Heather Rose's The museum of modern love: What is art, what is love?

We met this month at Muse Restaurant/Bar/Bookshop. As we did last year, we started an hour earlier than usual, dined first, then discussed the book, and followed that with coffee and dessert. Nine attended, and although noise (to which we contributed!) was a concern early on, the evening went well. We appreciated Muse staff's considerate service in organising for us to dine upstairs in the restaurant and then move to a circle of chairs in the bookshop for our discussion.

So now the book, Heather Rose's The museum of modern love. It was inspired by performance artist Marina Abramović, and particularly her 75-day performance piece at MoMA, The artist is present, and its narrative comprises two main parallel strands. One features the real artist Marina, and the other the fictional composer Arky Levin, who is at a crossroads in his professional and personal life.

We started with everyone sharing their overall impressions:

• Most loved the book, one calling it fabulous.
• A couple took a while to get into the writing, but enjoyed the different voices, the description of the various sitters, and the characters and their relationships.
• One launched into reading without having read the blurb, and wondered initially what it was all about: was it about the purpose of art or perhaps about Levin's journey?
• Those who had seen the documentary film, Marina Abramović: The artist is present, before, during or after reading the book, found that it enhanced understanding. For one it pretty much reversed her assessment from initially seeing performance art, particularly Marina's, as narcissistic, sado-masochistic, exhibitionist, to being something of interest and value.
• One said that for a book with no real plot, it was fantastic, and enjoyed the way Rose presented the parallel lives of Marina and Arky Levin.
• Several had little experience of performance art and/or found it confronting, if not stomach-turning, but enjoyed Rose's exploration of art (of all sorts, including music), and her analysis of people's feelings (including the conversations among the observers at The artist is present.)
• One was fascinated by the whole "business" of art, and the number of people who "feed" off the artist's work.
• One saw Marina as fragile, until she saw the documentary showing her to be a strong, powerful woman.
• One commented how privileged we are to be able to spend time discussing such issues as art and love.

What is it about?

Having said all this, was there anything more to discuss? Surprisingly, yes! There were the themes. Is the book is essentially about the meaning of art. Some felt it was a major theme, others less so.

The meaning of art?

We talked about how Marina's performance art pares art down to its very minimum. What does this mean? We shared different ideas about art as presented in the book, including that art:

• gets to "the heart of life",
• is about being able to see the world differently, 
• is about making connections, 
• needs to be about changing ideology, and
• explores what it means to be human. 

The book explores all of these, through a wide variety of art forms - performance, music, architecture and of course fiction.

This led, naturally, to some discussion of the artist, which both Marina and Arky Levin represent. For a performance artist, they are the work. In The artist is present, Marina is the connection, the focus. She wants, we felt, to be loved (see next theme!!), has a big ego, which is something we agreed you probably need to be an artist. Artists can't get bogged down in daily life, but need to be selfish. There is an irony here because to create great art you have little time for love, but without love you (and your art) can be empty. Is this the choice Levin must make at the end?

The importance of love?

Given the title, the book is clearly about love. We talked about Arky Levin and his wife Lydia, about how hopeless/weak Levin seemed to be. His daughter Alice is disappointed that he passively accepts Lydia's instruction - her court order - that he not visit her once she enters the final stages of her hereditary blood disease. However, some argued that while he does seem passive, it's also clear that Lydia liked to be in control. Regardless, we agreed that Levin is stalled, and needs to do something.

Romantic love (of which there are several examples in the book) is not the only type of love explored. Other forms include mother love. Marina's mother, Danica, appears in the book in ghost form. We thought Rose was courageous (see next theme!) to throw in a ghost. Rose suggests that this very tough mother did love Marina (in her own way). We also discussed the fact that, while Marina probably got her spiritual/emotional side from her grandmother, Danica's harsh treatment likely gave her the discipline and endurance she needs for her art! (Is the pain of a harsh childhood worth the art though? An age-old question.) 

We discussed the open ending. What does it say about love versus art? Does it mean that love has triumphed over art? Or something more complex about the relationship between love and art? In the final paragraphs Levin, in choosing his love for Lydia, embraces uncertainty and 

his heart responded to the blank canvas.

