One could argue that Manuel Borja-Villel fuses the position of the melancholic museum director, mourning the loss of the emancipatory projects of the recent past, with that of the activist utopian museum director, elaborating, if not enacting, the urgently needed changes necessary for a different future of institutional and cultural practices to be achieved. Since his initial appointment at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona in 1990 and continuing on to this January, when he left his directorship of the Reina Sofía, Borja-Villel has advanced, or rather re-embodied, the great tradition of the progressive museum director of the 1920s and ‘30s, from Alexander Dorner in Hannover to Alfred Barr in New York. Theirs was a tradition that defined the functions of the curator as being those of a scholar, cultivating historical memory as a form of collective enlightenment and visionary innovation as the dissemination of current critical thought and oppositional practice. As directors, they had imagined the museum to be an extension of the public sphere, one whose functions were comparable to those of libraries and the various faculties of the university: to collect and organize knowledge and critical and historical reflection in order to satisfy the largest possible public's desire for cultural literacy, beyond the inherited or enforced distinctions of class privileges. Unlike that of his contemporary American colleagues, Borja-Villel's institutional success was not the result of incessant compromises with the ever-intensifying demand to turn the museum's exhibitions into an expanded field of spectacle culture. Nor did he expand the museum's collections to serve as the affirmative substrate of speculative investment. Borja-Villel—until now protected by the legal principles of a recently restituted liberal-democratic state—could develop and sustain his exemplary practice of organizing truly historical exhibitions and building a formidable collection within the boundaries set by his comparatively limited access to public resources. Not to have yielded to those pressures, to private capital and its property control, is undoubtedly one of the reasons the newly emerging reactionary forces in Spain (as everywhere else) determined that it was time to conclude its support for the aspirations that had emerged from the oppositional practices of Conceptual art and institutional critique that had been formative for Borja-Villel (much more so than for any other museum director known to us in either Europe or the United States). Typically, to mention just a few examples, the first great comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Hans Haacke's work was organized by Borja-Villel, as were the first major European retrospectives of Marcel Broodthaers and James Coleman, of Lygia Clark and Nancy Spero. And another, equally ground-breaking exhibition (among dozens of others), Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer's The Potosí Principle —one of the first comprehensive projects to construct a site-specific mirror for Spain's colonial history—could not have happened anywhere but at the Reina Sofía.

This issue is the second part of a two-part October project dealing with the photographic practices of women in Weimar culture and in exile from it. Focusing on seven crucial figures (Ellen Auerbach, Ilse Bing, Anne Fischer, Gisèle Freund, Lotte Jacobi, Germaine Krull, and Grete Stern), the essays collected here address a wide range of productive changes and destructive conflicts challenging traditional models of the photographers' social, artistic, and professional identities. Some of these changes resulted from the impact of emerging technologies (both in the infrastructural organization of everyday life and in photography's own newly evolving technologies of cameras and color) and some from the dismantling of the liberal democratic nation state either by the rise of state socialism in the Soviet Union or of fascism in Germany. When these Weimar photographers had to find refuge in France, in the United States, in South Africa, or in Argentina, they found themselves not only confronted with the demands of a rapidly advancing and controlling culture industry but also with the caesura of cultural discontinuity and the disillusioning effects of living in exile.

Ilse Bing was one of those Weimar photographers whose work was recognized or rediscovered later than that of many of her more famous female peers. Her photographic project sprang largely from her persistent subversion of the stylistic oppositions of New Vision photography and New Objectivity. Just as complex was the work she produced after moving to Paris, defined as it was by her cross-cutting of Weimar socialist and French Surrealist photographic mentalities. Comparable in her precise socio-political analysis to the Frankfurt School's critiques of emerging mass-cultural and political formations, Bing's work in the United States, where, barred from publishing in magazines, she was able to pay witness to photography's functioning as a new ideological- and cultural-industrial medium—acquired the melancholic features of a mordant critique of traditional photographic genres such as the portrait.

