The Museum of Modern Love

by Heather Rose,

Allen & Unwin, 2016

Heather Rose’s award winning novel is a brave and audacious riff on the importance of art and creativity. How art aids growth and reflection while providing context and meaning to life. Art is presented as an almost cosmic entity, an organic swirling force that can be tapped into by artists and ‘facilitators’ but always impacting on the living, the dying, the dead. Characters in those three states feature textually.

At the centre of the narrative are Marina Abramovic a prolific, enduring performance artist and an unnamed eternal creative muse who hovers over the narrative offering linkages, interpretation and philosophical discussion. Rose uses ‘The Artist Is Present’ MoMA installation as her focal point. All the characters radiate and crossover from that 2010 seventy-five-day event in NYC.

'The Museum Of Modern Love' Blue period: The striking Op Art referencing cover against my architectural Italian glass wall referencing Art Deco and 'Scarface' era Miami. Showing again, that art is in everything. It is in every layer of our lives.

The narrative is largely about the exhibition and the work of Abramovic but to leave the confines of MoMA, and to ground the themes, there is a sub plot about a married couple going through a crisis. The couple are also creatives: a composer and architect respectively.

The characters are divided into the two dovetailing narratives. The first group of characters are primarily concerned with ‘The Artist is Present’: Marina and her troop of agents, assistants, helpers and dead mother. The second group: the family and friends of Arky Levin (composer). Some characters cross between the two narratives through their professions and the actual exhibition space.

Abramovic, through her exhibition, acts as the overseeing muse or angel as well. Her act of sitting still for seventy-five days inspires and ‘unblocks’ Arky Levin (composer) and the recently widowed Jane Miller (teacher ‘facilitator’). Through almost daily attendance at ‘The Artist Is Present’ Arky is ‘unblocked’ professionally and personally and Jane is 'unblocked' personally deciding to undertake her own version of Abramovic’s, ‘The Lovers’, with her departed husband.

As a writer, the novel appealed to me for its insight into artistic process and its offering of a holistic, big picture, of a world made of art.

‘His thoughts abhorred a vacuum but his heart responded to the blank canvas. Every song, every painting, every book, every idea that changed the world – all these things came the unknowable and beautiful void.’

There is great discussion of the physical and mental cost of art. As a writer, I had never considered before the impact on the kidneys and other organs of great periods of time sitting. Maybe the novel will cause a ‘Marina Abramovic Fitness Regime for Sedentary Creatives’. I think we need one.

‘The Museum of Modern Love’ is the deserving winner of the 2017 Stella Prize both as an artistic tour de force from Rose and as a reflection on the impact of the crowning achievement of ‘The Artist Is Present’ by contemporary woman artist Marina Abramovic. The genders are very significant to me – a woman writer and mother of daughters – in this era of increasing misogyny. Indeed, one of the passages from the book that struck me the most was:

‘I will never sit for seventy-five days, Francesca thought. I will never slice my stomach with a razor blade or eat a kilo of honey … But because you do this, Marina, I am stronger. I am more certain of that every day. You live your art and it is inseparable from you. And with it you bring me courage. You are a woman and this is a fact. No matter what people make of anything else, your gender is unequivocal.’

Music features heavily through Arky Levin’s composer profession, allowing discussion of music and its effects on wider creativity through different eras and styles: jazz, classical and soundtracks as well as contemporary performers such as Leonard Cohen and Anthony and the Johnson’s. In writing this review I had ‘The Crying Light’ by the latter as background.

The Promise Seed by Cass Moriarty
UQP 2015

To tell you the truth, I kinda felt sorry for the kid. There was something in his eyes that stirred a memory inside me. For a moment, I was him, I was that boy hiding by the woodshed . . .

An elderly man, living alone in the suburbs, thinks back on his life - the missed opportunities, the shocking betrayals, the rare moments of joy. When his ten-year-old neighbour hides in his garden one afternoon, they begin an unexpected friendship that offers a reprieve from their individual struggles. The boy, often left on his own by his mother, finds solace in gardening and playing chess with his new friend, who is still battling the demons of his past.

As a sinister figure enters the boy's life, he must choose between a burgeoning friendship and blood ties. Can the old man protect the boy he has come to know - and redeem the boy he once was?

I read ‘The Promise Seed’ over six months ago and it’s a testament to the strength of Cass Moriarty’s writing that so much of it is still with me. It’s no surprise it was shortlisted for the People’s Choice Award at the Queensland Literary Awards in 2016. It is a masterful, moving and ultimately life affirming novel about the hope found through chosen families. It concerns an old man living next door to a young boy with a difficult home life and their growing friendship. It’s about impacts outside of our control and coping with life choices foisted on you.

The characters are nameless, a Brechtian device that highlights both the character's ‘roles’ and the sad fact that while this is 'their story', it is a story tragically echoed in the lives of many others. It is principally the story of the friendship between the Old Man and the Boy, but has there ever been a more aptly named character than ‘Snake’?

‘The Promise Seed’ is about difficult subjects: child, institutional and elder abuse, and system failure. However, to counter the heavy subject matter, Moriarty cleverly injects a language or renewal through seasonal change, growth, replenishing and rebirth in both the literal ‘seed’ and the chickens and the symbolic 'seeds' or skills the old man also shares with the boy. This imagery and the associated narrative tangents gives welcome relief to the reader from the spiraling unravelling of the boy’s home life.

The old man teaches the boy both another way to be as an adult (an alternative to the life foisted on him by his mother’s bad choices) and a set of skills to find peace and solace, a calm place away from the horrors of his home life.

Moriarty deploys beautiful prose especially in her depiction of the natural world and the renewal of the man’s garden and chickens. This beauty acts a balm to the reader and as a rest point in between the depicting of the grim realities of both childhoods: the old man’s in the past and the boy’s in the here and now.

The depth of research Moriarty employed to understand how the social services system operates / fails in these cases is clear and well depicted which adds a further layer of strength to the novel. It is a story of these characters but also the story of thousands of others who have been interviewed by principals, police, social workers, and all the other stops along the intervention and monitoring chain.

The simple die-cut cover design evokes the age old wisdom and parable nature of the novel.

I can’t wait to read Cass Moriarty’s next book, ‘Parting Words’ which comes out in August this year. I will do that review immediately.

Review by Sarah Ridout, 'Le Chateau', Echo Publishing, 2016