Courage

Another theme is courage. It is also the subject of Part Six, which starts with the ee cummings epigraph: 

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

Many characters display courage, from Marina's doing what she does to Levin's having to make a decision, from those who choose to sit opposite Marina to others, like the warm-hearted Jane who doesn't sit but nonetheless makes her own decision at the end. 

We felt that Rose, the author, was also courageous in choosing to write about a living character, and that Marina was courageous in giving Rose unconditional permission to write about her. (We would expect nothing less of Marina though, having seen the documentary.) 

And the writing

We all enjoyed the writing, from the opening sentence:

He was not my first musician, Arky Levin. 

Not only is it attention-grabbing but it suggests an intriguing narrator, who turns out to be a sort of artist's muse, a "good spirit, whim ... House elf to the artists". Another courageous act on Rose's part, but it works. This narrator is not overdone, becoming less visible through the middle part of the novel, and reappearing near the end to guide us to the conclusion.

The main narrative is carried by the various characters - Arky Levin; the (loved-by-us-all) recently widowed Jane who comes to New York and is quickly captivated by Marina's performance; art critic Healayas; Dutch PhD student Brittika; and a host of others. Between them they tease out ideas about art and love, and they create a vivid picture of The artist is present and what it meant to those who were there. It clearly was something! We all wondered whether we'd have been brave enough to sit (as over 1500 people did, including Heather Rose) or just been one of the 850,000 spectators!

Such a beautiful book - to read and discuss. We all learnt something.

Charlotte Wood's The natural way of things

When our group met this month to discuss Charlotte Wood's Stella Prize winning novel The natural way of things, it was a case of the realists facing off against the willing suspenders of disbelief, with a couple of fence-sitters in between - and ne'er the twain did meet. It all made, however, for a lively, but always respectful, discussion!

The realists couldn't work out why the ten women hadn't ganged up to overpower their two guards, why they didn't work out they could dig their way out under the electric fence. The women were twits, one said. They should have fought back. She also felt the rabbit trapping was far more successful than you'd expect and that the book had the longest mushroom season ever! It just wasn't plausible. The willing suspenders, on the other hand, talked more about about the book in terms of metaphor, allegory and parable, though they didn't all agree on which of these the book represents, if any! Some also felt that Wood, in the opening scenes, showed the disempowering of the women, explaining why they didn't fight back.

One issue we grappled with was some vagueness in the plot. It's the story of 10 women plucked ("foolishly lured and tricked") from their normal lives and transported to a nightmarish place in the outback where they are imprisoned behind an electric fence and controlled, labour-camp style, by two boorish men, bruiser Boncer and the preening Teddy. We are not given the full background but it's clear that the women are being scapegoated for their sexuality. Some had been raped or assaulted while for others the sex had been consensual (think affair with a politician or the flight attendant in a “mile-high” situation). In all cases, though, the women are being punished to protect the man/men. As time passes, and as circumstances at the facility change, the women move from disbelief and anger, through resignation, to a sort of acceptance and an attempt to make the best of their situation.

Some members struggled with the story, with its darkness and/or with the lack of full disclosure about parts of the plot. How did the women let themselves be taken there? Who had taken them? Who were Boncer and Teddy waiting for? One member particularly hates women being presented as victims, which resulted in her disliking the book. She was frustrated by their impotence. Most of those who liked the novel, agreed that they initially felt a little uncertain, for various reasons, but on reflection found the journey worthwhile, seeing it as a provocative, absorbing story about women and power, sexuality, femininity and femaleness.

Dystopia 

Is The natural way of things a dystopian novel, like, say, Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale? Not all were comfortable with this idea, feeling it was too near, too real, "not that much removed from our reality", to be a true dystopia. Others felt dystopia simply means a world characterised by all that is bad or negative, and that this book satisfies that.

But what are Wood's targets? In some dystopian novels, they are clear - climate change, totalitarian regimes, for example - but it's more nebulous here. The novel was inspired by the idea that women are still being abused and scapegoated, but Wood's focus is not the trauma they experience, but in the way "femaleness" and "womanhood" is (mis)constructed in our society.  Complicating our pinpointing of targets is that partway through we realise that guards/gaolers Boncer and Teddy are also victims: this is not a simple gender dichotomy story. It's more complex, about current social system/mores that allow powerful people (more often men) to control and manipulate the less powerful (more often women).

