The setting is a dark room in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where I have come to see and hear this work for the second time, on the third last day of 2017, just before the show closes. It is a busy day at the museum, the building packed with adults and children in the last week of school vacation. We are here en famille, with the twelve-year-old and the two-year-old, already exhausted by the journey from Berkeley on the train. It is an ambitious idea; we have not planned in advance how we will juggle the competing attentions of these children, and I am hoping that the baby will be accommodating in The Visitors. He likes music, after all.

In the crowded elevator a man says to a young boy, probably his son, ‘I’m going to show you something amazing.’ I try to interest our twelve-year-old in other elements of the museum’s collection – they have paintings by Munch and Frida Kahlo, sculptures by Calder – but he is already bored.

Inside the space of The Visitors, the baby fails to be accommodating. He does not like the darkness, the press of people. ‘All done,’ he insists after a minute or two. ‘Bye bye!’ My husband takes him out of the dark room; we agree to take turns. The baby wants me, and I cringe at the way his cries disrupt the music on the way out. Before long I will be summoned to attend to him.

The first time I saw The Visitors was at the Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea, New York, at the work’s first US exhibit in 2013. Unassuming industrial glass doors led off the street into a darkened space almost exactly like this one in San Francisco. My husband and I were alone for most of the time. We stood and wandered around the room, pausing in front of one screen and another, marvelling, enchanted. Speakers are positioned in alignment with each screen so that the sound changes subtly as one moves, highlighting the voice and sound of one musician then another. The musicians are separated from one another in different rooms in the one house; they are connected to each other through headphones, sharing a single sonic space, a physical space at once divided and conjoined.

The music is beguiling, unashamedly sentimental, the lyrics a circling loop of love and loss. It is heaven for me, who loves to play a new favorite song over and over and over to death (or watch a favourite movie repeatedly, or reread a favourite book). One of my regrets about our time in New York is that I did not make it to Kjartansson’s other show that year, in which the band The National sang their song ‘Sorrow’ over and over again for six hours.

Kjartansson’s art deals frankly with cliché and sentiment: in his work, clichés seem to collapse, explode, and reach a pitch of sublime transcendence under the pressure of extreme repetition and duration. He grew up in the world of theatre in Reykjavik, watching his parents rehearse scenes on stage again and again, and understands the trance-like state, the surprising twists of emotion, the catharsis that repetition can bring. In pieces that blur the line between video art, performance art, and theatre, musicians perform a single chord (Woman in E, 2016 ), singers repeat a single song, phrase (God, 2007) or Mozart aria (Bliss, 2011), actors repeat a simple interaction (Bonjour, 2015), painters paint the same painting (The End, 2009), over and over again, for hours. The lyrics in The Visitors gain some of their power – for me, at least, who loves self-reflexivity – from the way they trope the principle of Kjartansson’s own method: Once again ...

The work elicits a desire for repetition – apparently people came back again and again to The Visitors at the Luhring Augustine. I have come to see and hear it again for a number of reasons. The work was so charming the first time I saw it that I became suspicious of its allure, its lasting emotional hold on me, its striking ability to call forth tears. (I am not the only one who has cried in that dark room; the work is renowned for its ability to make viewers weep.) Had I fallen for a cheap trick, I wondered, me who loves irony above all things except sentiment and self-reflexivity? Was The Visitors basically a long, really good music video for a long, really good pop song (it is, after all, named for Abba’s last album)?

And so what if it was? Was it as good as I remembered? Was it clever as well as extremely good-looking?

Could I return to the magic space of enchantment, transcendence, emotional surrender and supplication to beauty that it offered? My own longing for that return disturbed me and yet I went after it thinking only of how lovely it would be, not prepared for how complicated it might turn out to be, or how painful it might be to find the door to that place closed to me. We have come here today to the San Francisco museum at my firm insistence, in the face of complaints about taking the time out from work when there are deadlines to be met and syllabi to be written, all the endless, relentless work of academia.

The pretty rooms, the soft light, the tenderness of the musicians towards their instruments, are all just as lovely as I remembered. I have stayed with the twelve-year-old while my husband minds the baby, but the twelve-year-old is restless and unimpressed. The work provokes tears again, but too quickly, frighteningly fast. I agree to leave the room after only a few minutes, and a slow wave of something begins to break in me that takes a very long time to register as a form of grief.

