Performance Now

This major survey charts the development of live art internationally since the turn of the twenty-first century, revealing how it has become an increasingly essential vehicle for communicating ideas across the globe in the new millennium.

Performance Now offers an unprecedented illustrated survey of this temporal medium which is notoriously hard to document, written by renowned curator, art historian, and critic RoseLee Goldberg. Six chapters cover different themes of performance, such as activism and global citizenship, as well as its intersection with other media including film and technology, dance, theater, and architecture. The book is interspersed with illustrated profiles of some of the world’s best-known artists working in performance-- Carlos Amorales, Tania Bruguera, Paul Chan, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, FlucT, Theaster Gates, Subodh Gupta, Juliana Huxtable, Anne Imhof, Joan Jonas, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Rasheed Newsome, Toshiki Okada, Walid Raad, Yvonne Rainer, Pussy Riot, Pipilotti Rist, Athi-Patra Ruga, Laurie Simmons, Ryan Trecartin, Wu Tsang, Do Ho Suh, among over 200 more. 

At once a wonderful introduction to the medium and a must-have sourcebook, Performance Now is the go-to reference for artists, students, and historians as well as lovers of avant-garde theater and film.

“An indispensable chronicling of both performance art and its time.”
–Barbara Kruger

RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa, is an art historian, critic, and curator whose book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, pioneered the study of live art performance.