And what about that ending? Did it offer any hope? Some of us thought Yolanda's action at the end showing her rejection of society's power plays, and Verla's finally relinquishing her long-held beliefs and attitudes about her feminine powers, contained hope.

And two words force their way through everything in Verla, pushing through all these months, through failure and fear and degradation, fighting through this last defeat. They thrust up through Verla's centre, bursting into flower in her mouth. Two words: I refuse.

But others just hated that designer handbag scene, and the way the other women leapt unthinkingly into what they wanted to see/believe.

Characters 

The book has a lot characters, and we don't get to properly know them all. However, we liked getting to know the two 19-year-olds, Yolanda (rabbiter) and Verla (mushroom gatherer), and were able to feel sympathy for them. In becoming the hunter, Yolanda took back some power for herself, a member suggested, making this book a metaphorical story of power, rather than a psychologically-focused story.

We did think, though, that, psychologically, Hetty represents abused person's behaviour. We wondered about the grotesque doll the women make for her. What does its grotesqueness mean? That what she was doing represented a perverted sort of nurturing?

Landscape and nature 

Landscape description and nature imagery feature throughout in the novel. One member shared a 2010 interview with Wood in which she commented on her frequent reference to birds, saying they represent flight, escape, freedom - as they do here too:

Outside the cockatoos are starting up for the evening. Boncer sits, staring at Yolanda, running there leash slowly through his hands.

However, in this novel there are also hawks and crows, suggesting "prey" and "death", which is also relevant here.

Verla keeps seeing a white horse, which is her personal escape image, perhaps referencing the idea of a "knight on a white charger" as she believed her "cabinet minister" would save her.

Another member suggested that Yolanda's gradual reliance on and ultimate "return" to nature might be Wood suggesting that human survival is closely tied to a positive relationship with landscape and nature.

So, what is the "natural" way of things? There's irony in the title's suggestion that women "somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves", that they lured abandonment, abduction, mistreatment. Natural? No way!

The strays by Emily Bitto

After a lovely tour of a gorgeous new home we settled down to discuss this month’s read of the debut and award winning novel by Australian author, Emily Bitto,  entitled The strays. 

Discussion began with our opinions of the book. The fairly unanimous opinion was that everyone enjoyed the read. The style of writing and turn of phrase was applauded. However, one or two members thought it was not up to the standard of an award. A couple of us felt it was a ‘little flat’. Too many things were not fully explained.  For instance, why did Lily explore the art scene in later life. (Afterwards I thought it was obvious – Lily associated art with glamour, intelligence and excitement.)

The novel is loosely based on the Bohemian lifestyle of John and Sunday Reed at Heide (a former dairy farm on the outskirts of Melbourne), in the 1930s. The strays novel begins in the thirties.  Sidney Nolan could be the model for Jerome?  Heide is now the Museum of Modern Art of Australia and is a beautiful place to visit.

One of the problems with this book was the implausibility of some of the characters. Lily’s parents were particularly hard to fathom or believe even for the times. They seemed to have a sense of relief that their daughter was not their responsibility. They were very conservative so it was surprising that they could allow their only daughter to live with an artist and his family. We discussed Lily and her feeling of being an outsider. Members of the group could relate to that feeling. One member related her experience of meeting people who she thought were extremely wealthy. They had intelligent  conversation and lots of house guests, and to her it was exciting to be in their company. This was very similar to Lily’s experience with the Trentham family. Lily was only an observer living with these people.  This becomes even more obvious at the end of the book when she was talking to Bea and the others about writing a memoir.

Living with the Trenthams was a life of possibility for Lily.  The house and the huge meals all seemed effortless so different from her lonely boring life with her parents.

One member enjoyed the book but had reservations.   It reminded her of hippie life in Byron Bay where life was full of strays.  Another member was wondering what it was really about – angst of an artistic life or a clash between sensible suburbia and bohemian life.

Another member was very enthusiastic about this book – it reminded her of ‘Brideshead revisited’ and also ‘Atonement’.  She thought it was about family and desire and connection to people, parental responsibility and friendship between girls. One of the good facets of the novel was the way the author describes the cultural isolation (in art terms especially) of Melbourne at the time. The family were living in a bubble.

The Prologue is very important. Here the author talks about the:

heart’s magnetic field …the body’s silent communications with other bodies are unmapped and mysterious …Who knows, what we call instant attraction may be as random as the momentary synchrony of two hearts’ magnetic pulses.

