This essay investigates the status of “reification” in the work of Marcel Broodthaers, particularly in the 1971 “Section Financière” of his Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles . It will pose finance and debt as social forms through which Broodthaers both experienced reification concretely and attempted to register its forming pressure upon the artwork's conditions of possibility. The article argues that it was Broodthaers's understanding of reification that allowed him, at a crux in the history of finance represented by the end of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, to posit art as a speculative investment at once uncoupled from the concrete limitations of production and ever-more-tightly ensnared by the economic power of debt.

From the 1960s until his death in 2021, Lawrence Weiner developed an art practice operating in language, which he described as being that of a “materialist.” This paper examines the scope of Weiner's career to determine what he could mean by that term—to derive the specific characteristics of his linguistic materialism. Differentiating his work from existing materialist paradigms in poetics and linguistics, this paper argues that the matter of language for Weiner was not reducible to the visual character of the signifier or to the physicality of the referent. Rather than attempt to define language as such, Weiner's materialism set into motion the infinite social uses of words within the “stream of life.”

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.

On November 22, 1923, Emmy Hennings received an ecstatic letter from Hugo Ball, her husband and fellow founder of Zurich Dada, describing his “constant immersion in jurisprudence”: For months, I have studied the writings of Professor Schmitt, of Bonn. He is more important for Germany than the entirety of the Rhineland, with its carbon mines included. Rarely have I read a philosophy with as much passion as his, and a philosophy of law at that! A great triumph for the German language and for legality. He seems to me even more precise than Kant, and rigorous like a Great Spanish Inquisitor when it comes to ideas.