Introducing a cluster of texts on the Whitney Independent Study Program, Benjamin Buchloh briefly discusses the history and importance of the program's founder, Ron Clark, and the program itself, which Buchloh suggests functions as a kind of countermodel to Andy Warhol's Factory.

A conversation between Benjamin Buchloh and Ron Clark on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Whitney Independent Study Program, which Clark has directed from the very beginning.

Benjamin Buchloh speaks with art historian Joseph Koerner about his first major film, The Burning Child (2014–2017). Written, directed, and produced by Koerner, the film tracks his search for the fate of his grandparents and their Viennese home, known only through a painting done by his exiled father in 1944, and traces the systematic destruction of the Jewish population in Vienna during the Nazi occupation. Koerner interweaves his personal journey with an investigation into the history of the Viennese interior and the birth of modern architecture through interviews with historians, architects, and artists. Koerner and Buchloh discuss the making of the film; its formal structure, major sites, and main characters; and how it grapples with urgent questions of memory, trauma, belonging, and the concept of home.

Benjamin Buchloh speaks with German artist, musician, and critic Jutta Koether about the many ways in which Koether blurs the lines between painting and performance in her practice, “reinstalling,” in her words, painting as a “platform, a potential, [and] a performance.” Koether discusses the formative role of New Wave and punk culture in her practice, particularly her time at Spex magazine; her studies in Cologne in the late 1970s and the anti-aesthetic impulse in painting from Picabia to Polke to Kippenberger; and her time in New York in the late 1980s and ′90s. Special attention is paid to her relationship to Poussin, both in her paintings The Seasons and The Sacraments and in her performance at Harvard in April 2013, as well as to early works like Inside Job (1992).

On the occasion of Marcel Broodthaers's first retrospective in New York at the Museum of Modern Art and forty years after his death in 1976, October presents a roundtable discussion on the Belgian artist's career and legacy. Exhibition curators Christophe Cherix and Manuel Borja-Villel join Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rachel Haidu, Rosalind Krauss, and Trevor Stark for a conversation on Broodthaers's work, his artistic development, and his reception. Topics include the indeterminacy between language and visuality; the status of film in his work; his meditations on the commodity, the art market, and the historical role of cultural institutions; his ambivalent relationship with Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art; and national identity and decolonization.

As a genre of cultural production, where iconic (painterly or photographic), sculptural, and architectural conventions intersect to represent the uniquely specific and current conditions of experience in public social space, exhibition design by artists has only recently emerged as a category of art-historical study. While earlier discussions of El Lissitzky's design of the Pressa exhibition in Cologne in 1928, an exhibition that likely had the widest-ranging impact and is the central example of such an emerging genre in the twentieth century, might have served as a point of departure, 1 Romy Golan's important, relatively recent book Muralnomad 2 —primarily concerned with the history of mural painting and its various transitions into exhibition design—has to be considered for the time being the most cohesive account of the development of these heretofore overlooked practices. Yet, paradoxically, two of the most notorious cases of the historical development of exhibition design after Lissitzky are absent from her study: the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition that opened in Munich on July 19, 1937 (two days after the opening of Nazi Fascism's first major propaganda building, Paul Ludwig Troost's Haus der Deutschen Kunst, and its presentation of German Fascist art in the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung ), 3 and the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, which was installed by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp six months later and 427 miles to the west, on January 17, 1938, at Georges Wildenstein's Beaux Arts Galleries in Paris. 4

Having just recently returned from a rare visit to Los Angeles, and wondering about the city's loss of Michael Asher and Allan Sekula in the past year and a half, I was suddenly struck by the idea that these artists must have made gargantuan efforts in that environment on a daily—if not hourly—basis to sustain their conviction in the viability of their practices. After all, the near-total erasure of any remnant of conventional structures of subjectivity and the dissolution of even the last residual spatial forms of the public sphere could hardly reach a more decisive state.