Does this explain Eva and Lily’s friendship, or Lily’s attraction to the whole Trentham family?

Eva’s mother is another interesting character – she is not a sympathetic character and hopeless as a parent. Evan is a bad father. The dinner party conversations (with the extra members of the ‘family’) and their behavior shows how dysfunctional the family really is. No-one is interested in the children.

Bitto explains the relationships between the family members really well and how they are all under stress, and not healthy.

We discussed the girls' relationships – Lily and Bea, the sad and unloved Heloise, and Lily herself –and Jerome, the ‘devil’ in the ‘mix’?  These relationships reminded one reader of a relationship between Jack Thompson and 2 sisters. Apparently there is also an instance of the poet Shelley ‘having’ two young women. According to the Oxford Handbook online Shelley was possibly one of the ‘pro-feminist of the male writers’ of the time. 

Jerome is totally unremorseful, a good artist who was expected to make money. Why did society allow him to get away with ‘taking’ young girls? Why did the family not object sooner? Even if Lily had told would the family have acted sooner? These questions cannot be answered.

The whole episode of Jerome absconding with the girls reminded us of incidents concerning supposed obscene art and photographs of children by Bill Henson which were censored in 2008 by the Labor government. (The exhibition was at the Roslyn Oxley Gallery in Paddington.) Interestingly, none of us thought that Jerome kidnapped Eva and Heloise, but they presumably went of their own volition. Jerome was 24 and the girls were 15 and 13. This sort of behavior happens. Evan and Helena wanted to keep the community intact and wanted to believe that their life was possible longterm. (It didn’t work for the Reeds for very long either.)

Central to the community idea is that this lifestyle upsets lives – relationships happen which are not meant to happen – Jerome and the girls, especially Heloise. I suppose this is reinforced by Lily’s first marriage to her romantic artist husband which didn’t succeed.  Life was better with her more boring second partner, an economist.

The life of the Trenthams is not a good model for society we decided. It is good to have challenging people around but you had better lock up your daughters. So is the meaning of this book about coming to terms with the past? Lily’s parents’ behavior is inexplicable. The three Trentham daughters lacked boundaries which ruined their lives ultimately.

Clare Wright's The forgotten rebels of Eureka

October's meeting was more adventurous than usual with a last minute venue failure that saw us, adaptable like the women of Eureka, retiring to Tilley's Cafe in Lyneham. We settled into a capacious booth, purchased the necessary comestibles, and hunkered down to a good old round table discussion of this month's book, Clare Wright's Stella Prize winning The forgotten rebels of Eureka. We discovered that while Victorians had studied this event in some depth throughout their education, those of us from other states had studied it more cursorily, mostly in primary school, so our memories and knowledge were not necessarily strong.

Our reading and her writing

We started by discussing the different experience of reading history versus historical fiction. We've read several historical fiction novels over the years, including Eleanor Catton's The luminaries (of which we were reminded as it is set in the goldfields of New Zealand in the same period) and Hilary Mantel's two Cromwell novels. Members were aware of having to consciously change their mindset from reading a story framed around a defined set of characters to a book in which multiple people appear who may or may not carry through to the end of the book. The opening chapters of Wright's book introduces a large number of people and some worried about managing to remember them all. The need to remember a lot of "stuff" was what turned some off history at school! Others decided to go with the flow, and focus on the "story" or thesis Wright was presenting. We'll remember what we can, we thought - and, there was always the extensive index to refer to if needed.

We liked the expressiveness of Wright's writing, such as this description of George Black:

Black represented diggers who would no longer submit to tyranny; men who were desperate to asset their legitimacy after months of humiliation. The new codes smacked up against the old like waves against a cliff face. (p. 398)

Her writing beautifully captures life on the diggings. We felt we were there - living in tents in the cold, the wet, and the dusty dry. In addition to expanding our understanding of the Eureka Stockade, we saw the book as good social history. Our members in the medical professions were particularly impressed by the realistic (and horrifying) description of childbirth in those times.

