1.
ARTIST TALK

Taking Time in Performance
Thursday, September 24, 5:00 pm MST

In this lecture, Marilyn Arsem will discuss thematic concerns and performance strategies that artists consider when they create durational performances.  Using examples of performances by artists such as Gina Pane, Hsieh Tehching, Linda Montano, Ulay and Abramovic, Alastair MacLennan, William Pope.L as well as her own work, she will talk about the ways that extended time impacts performers, their materials, and the viewers of the work, and how the concepts in the work can only be revealed over time.  

2.
CoLAB meetup on Arsem’s work 

Friday, September 25, 2:00 – 4:00 pm MST

In this month’s CoLAB meet-up, we will discuss texts pre circulated by Arsem and linked to her talk and workshop.



3.
WORKSHOP

Inhabiting Time
October 1–8, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm MST

This four-day workshop on TIME, taught by performance artist Marilyn Arsem, includes online group sessions, online duo sessions, some work outside of the sessions including writing, and discussion.  

Working with everyday materials and actions, participants will engage in a series of exercises to examine their experience of time.  While these exercises were designed for artists creating durational performances, the insights gained in understanding how time operates in one's life can be effectively applied to other practices.

Competing obligations often make us feel as if we don't have enough time.  We lose track of time when we are engrossed in something pleasurable.  Worlds collide when we expect other people, beings and objects to conform to our own sense of time.  But they have their own temporalities, and perhaps we can instead be curious about how they occupy time, rather than resisting or trying to make them conform to our own. 

In addition to exercises, this workshop includes readings in advance of the workshop on the nature of time, daily private writing in response to specific prompts, discussions with the group, and a final project.

workshop ONLINE SESSIONS:

(limited space)

Thursday, October 1, 10 am – 1 pm MST

Introduction, group exercise and group discussion, writing assignment.

Friday, October 2, 10 am – 1 pm MST: 

Group exercise and group discussion, writing assignment.

Saturday, October 3, 10 am – 1 pm MST: 

Group and duo exercises and group discussion, writing and project assignment.

Sunday — Tuesday:  Participants design, execute and document a simple experiment that examines an aspect of time. By Wednesday morning, each person uploads a short description and documentation of the action.

Wednesday: participants review each other's materials.

Thursday, October 8, 10 am – 1 pm MST: Final discussion

Water Moving. 12 day/6 hours per day durational performance as part of the exhibition Maalstroom at Arti et Amicitiae Gallery Amsterdam, The Netherlands June 11 – June 23, 2019 Photo by Jacques Martens.

Marilyn Arsem has created more than 200 live events since 1975, ranging from solo performances, to large scale, site-specific works incorporating installation and performance.  Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Arsem has also presented work in 30 countries, at festivals, alternative spaces, galleries, museums, universities and conferences in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Oceania and Asia.  Most recently she is starting to present work online.

Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and often located in peripheral spaces in the context of larger events, where viewers discover the work on their way to seeing other performances. Arsem regularly creates performances for galleries, but in the last 20 years she has focused on site-responsive performances.  They are often designed for audiences of a single person, and respond to both the history of the site, as well as to the immediate landscape and materiality of the location.  Her performances are designed to implicate the audience directly in the concerns of the work, to create an experience that is both visceral and intellectual.  She incorporates a broad range of media, and often engages all the senses. Sites have included a former Cold War missile base in the United States, a 15th century Turkish bath in Macedonia, an aluminum factory in Argentina, the grounds of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium in Poland, the site of the Spanish landing in the Philippines, and a deserted Russian mining outpost in the Arctic Circle.

A book on her work, Responding to Site: the performance work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, will be published in Fall 2020 by Intellect Press of the UK.  In 2015 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston published an I-book, The Performance Art of Marilyn Arsem, which includes essays by MFA curators, as well as images, video and audio excerpts of her work.  Arsem has also published articles on her work, including in Lynette Hunter and Shannon Rose Riley, eds., Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

She has been the recipient of fellowships, awards and grants since the 1980s.  Recent awards include the 2015 Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which included a cash award and an exhibition at the museum; a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship; a 2017 City of Boston Artist Fellowship, and project grants in 2017 and 2018 from Boston Foundation’s Live Arts Boston program.

For more information see: marilynarsem.net.