Book review: Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, written by Steve Edwards

Steve Edwards’s book, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, is a close study of Rosler’s 1976 artwork. The book takes up the social and political coordinates of the work’s production, focusing on the San Diego Group of which Rosler was a member, New York City during the fiscal crisis, and the broader contribution Rosler makes to what Edwards calls ‘second-wave political modernism’. This review considers Edwards’s analyses of the work, and locates its importance within the discussion around Rosler, as well as the broader history of radical American art.