The first comprehensive collection of writings by Martha Rosler considers the intersection of art and politics, the operation of art systems, feminist art practices, and the media. Decoys and Disruptions is the first comprehensive collection of writings by American artist and critic Martha Rosler. Best known for her videos and photography, Rosler has also been an original and influential cultural critic and theorist for over twenty-five years. The writings collected here address such key topics as documentary photography, feminist art, video, government patronage of the arts, censorship, and the future of digitally based photographic media. Taken together, these thirteen essays not only show Rosler's importance as a critic but also offer an essential resource for readers interested in the issues confronting contemporary art. The essays in this collection illustrate Rosler's ongoing investigation into means of exposing truth and provoking change, providing a retrospective of characteristic issues in her work. Mixing analysis and wit, Rosler challenges many of the fundamental precepts of contemporary art practice. Her influential essay, "In, around, and afterthoughts: on documentary photography," almost single-handedly dismantled the myth of liberal documentary photography when it appeared. Many of the essays in this volume have had a similarly wide-ranging influence; others are published here for the first time. Illustrating the essays are 81 images by Rosler and other artists and photographers.

The politically engaged work of Martha Rosler is fascinating and provocative; this wide-ranging survey brings timely insights at a moment of resurgence for political activism and feminism.

This text presents about 7,800 publications from the personal library of the artist Martha Rosler on extended loan to e-flux.

"In her diverse work, be it photography, installation, performance, video, critical writing or fiction, Martha Rosler constructs incisive social political analyses of the myths and realities of a patriarchal culture. Articulated with deadpan wit, Rosler's work investigates the socioeconomic realities and political ideologies that dominate ordinary life. Presenting astute critical analyses in accessible forms, her inquiries are didactic but not hortatory."--Page 4 de la couverture.

In this collection of essays Martha Rosler embarks on a broad inquiry into the economic and historical precedents for today's soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions. In the creative city, the neutralization or incorporation of subcultural movements, the organic translation of the gritty into the quaint, and the professionalization of the artist combine with armies of eager freelancers and interns to constitute the friendly user interface of a new social sphere in which, for those who have been granted a place within it, an elaborate retooling of traditional markers of difference has allowed class distinctions to be either utterly dissolved or willfully suppressed. The result is a handful of cities selected for revitalization rather than desertion, where artists in search of cheap rent become the avant-garde pioneers of gentrification, and one no longer asks where all of this came from and how. And it may be for this reason that, for Rosler, it becomes all the more necessary to locate the functioning of power within this new urban paradigm, to find a position from which to make it accountable to something other than its own logic. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

"This volume documents the present crisis in American urban housing policies and portrays how artists...within the context of neighborhood organizations, have fought against government neglect, shortsighted housing policies and unfettered real estate speculation. Through essays, photographs, symposiums, architectural plans and the reproduction of works from the series of exhibitions organized by [Martha] Rosler, the book serves a number of functions: it's a practical manual for community organizing; a history of housing and homelessness in New York City and around the country; and an outline of what a human housing policy might encompass for the American city"--Back cover.

In 3 Works, photographer and critic Martha Rosler braids together three classic, newly relevant pieces tracing the ways in which photography's aesthetic conventions and social practices fail or succeed in generating socially meaningful work--work that not only takes into account the political conditions within which it was produced and assumes social and political responsibility but also activates the viewer. The title three works are The Restoration of High Culture in Chile, a 1972 short fiction piece-cum-essay that examines the degrees of political anaesthesia and corruption a successful adaptation to high culture implies, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, a 1974 photo work in which contemporary urban photography's capacity to continue documentary photography's historical work is questioned, and in, around, and afterthoughts, a 1981 critical essay exploring these questions more systematically and attempting to develop criteria to define contemporary photographic activities as meaningful social practice.