A still from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012) Nine-channel HD video projection with sound; jointly owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of Mimi Haas and Helen and Charles Schwab; copyright Ragnar Kjartansson; photograph by Elísabet Davids, courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

I first saw The Visitors in New York in the middle of a six-month sabbatical in the city in 2013. We had lived there as graduate students in the late 1990s and early 2000s, first in downtown Manhattan, then in Brooklyn, pushed further out by rent and the need for space. After our first son was born we moved back to Australia in 2006 with reluctance, compelled by the attractions of universal healthcare; our insurance ran out along with my fellowship that year. We came back to the United States in 2008 for a fellowship for my husband at Cornell University in upstate New York, and back to Australia two years later when that fellowship ran out and a job in Sydney turned up for him. Life has been a swinging pendulum between these places, each move bringing its own peculiar sense of exile, loss, excitement, return. Sydney presented its own particular impossibilities related to work, money, life; we missed New York, and a sabbatical gave us the chance to return. We landed in Manhattan in 2013 in a strange land: an insanely luxurious sublet apartment across from Central Park on the far Upper West side near Columbia University, miles from the world we knew in the East Village and Park Slope.

We sent our son to the least worst public school we could find nearby. Just weeks after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that killed twenty children, every morning we walked by the police officer wearing a gun at her side who sat at the entrance to the school. Our son told us about how they practised lockdown drills in class. He didn’t really know what they were for, and we didn’t want him to know. You have to hide in the cupboards, he told us, you have to see how quiet you can be.

It was only for a few months, I told myself. Each school day became an exercise in not thinking about guns.

I walked to the exquisitely beautiful Avery Library of Art and Architecture every day, showed my visiting scholar card to gain admission, and sat alongside Columbia students researching their various projects. Pig anatomy, classical architecture, statistics. I did my own research for a book I would never write, learned about ancient Chinese art and how easy and how hard it is to forge ancient jade carving. I started work on a different book that I did eventually write, tried to resign myself to never writing about anything else except death and sorrow over and over again. I walked the blocks that never stopped feeling alien and told myself I would put myself back together, put my marriage back together after years of mistakes and failures; I promised myself that this time we would not waste our time in New York altogether, we would make it to shows and galleries and the museum across the park.

One morning when our son was at that not totally terrible school, we took the subway down to Chelsea to see the Kjartansson show I’d read about. It was what we were here for. My husband is a guitarist as well as an academic, and writes about music and sound; he would either like or hate it, and I worried about it on the way there.

In one of my favourite novels, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, the narrator Richard is invited for a weekend at a beautiful old rambling country house that belongs to some friends, a pair of twins in a close-knit group of Classics students he has fallen collectively in love with. It is the apotheosis of the seductive, picturesque, old-world East Coast moneyed élite ideal that he fetishises, and his invitation there cements his belonging to this exclusive clique. (It is also the site of the worst betrayals and the most disturbing violence, but that is revealed much later). The house is filled with antiques, gorgeous rugs, vintage wine, heirloom dinner services and the like, complete with its own miniature lake and an old sleigh in the basement. When I saw Rokeby Farm on screen in that dark Chelsea room, it was familiar in a half-remembered way that I later recognised as my image of that house in the novel, that imaginary ideal, that fulfilment of a fantasy. I have always identified with Richard Papen, the hapless self-deluded Californian fake who longs to escape his shallow West Coast origins and find acceptance in the rarified intellectual history-drenched world of New England. I read The Secret History while I was an undergraduate, and I thought of Richard when I sent off my applications to US graduate schools a year later, delighted by their brochures showing old stone campus buildings littered with red fall leaves, or artfully dusted with snow.

Rokeby Farm evokes just this sort of fantasy. Innumerable rooms, each as beautiful as the other, shabby and glorious. Velvet-covered furniture everywhere. Not one but two grand pianos. Tapestries gleam in corners. Elegant sculptures rest on delicate side tables. On the wall above the guitarist’s bed, where his naked lover lies with her back to the camera, painted birds take flight. A luminous green expanse of lawn extends beyond the house.

It is a kind of artistic utopia, the musicians all alone and yet together, solo and playing in harmony, utterly immersed in their work. We can join them, for a while, in the dark space of The Visitors. Standing in front of one of those screens, you can imagine that you are there in the room with them, or one of the group on the verandah. It invites you in.

