The latest from performance historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg is a lushly illustrated brick of a survey of twenty-first-century live art. It continues her project of illuminating the critical role of interdisciplinary, live performance artists working across continents in a diverse array of political and aesthetic contexts.

Having been born in 1981, I'm part of a ‘borderline’ generation who came of age at the dawn of the Internet, and thus remember life ‘before’ but also adapted to the information revolution and can ‘pass’ as digital natives. This is thrown into sharp relief by my memory of first encountering Goldberg's prior live-art survey. Performance: Live Art since 1960 (1998) was bequeathed to me by a departing roommate from clown school in northernmost California. It was a hardcover ‘coffee-table edition’ (we may have, in fact, used it as a coffee table) too cumbersome to lug to her next destination. The sparse descriptions were tantalizing but often baffling, so an aspiring clown in a rural community hundreds of miles from anything resembling a performance archive delved no further. I left the book for the next occupant of the room. Fast-forward to the titular ‘Now’ and a live-art survey book is arguably a more magnetic entry point to study of the genre. It took me ages to read due to the pleasure of disappearing down rabbit holes of online documentation of Goldberg's selections. Therefore the brevity of the caption accompanying each image adrift in a sea of eye-pleasing negative space is less frustrating.

Anyone insistent upon logical organization of the work surveyed will be challenged; the pieces are sometimes categorized by the artist's wider oeuvre rather than chapter-heading disciplinary traditions on which they draw (e.g. dance, visual art, architecture, theatre). For example, Robert Wilson's video portraits are in the theatre chapter. This is, however, beside the point – read the whole book to avoid missing something of interest. Focus is given to work that engages with themes of global citizenship, such as Amalia Pica's use of literal intersections of colour, form and bodies in A ∩ B ∩ C (2013) drawn from the suppression of the Venn diagram by the Argentine military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Radical action is another main theme, with Goldberg considering how artists (e.g. William Pope.L and his continuing work investigating collaborative labour and blackness in America) protest systems of oppression in confrontation of the ‘underlying mercilessness of real events’ (p. 113).

Often the ‘visual clues’, to use Goldberg's phrase, work splendidly with the caption to convey much about the work. The analysis of Allora and Calzadilla's prepared piano performance Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy No. 1 (2008) and the hole drilled in the instrument, the melody and its metaphors is insightful and, more to the point, comprehensibly linked to the documentation. Not all practice benefits from such clarity and specificity in the discussion; My Barbarian's Post-living Ante-action Theatre (2016) created a series of ‘workshops, performances and events for our times’ (p. 216), if you can believe it! However, Goldberg knows exactly how and when one image can unlock the performance, as with Nelisiwe Xaba's They Look at Me and That's All They Think (2011), where the shadow play with Sarah Baartman's silhouette is succinctly contextualized within Xaba's allegorical critique of exoticism within her own professional narrative. More intertextual analysis of the works surveyed might benefit the book; with Vanessa Beecroft's entry mere pages away from Cassils's, one can't help but wish some of the white space was sacrificed to articulate the latter's searing critique by way of the 2001 parasitic intervention in the former's work.

Readers will be kept abreast of what the usual suspects (e.g. Abramović, Jonas, Rainer) have been up to, as well as introduced to key performances by practitioners emerging in the last two decades. Of course, many works commissioned by Goldberg's own biennial, Performa, feature, and some personal reflection and insight on how her enormously influential curatorial practice shapes the world she describes would add further interest to the book, which is certainly not short on interest. I will most certainly be lugging it with me next time I move house.