The Museum of Modern Love

by Heather Rose

When they’re inside their craft, inside colour or movement or sound, words or clay or pictures or dance, when they submit to the art, that is when they know two things—the void that is life and the pull that is death. The grand and the hollow. The best reflects that. To be such harbingers of truth is not without its cost. It’s no easy task to balance a sense of irrelevance with the longing for glory, the abyss with the applause. Artists run their fingers over the fabric of eternity.

‘fear leads to doubt. Doubt leads to reason. Reason leads to choice. Choice leads to life. Without fear you don’t have doubt. Without doubt you don’t have reason. Without reason you don’t have choice. Without choice, you don’t have life.’

Oprah had asked him what race he was. The young man had responded: ‘The human race.’

Most people, Healayas knew, didn’t want to look inside themselves, let alone magnify that inner life for the world to see or hear or criticise.

There you are, art! You capture moments at the heart of life.

For hadn’t it been that for Abramović? An act of love that said, This is all I have been, this is what I have become in travelling the places of my soul and my nation, my family and my ancestral blood. This is what I have learned. It is all about connection. If we do it with the merest amount of intention and candour and fearlessness, this is the biggest love we can feel.