ARLIS/NA Reviews

ISSN 2374-4723 | arlisna.org/arlisna-reviews

The latest in art publishing, reviewed by art information
professionals and published on a bimonthly basis.

Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century

by RoseLee Goldberg. Thames & Hudson, August 2018. 272 p. ill. ISBN 9780500021255 (h/c),
$45.00.

Reviewed November 2018 Kevin Whiteneir, Library Associate, Chicago Public Library,
kwhite3@artic.edu

RoseLee Goldberg’s Performance Now: Live

Art For the 21st Century proves ambitious as it
explores the last century of the medium,
which it dubs “now one of the most highly
visible art forms.” In Performance Now,
Goldberg, founder of Performa--New York
City’s premier performance art biennial--
follows up on her 2001 publication
Performance Art: From Futurism to the
Present (Thames & Hudson) in this well-
illustrated survey of contemporary
performance art.

The text opens with an introductory chapter

that boldly situates performance as visual art,
global language, political platform, and more.
Over the course of the six chapters, Goldberg
champions the medium as both a standalone
art form and an interdisciplinary bridge
between its more established peers, including
sculpture, painting, and film. As she attempts to tackle these taxonomies through brief, eight-
page-or-less micro-analyses, Goldberg abbreviates her overarching chapter theses in favor of
providing over 200 artist captions, transforming each chapter into a rapid-fire “who’s who” of
today’s performance artists instead of the multivalent discourse the grandiose introduction
suggests it will be. Ultimately, Performance Now lends itself best to an audience with a prior
and more developed background with the genre.

Through a discussion of the differences between theatre and performance, and between
performance and dance--all of which are performance arts--Goldberg provides some in-depth
analysis of the means and methods that have shaped the genre. Additionally, though it forgoes

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To
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 ARLIS/NA Reviews
ISSN 2374-4723 | arlisna.org/arlisna-reviews
The latest in art publishing, reviewed by art information
professionals and published on a bimonthly basis.

the traditional chronological structure of a survey like Gardner’s Art Through the Ages,
providing instead a dense selection of artists and their work as the organizational schema,
Performance Now succeeds as a reference text in that it offers readers a glance at the medium
through short summaries illustrated with crisp screenshots and images.

Readers will note some floridness, and a minor incidence of jargon and “art talk,” but the text
leans toward the general inclusivity of an audience with varying levels of engagement with the
art world. Performance Now serves best within an educational setting with a discursive or
analytical structure, considering it provokes questions about how and what participants
perform within these art environments.

Among the most pressing questions is the topic of artist selection, given that performance and
the other visual arts are shaped by a series of networks influenced by several players including
artists, critics, historians, gallerists, and more. Considering almost fifty percent of Goldberg’s
more than 200 captions depict artwork performed in New York, the text encourages librarians
and a general audience alike to ask: are our focuses shaped by the discipline, or is the discipline
shaped by what locus we deem exemplary of this contemporary moment?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To
view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO
Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.