“Positions in the Life World,” a traveling survey of Martha Rosler’s work of the past thirty-four years, organized with the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, brings out one of the artist’s greatest strengths: her ability to articulate a broad spectrum of themes—and to rework them over the years with undiminished returns—in media appropriate to her subject and reflective of the changing contemporary art world.

The fact that Rosler’s exhibition opened during the war in Kosovo gave an unwanted if affecting concreteness to one of her ongoing thematic concerns: namely, war and the way it is represented in