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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Tony Smith famously attempted in 1966 to come to terms with the radical changes imminent in sculptural production and perception, he pointed to two seemingly unrelated examples of highly [...]

The article discusses the work of the American photographer Allan Sekula. The author focuses on Sekula's early work, particularly his engagement with documentary practices in which he challenged existing conventions of conceptual art. The author also argues that Sekula's work involved an attempt to recover two aspects of photographic history: the centrality of photography to the pre–World War II avantgardes, particularly the politicized montages of photographer John Heartfield, and the tradition of 20th-century realism.

A conference paper on the sculpture of Thomas Hirschhorn is presented. It discusses the deterioration in the practice of sculpture and the effects of digitization and improved means of production. The article describes the sculpture and pavilions of Hirschhorn and their significance. An overview of the paper is presented.

Evaluates the drawings and writings of Raymond Pettibon. How his drawings can be situated with regard to the functions and morphology of drawing in the sphere of avant-garde culture; Operation of his drawing between two crucial moments of the formation of mass culture; Most astonishing achievement in Pettibon's drawings.

Focuses on the paintings of Simon Hantai and Jacques de la Villegle, which trace the oppositional practices of painting in the immediate aftermath of World War II in France. Information on the two artists; Proposed contexts that set the artists apart from any comparative reading with the avant-gardes of the 1920s; Problems encountered during the construction of a historical context for artists.

The author focuses on the transformation of the medium and technology of collage art. He reflects on the transformation of the art of collage and its decline in the advertisement industry due to the emergence of electronic media technology, billboards and the technology of large-scale printed image and text. He comments on some of the postwar décollage artists in Paris and analyzes the circumstances that actually generated an alteration and discontinuity of their practices while these practices are still being presented by art historians in the study of collage aesthetics.

The article focuses on the group of paintings "October 18, 1977," by Gerhard Richter. It notes that the paintings, which were completed in the late fall of 1988, confronts its viewers with the question regarding the possibility of representing history in modernism and contemporary painting in general. It also reveals that these paintings exposes the first attempt of the artist's oeuvre to address specific public experience. It further states that the first two series of the paintings are "Eight Student Nurses" and the "48 Portraits."

The article presents the author's view on Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers' open letters and poems that were described as industrial. Commenting on the industrial poems of Broodthaers, the author says that the poems differs programmatically from the artistic and poetic rediscoveries of cubo-futurism. The author is of the view that the statement of Broodthaers to make dedications and to establish the relationship between art and commodity remains enigmatic.