Marilyn Arsem’s performances are potent. Glancing at the decades of photographs throughout Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem elicits the unique stench of Arsem’s oeuvre—fish scales, melting ice cream, seaweed, jasmine. With this long overdue publication, editors Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless have successfully curated a volume that claims critical space for Arsem’s body and magnifies its distinct odor.

The monograph begins and ends with Arsem’s manifesto, “THIS is Performance Art.” We are immediately reminded, “Performance Art operates on a human scale. It exists on the same plane as those who witness it” (2). To avoid the spectacular, relish the void, and practice disappearance over a career that spans five decades takes guts. Arsem is pure grit with no bells or whistles. Engaging with her “uncomfortably lean” massive oeuvre (a reading offered by Sandra Johnston to indicate the complexity found in Arsem’s stark aesthetic), Responding to Site offers new insight into durational aesthetics, performance pedagogy, and the ethics of site responsive work and political art.

The volume is organized in three sections: “Duration and Action,” “Site and History,” and “Performance and Pedagogy.” The first set of essays includes “On Time at the Museum” by Lucian O’Connor and “Salt, Stones, and Stars” by Jeffery Byrd, both sculptural examinations of 100 Ways to Consider Time (2015–16), a 100-day performance Arsem realized at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. O’Connor’s essay opens up Arsem’s performance work to art historians and provides astute observations about expansive, geological, and deep time (52). Byrd is hyperattentive to the materials that coperform with Arsem during the 100 days, concluding, “our lives are shorter than stars but longer than flowers. It is the contemplation of our place within this grandeur and not our control of it that makes our existence precious” (67). The other two essays in this section by Sandrine Schaefer and Paul Couillard attend more directly to the body, performance analysis, and Arsem’s mastery of durational performance as a precise medium. Schaefer’s articulation of durational work as an engagement with the materiality of time, reliant on “moving through multiple temporalities” (69), stands out as the most nuanced analysis of the durational medium. The other notable contribution on duration that offers an embodied analysis of movement and temporality is editor Natalie Loveless’s “Afterword.”

The essays in the second section of the book coalesce at intersections of site, history, and memory. Klein describes these texts as illuminating Arsem’s “ethical approach to global art making” (23). Kristine Stiles’s examination of Arsem’s Balkan corpus establishes the artist as a “visual poet” (134) whose research process manifests sculptural embodiments of time’s perpetual return. Stiles’s survey frames Arsem’s significant contributions to site-specific and social practice while highlighting the artist’s adeptness at recasting histories of violence, war, and transition with considerable care. In an opposite vein, El Putnam’s essay “Impossible Totalities: Political Performance as Palimpsest” draws out the antagonistic qualities of Arsem’s American Foreign Policy series to shed new light on “what it means to create political art” (149). One gift of this essay is that it is comprehensible for students new to discourse around aesthetics and politics and quite satisfying to teach. Essays by David P. Miller and John Dennis Anderson then shift the focus of the section from the global to the local. Site becomes Boston and Arsem’s literal house-audience becomes neighbors, local shopkeepers, students, and fellow artists; history becomes personal, familial, and macabre; and body becomes the ancestral body, the ghosted body, the aging body. Taken as a whole, the section traverses incredibly diverse arcs in Arsem’s career, offering intimate readings of each performance, while arguing that Arsem’s method of “responsiveness” unfurls political sites and historical traumas in hauntingly vital ways.

In the final section on pedagogy, the impact of performance on the body is of central concern. Multiple authors, including Arsem, explore the role of witness, the interstices of duration and collective experience, the obstacles posed by making live art, and the unique joy in teaching, making, and witnessing performance. Arsem’s pedagogy essay includes crafted examples of creative prompts and diligent strategies for teaching an artistic practice that is boundless. She writes, “while performance artists might take certain risks that others don’t consider taking, being artists does not absolve them from responsibility. If anything, they need to be more cognizant of the impact of their actions, both on themselves and on others” (196).

Considering impact beyond singular or personal encounters, a reader will also find a productive tension in the ways Arsem’s performances are framed to both suspend human-centric paradigms and produce unique bodily sensations. Analyzing Orpheus (1983), 13 Actions in Yellow (1988), and Red in Woods (1991–1993), Miller describes how Arsem’s shift from experimental theatre to longer durational works was borne out of a desire to extend encounters, produce more complex entanglements among audience, artist, and environment, and identify the impacts of performance far beyond the conclusion of a singular event. Sandra Johnston’s “Dialogues with Absence: Reflections on Time and If to Drift” additionally registers varying moments of bodily impact in her encounters with Arsem’s performances as seepages and retractions of time (199). Johnston’s perspective sits productively at odds with O’Connor’s reading of time in Arsem’s work as it “self-consciously expands from a narrow focus on the present into four dimensions at vastly different scales” (50). In effect, each essay renders sense and impact differently, directing readers to contemplate the many ways Arsem’s body operates on a human scale while also tipping, seeping, and spilling beyond normative and linear measures of time and space.

Beyond the critical essays, handfuls of performance photographs appear at the end of each section in the volume. Quite pleasurably, these visual vignettes bring the tactile environments of Arsem’s work into delicate focus. Yet similar to the limits of approaching performance solely through sculptural analysis or art historical discourse, each photograph signals the loss embedded in any art of translation, a loss arguably multiplied by the durational performance medium itself. As photographer Michael Woolley writes in his essay, durational performance resists capture. Rhythm, vibration, the smell and sound of a sea breeze, a snapping twig, sunlight, foggy dew, a woman barely moving but moving still, the photographs offer a small glimpse into a practice intensely crafted around disappearance, deterioration, and everything a body may never see but might learn to sense.

Beyond the section themes, some of the most palpable points of convergence across the volume coalesce around ecofeminist tactics, ghostly vibrations, and insight into the labor involved in cultivating a responsive body. By attending to the chasms of silence Arsem’s performances orchestrate, a handful of essays additionally offer insight at the intersection of sound art and performance. The most notable include Paul Couillard’s reading of silence in Arsem’s work as extending beyond human speech to a “quietened body” (87); and Kathy O’Dell’s turn to composer Pauline Oliveros’s practice of deep listening, which provides a refreshing take on Arsem’s work and pedagogy.

Fascinated by human experience and intent to facilitate discovery and growth within herself, her practice, and her audience, Arsem is indeed a composer who invites her audience into silence and deep listening in profound ways. For these reasons and many others, Responding to Site validates the work of performance artists who most often operate outside the bounds of traditional time structures and codified performance spaces. The book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in performance art and an integral monograph about one of the field’s most prolific makers.