Shannon Jackson's fascinating new book deals with what she calls ‘interdependent performance’ – that is, the ways in which a range of contemporary artists and theatre-makers have sought to dramatize their relationships with, and reliance on, supporting structures. Of concern here are a wide range of networked dependencies – from the service provided by immediate colleagues (curators, stage managers), to the labour of sometimes-volunteer performers and participants, and beyond to the global social infrastructure itself. In one chapter, for example, Jackson discusses the way that recent performances by the Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll have rendered visible the reliance of Western communication structures on Asian call centres, by employing Indian telephonists as remote performers.

Running throughout the book is a sophisticated critical analysis of the also-troubled relationship between the traditions of theatre and the visual arts. Art-world discourse is still frequently predicated on the notion of the individual artist–genius, for whom images, objects and other people function simply as ‘material’ to be assembled under their solo signature. From the 1960s onwards, however, artists working in the fields of minimal, conceptual and performance art began controversially exploiting elements of the theatre's fundamentally collaborative dynamic, and its dependence on the contingencies of time and place. Attention was drawn, in effect, to the stage management of the gallery context itself. Such reflexive theatricalization of art has, Jackson argues, again become particularly prevalent in recent practice. Indeed, she begins and ends Social Works with reflections on two twenty-first-century redeployments of Samuel Beckett's plays in art-world contexts. The final chapter examines artist Paul Chan's decision to stage Waiting for Godot site-specifically, in the devastated wasteland of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward, post-Hurricane Katrina. To do this, he brought in the Classical Theatre of Harlem's existing production of Godot – thereby complicating questions of authorship and attribution. Was Chan producing a stop on the CTH tour, or were they material in his art?

Such interdependencies and contextual conundrums form the core of Jackson's analysis throughout the book. Among the many delights of Social Works are a playful but trenchant critique of the blind spots in the thinking of ‘situational’ art critic Claire Bishop, and a superb exploration of the work of conceptual/performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles – whose roots in second-wave feminism led her first to dramatize the often invisible ‘women's work’ (e.g. cleaning) on which the male-dominated gallery world relies, and then by extension to document and highlight the labour of urban sanitation workers.

This is a subtle, nuanced and socially committed book that should be widely read. One question I had after reading it, however, was why relatively little attention had been directed to the reception of these artists’ work by their audiences. Surely this, too, is an interdependent relationship of considerable social significance? Yet most of the performances discussed here, for all their emphasis on labour and support structures, appear to have been targeted primarily at an existing, relatively privileged, audience base for contemporary arts. And so, for example, when Jackson notes that Chan's Godot attracted a much larger audience than its organizers had anticipated, I wanted to know more about who had come. Presumably there were many Lower Ninth Ward flood victims in attendance at this high-profile event in their neighbourhood, but we are told nothing of their reactions. Jackson quotes the perspectives of the artists involved in some detail, but what of their audience?