One member commented on the new (old) words Wright used, and liked the fact that she often explained their meaning and derivations. "Masher" is one example:

But at night, some men cast off their utilitarian duds and slipped into evening clothes: black pants, white shirt, a red sash, patent leather boots and a black plush hat. John Deegan describes such men as swells or mashers, and says they took their sartorial cues from the Californians in their midst. The outmoded term masher is a real gem. It derives from the Romani gypsy word masha, meaning to entice, allure, delude or fascinate, and was originally used in the theatre, although it is unclear who these diggers were setting out to delude. (p. 256)

However, we did have some concerns about the writing. We felt that at times Wright resorts to clichéd or "slogan" type writing. One example concerns the police on the goldfields. She writes:

The Victorian Government paid peanuts and got the inevitable monkeys". (p. 218) 

This comment irritated at least one member as a cheap shot. Although pay is often a valid concern, the real issue, she argued, usually involves factors like training, leadership and the appropriate support. Wright frequently uses throwaway lines - like "sometimes no news is the best news" - and aphorisms. Sometimes they work, but other times we felt they impeded real communication.

It's a long book and is sometimes repetitive. For example, Wright tells us several times that Jane and Stephen Cuming named their daughter Martineau for "women's rights campaigner, Harriet Martineau". Repetition can be useful to ensure readers get a point, but we didn't feel that this point was germane to Wright's main argument.

Good history

We felt the book exemplified well-written history. We appreciated Wright's evocative, narrative-oriented style and felt that she was targeting a general audience. One member commented on the Chapter titles - such as "The winter of their discontent" and "Parting with my sex" - describing them as "hip" and sometimes "raunchy". Her aim, we thought, was to enliven history as well as to present a new way of looking at things. We liked that the work is carefully footnoted, but that it's presented in a way that did not obstruct our reading. In other words, the evidence is there if the reader wants it.

Our member who had taught history her youth, admired Wright's good historical practice in the book, which involved always starting from the primary sources. When these sources are contradictory, Wright makes this clear, as she does in her reporting of the Bentleys and the fire that destroyed their hotel. We liked Wright's effective use of statistics to support her arguments. The book draws constantly on letters, diaries, newspaper articles, and Wright regularly quotes directly from these sources, identifying them through italics.

Wright also looks at the wider global environment and how actions in other parts of the world may have played a role in what happened at Eureka, such as the Chartists, the 1848 revolutions, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's stand with other women at Seneca Falls in 1851. She provided evidence in most of these to show a direct relationship between them and people on the Ballarat goldfields.

However, several members said that Wright "lost me" when she gave the full moon, and the likelihood that women were ovulating, as a reason for why many men left the stockade on the fateful night! This pushed the group's credulity a little too far but was, most agreed, the only point where a conclusion wasn't effectively supported by good historical evidence (albeit Wright gave reasons for her theory).

Wright's thesis

We, of course, discussed Wright's thesis which involves demonstrating that women were there on the fields and they played a significant role in the Stockade (and all that led up to it). Wright's purpose, in other words, was to uncover the role of women and to give them a presence. This means that the book is not a comprehensive history of Eureka - but the title tells us that.

Wright is strong in her opinions, but we didn't see that as a negative. It's time, after all, that women's stories are told, and it's clear from her analysis that women were involved in the goldfields at all levels, besides the traditional domestic sphere. Some worked as diggers, some ran businesses which essentially supported their families while their husbands looked for the elusive strike. Many chronicled their experiences, either privately in letters and diaries or more publicly through newspaper articles and poetry. Wright names many women - such as the doctor-cum-digger-cum-doctor's wife Martha Clendinning, the poet Ellen Young, the publican Catherine Bentley, to name just a few. Their stories are fascinating.

We also touched on other ideas and themes Wright explores, including:

• the philosophical difference between the British and their belief in law and order for the common good, and the Americans with their focus on individualism.
• the fact that, unlike the Californian goldfields, women were actively encouraged to go to Ballarat (for their civilising influence!)
• the idea that the Eureka rebellion was primarily a young people's movement, with most of the activists being 35 years or younger
• the presence of indigenous people and their relationship with the diggers (though this wasn't fully developed, as it was not her focus)

We considered the term "digger" and whether there is a direct connection between its use for miners and its adoption in the First World War as a slang term for Australian soldiers. We felt that it probably did, both in terms of resenting inappropriate authority and belief in mateship and equality.

Finally, some wondered whether Wright had another, agenda in the book. Was she making a plea for a new Australian flag. We all agreed that Australia's flag is unfinished business.