The endpapers of Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE depict a pair of workmen lowering a manhole cover into place on a rain-soaked city street. But this is no ordinary piece of civic hardware, as subsequent images make clear. The distinctly ambiguous phrase "IN DIRECT LINE WITH ANOTHER & THE NEXT" is picked out in raised letters on the lid's forged-metal surface. What we are looking at is photographic documentation of an installation produced by New York's Public Art Fund in 2000, representing just one example of the dizzying variety of forms taken by Weiner's art over the course of his long and prolific career.

One of Weiner's central credos — famously articulated in his "Statement of Intent" in 1969 — is that, once conceived, an artwork exists whether it is actually fabricated or not. Weiner repeatedly employs the written word (varying its look, scale, and placement according to the context at hand) in order to communicate his ideas, which often betray a traditional sculptor's concern with the behavior and interaction of physical materials. Unsurprisingly, this has often led to his work taking the form of books and other kinds of printed publications. Fortunately, what might sound like a wearisomely arid approach is rescued by Weiner's subtle wit (one text reads: "AN OBJECT TOSSED FROM ONE COUNTRY TO ANOTHER") and deadpan poetics (another says: "SLOW CORROSION LEADING TO A LOSS OF INHERENT DIGNITY OF THE OBJECT AT HAND").

Published to coincide with a major traveling retrospective that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in November 2007, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE constitutes an exhaustive survey of Weiner's chameleonic oeuvre. Kathryn Chiong, Liam Gillick, Ed Leffingwell, Dieter Schwarz, Gregor Stemmrich, and the show's organizers, Ann Goldstein and Donna De Salvo, all contribute tough-minded essays that interrogate different aspects of this highly flexible (yet ultimately durable) practice. The book also features numerous photographs of the veteran conceptualist's projects, taken at public sites, private homes, and commercial premises — as well as at galleries, museums, and other "official" exhibition sites — throughout the world.

-Michael Wilson