In that Chelsea gallery I allowed myself to sink into a fantasy of inclusion. This was a version of what I sought, every day for those few hours between school drop off and school pick up, at the exquisitely beautiful gated library, working alongside others also working on their own peculiar undertakings.

In San Francisco I heard a person next to me begin singing along with that refrain – Once again I fall into my feminine ways – and it was lovely to feel part of a collective experience of art in which we could all participate. I moved around the room to the next screen and realised that what I had heard was an illusion; I had stepped into and then out of the range of one of the speakers, and one of the recorded voices had stood out for a moment. This did not stop me singing along with the singers on screen, for a few seconds.

I am not embarrassed to be moved to tears by this work of art, but that exquisitely sharp sense of longing that I remember from Chelsea cut in new ways this time around. How could I have imagined that the work invites one in, or have been fooled by the illusion that the viewer could be part of this group, included, inside the house with them? I am separated from their playing more profoundly than they are separated from one another by the walls of the house. I am inside the house of art, yes, but in all senses that matter I am outside, looking in.

I have come here to relive that sense of immersion I experienced in Chelsea, but it now feels like a terrible mistake. In the intervening years we have moved to California for a different job and the baby has been born, bringing all kinds of joys and frustrations.

The time I have for writing or anything else has shrunk to a fragment that makes those days in New York feel like unbelievable luxury. Back then we watched The Visitors the whole way through, and stayed to watch it start again; is it possible that we spent hours just standing there in a gallery together? It almost feels like another life, although that doesn’t quite get at it; it feels like what it is, which is the past, and it is unrecoverable. Now I have become that thing I see women everywhere, all around me, with PhDs and advanced degrees, becoming: the spouse of the academic (or the lawyer, or banker, or tech worker) who puts her own lesser-paid work aside to care for the baby, and turns into one of those statistics. From here it is hard to see a way back to Rokeby Farm, my own version of it, or a path forward to whatever its new instantiation might be. Like Jenny Offill’s narrator in her poetic, anguished novel Dept. of Speculation, I once wrote a book and dreamed of being what she calls an ‘art monster’, a creative force, and instead, like her, became a mother consumed by motherhood and irrelevant piecemeal freelance work. She managed to make something brilliant out of all that, though, turned it into that little jewel of a novel.

I begin to hate this naked man in the bath with his guitar, this artist. Who does he think he is? Where is his daughter, the daughter he had with his artist ex-wife whose words he has taken to make this indulgent masterpiece?

Yes, where are the children, I find myself wondering, as I watch the musicians play in this beautifully decorated house of art and artistic autonomy? Who is looking after the children, and listening to the music being played, and not playing music herself? Is she down in the garden somewhere, off screen, or out of sight on the other side of the verandah, instructing the children to be quiet so that they do not spoil the recording? Does she hum along herself? This is what motherhood has done to my imagination. Just as now I reread Monkey Grip by Helen Garner and find myself reading a bewilderingly different novel from the one I read at eighteen, which was a mind-blowing evocation of desire and self-destruction. Now I find myself noticing the child at the edges of the story, and feel disturbed by her neglect, horrified when she stumbles on needles and heroin; it is as though a new character has been introduced into the story in the intervening years.

This is not the insightful analysis of artwork, the sophisticated response I was trained for and praised for, I tell myself, and it sickens me. This too feels like an artistic and moral failing. I wish I could be like Rachel Cusk, with her sharp, blazing, splendidly bitter evocations of parental life, an art monster whose art depends on her motherhood and yet seems to transcend it in a mysterious, enviable alchemy.

Once again, the singers sing, and it is only later, after we have left the museum, after I have tried to reflect on that wave of grief, those unstoppable excruciating tears, that it feels as though they might be offering some kind of absolution:

Once again I fall into
my feminine ways

 A still from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012) Nine-channel HD video projection with sound; jointly owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of Mimi Haas and Helen and Charles Schwab; copyright Ragnar Kjartansson; photograph by Elísabet Davids, courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

By the side of the verandah, a middle-aged man in overalls and a hard hat sits glumly in a director’s chair under a garden umbrella; he does not look like one of the artists. He may or may not be asleep. A young man who does look like one of the artists sits next to him on the grass; at one point, in response to some signal in the music, they both rise and begin to prepare a small iron cannon resting on a low stand on the ground in front of them. The older man seems to be in some way responsible for the technical operation of this weapon.

