A Sculpture Reader ─ Contemporary Sculpture Since 1980

Piano keyboards, stacked to the ceiling, feature sheet music, straw and mice. A Zen garden features turbines and window frames. A white figure, obviously in need of a good meal, towers several stories over observers as it strides across a park. In this collection of dozens of essays, contemporary sculpture finally gets its due in the form of reviews of individual artists from a progressive viewpoint, mostly based on significant exhibitions and installations. The subjects, literally too numerous to list here, come from around the world and include emerging sculptors as well as the well-known, and the essays cover the trailing ends of minimalism, post-minimalism and conceptualism and on into post-movement, with each artist expressing his or her individual path inside or outside of theory. Distributed by the U. of Washington Press. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)