the backdrop of a work of art performed by Marina Abramovic´ at MoMA in New York City in 2010. Troubled composer Arky Levin, whose absent wife is gravely ill, joins several other needy characters as they witness the Serbian artist sitting at a table in the museum, gazing into the eyes of anyone wishing to join her (as the artist really did in 2010, for over 700 hours over the course of a few months). He becomes friendly with Jane Miller, who has come from Georgia burdened with the death of her husband, but many others watch as well, and each is healed or transformed by the experience. Assisting the characters in unspooling their stories is a spirit or angel, guardian of the creatives Arky and Marina, the ghost of Marina’s mother Danica, and, most strangely, the artist herself. Rose dives into the head of Abramovic´ to muse upon the meaning of it all, which might appear controversial had Abramovic´ not given the author complete freedom to appropriate. Taken together, these points of view succeed in creating a portrait of human desire and human failing, but perhaps most profoundly, human striving for something greater than self. Rose’s melancholy book resonates with emotion, touching on life’s great dilemmas—death, vocation, love, art.

September 15, 2018
Artist Marina Abramovic's marathon 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art becomes the focus of Rose's tremblingly earnest novel, the Australian writer's first novel for adults to be published in the U.S."This is not a story of potential," announces the ominously angelic narrator who hovers over the novel, half muse and half ghost. "It is a story of convergence." And so we meet Arky Levin, a noted composer of film scores, who has found himself unmoored after separating from his beloved wife. The circumstances are complicated: Incapacitated from a genetic condition, she has retreated to a home in the Hamptons, given their medical-student daughter power of attorney, and ordered Arky never to see her. It is in this state that he finds his way to MoMA, where Abramovi? is staging The Artist Is Present, for which she sits, still and in silence, as audience members take turns sitting across from her. There he meets Jane, a tourist and recent widow transfixed by the performance. She is not alone. There is Brittika, a Dutch graduate student writing her dissertation on Abramovic. There is Healayas, an art critic and old friend of Arky's--once, she was the girlfriend of his longest-time collaborator, who betrayed them both. The performance is the gravitational pull of the novel, the point of convergence; no one emerges unchanged. Abramovic, too, is a character here: Large swathes of the book contend with her childhood and previous work, situating The Artist Is Present in her past. (Abramovic gave Rose permission to use her as a character.) It's a bold proposition--Rose does not shy away from grappling with questions about the meaning and purpose of art--but too often, the answers to those questions tend to feel like platitudes about art and suffering. "Art will wake you up," Abramovic's childhood tutor announces. "Art will break your heart." Art, Jane muses, offers "a kind of access to a universal wisdom." The real power of the book, though, lies not in its philosophizing but in the unsteady tenderness between its characters.A book that attempts to walk the thin line between the trite and the profound--and sometimes succeeds.

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Starred review from November 1, 2018
A strange hybrid of fact and fiction is what Australian writer Rose calls this deeply involving novel inspired by famed performance artist Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present?a now-legendary 2010 work at New York's Museum of Modern Art during which she sat in rigorous stillness for 75 long days, facing 1,545 people who, one-by-one, sat across from her in eye-to-eye communion. An intriguing cast of characters are drawn to and mesmerized by this silent ritual, primary among them Arky Levin. A successful film composer, he is now engulfed by guilt and anxiety as his wife, a renowned architect, struggles with a debilitating blood disease in a nursing home. Other regular attendees include a recently widowed, friendly, middle-school art teacher from Georgia; a Japanese-Dutch PhD candidate with neon-pink hair, red lips, purple contacts; a strikingly beautiful black, Muslim art critic; the photographer chronicling every sitting; and the ghost of Abramovic's Serbian war-hero mother. Each offers an illuminating perspective on the proceedings, adding to the mystery and power of Abramovic's life and performance, and engendering profound questions about the divide between artist and art, artist and audience, self and creativity, love and spirit. Rose's emotionally rich and thought-provoking homage and inquiry should prompt readers to seek out Abramovic's dramatic memoir, Walk through Walls (2016)(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)