After modern sculpture : art in the United States and Europe

During the mid-1960s, sculptors in the USA and Europe simultaneously lost interest in making objects.

Instead, under banners such as "Anti-Form" and "Arte Povera", they began to present undifferentiated matter as sculpture: industrial felt, lead, dirt, vegetables, even live animals.

Such heaps, arrays and environments seemed to mark the end of modern sculpture.

They dominated sculptural debate at the time of their appearance, and they have since proved enormously influential on contemporary art. This text treats such work as a separate topic. It discusses its appearance in the work of such diverse artists as Joseph Beuys, Evan Hesse, Robert Morris and Richard Serra, and analyzes the ways in which it questioned existing traditions of modern sculpture.

The book describes in detail the contemporary theoretical basis of the work, for example the impact of psychoanalysis, and the politics of the so-called New Left.

It is also careful to situate the work in its social and historical context.