I have come back to the exhibit with the twelve-year-old. I remember this part with the cannon from seeing it in Chelsea, and being delighted by it. My husband is off with the baby in another part of the exhibition but he might like to see this part. I send him a text.

Cannon coming up
Do you want to see it

But the preparations happen in more of a hurry than I remember, and seconds later the cannon has exploded, firing confetti across the lawn. I text him again.

Boom!!!

He has missed it. There is no way we can wait another hour this time around for the cannon to be fired again. He is missing other things too, such as most of the bigger exhibit, which is focused on sound and involves subtle installations in dark or quiet spaces, things requiring time and concentration and often headphones, not accessible while encumbered with children, not enjoyable when rushed to take over from the other parent attending to the urgent need for nappy changing or eating or screaming.

Next to me is the man from the elevator with his son. ‘There!’ the man says in rapture after the cannon has been fired.

‘Why did they fire the cannon?’ the boy asks. The father searches for an explanation; to me it seems that perhaps it echoes a line in the lyrics about stars exploding, but the cannon appears basically to have been fired for fun. How can an adult explain this to a child who has asked this question?

My own twelve-year-old is equally unimpressed. It is a small cannon and has not been fired at anything in particular. The whole thing makes no sense. The twelve-year-old has had enough.

I was dragged around art galleries and allowed to wander around by myself or with my brother at art openings as a child, or left to explore the beer gardens and pool tables at pubs for book launches and poetry readings, spending hours in a corner with a book or at the pinball machine, trying to avoid lecherous older male writers. I feel a momentary anger and impatience with the twelve-year-old; what is he complaining about? But this is short-lived, since I have promised myself not to inflict those things on him, and remember how much I would have liked the idea that anyone would actually listen to my complaints at the time.

There is probably a recording of The Visitors online, I tell myself, and then feel depressed at the idea of watching this on my computer screen, alone, without the ability to walk around and hear the different sounds attached to different screens, or look across the room and see how the bass player is responding to the piano, or enjoy the cinematic luminosity of the images in the darkness. I am all out of acceptance, suddenly, helplessly crushed by the accumulated stresses and exhaustions of the holidays and the whole year, the whole last two years.

My husband takes pity on me and takes the children to see the Frida Kahlo paintings and the fountain across the road, and leaves me alone for half an hour so I can go back to The Visitors. Despite my efforts, I cannot bear to be there with the consciousness of minutes passing, the sense of time running out, that constriction, in the face of this languorous performance.

The rest of the museum is startlingly bright as I pass through it on the way out. A painting by Gerhard Richter of a blue wave breaking on a shore looks almost exactly like a photograph, which is the point of it.

My friend tells me about a saying she attributes to a Chinese proverb: the days are long but the years are short.

Remember, another friend writes on Facebook, when you wanted all those things you now have?

It won’t be long until the baby is in preschool, my husband says. Remember what you did last time when we got just a few hours of childcare, he reminds me, when the twelve-year-old was this age. I finished my dissertation, wrote a novel, all in the space of a year. This discipline would not have been possible without the very constriction that now feels so wrenching: with a small, strictly limited time in which to write, I wrote with desperate intent, just as I try to do now with the few precious hours of childcare we can afford.

Later that evening I find an image from The Visitors on the museum’s website. The musician with the piano accordion is the one I like best; I wonder whether this is because she cradles her instrument on her lap in a way that reminds me of how one holds a baby, and it is both similar to holding a child and utterly different. She sits upright with her strong legs and bare feet planted firmly on the floor, her face turned to the gentle light spilling in through the open French doors. The sun illuminates the wings of an alabaster angel on a table beside her and it seems as though the statue must have been made with exactly this effect in mind. The accordion is not a dominating instrument in the mix of sound, but her voice is soft and lovely and uncertain as she sings the refrain. The music comes to an end. Along with all the other players, she lays down her instrument and leaves the room, unhurried. She joins the rest of the household as they all file out of the house and wander down the grassy slope towards a line of trees in the distance in the fading northern light. The artist has wrapped a red towel around himself and walks along with them. Their voices grow faint. The film ends and starts again.