In this memoir—which is part diary, part scrapbook—Yve-Alain Bois sifts through his nearly half-a-century correspondence with the British art critic Guy Brett to recount their friendship and evoke the numerous exhibitions the latter curated as well as the many books and catalogues he wrote, from his publications on Kinetic art and Helio Oiticica in the 1960s to his pioneering forays into contemporary art in the global South from the 1970s on. (Four short texts previously published by Bois on Brett's work are interspersed in the narrative). Particular attention is given to the Filipino artist David Medalla and the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, whom Brett championed all his life and whose work and tribulations are discussed throughout.

From 1957 to 1964, Annette Michelson wrote over seventy-five columns and reviews from Paris for the International Herald Tribune, Arts Magazine , and Art International . As Yve-Alain Bois demonstrates, Michelson's subject matter as an art critic during this time was varied, but her tone remained consistent and inimitable, characterized by erudition, irony, and attention to formal detail. Bois quotes from her self-confident appraisals of contemporary painting, traces her burgeoning interest in film, and highlights her particular interest in sculpture, from Daumier's modeled busts to Matisse's small bronze nudes to Tinguely's kinetic machines.

Yve-Alain Bois introduces three historical texts—Heinrich von Kleist's “Primer of French Journalism” (1821), Bertolt Brecht's “On Restoring the Truth” (1934), and Alexandre Koyré's “The Political Function of the Modern Lie” (1943)—that address the age-old but still urgent question of how to address blatant political lies.

Resuming his examination of pseudomorphism from October 154, Yve-Alain Bois argues that the striking resemblances between works by François Morellet and Sol LeWitt are the result of structurally different notions of systems. They each arrived at results that might look similar, but only from a superficial, morphological point of view. Very early on, Morellet set out to purge elements of personal taste—which seemed to him akin to the worst aspects of European postwar abstraction—from his systematic approach. It was through the attempt to suppress choice, and thus composition, that he finally adopted adopted chance as a master organizer of his work. While the premises of Morellet and LeWitt are often identical (both rejected the arbitrariness of composition and the subjectivism of gestural abstraction), and their respective toolkits have many elements in common, as in any other case of pseudomorphism, the works themselves have a different meaning—or assert differently their author's craving for meaninglessness—because the historical and geographical context of their occurrence is different.

An introduction to Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński's 1932 treatise on sculpture, Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms, this piece discusses how these authors carry the essentialism and historicism typical of geometric abstraction of the interwar period to unprecedented levels. Includes critical remarks about the authors’ omissions (of Rodin, of Hildebrand, of Cubist sculpture) and their connection to Russian Constructivism.

Yve-Alain Bois, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Eyal Weizman discuss “forensic architecture,” the practice of treating common elements of our built environment as entry points through which to interrogate the present. Forensic Architecture is also the name of a research agency established by Weizman to undertake independent investigations in the context of armed conflicts, political struggles, and environmental transformation. Participants discuss cases in which the agency acts on commissions from international prosecutors, investigative journalists, the United Nations, human rights organizations, and environmental-justice and media groups. The discussion of this practice is illustrated by brief examples taken from recent investigations in places such as Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, Syria, and Guatemala.

Panofsky defined pseudomorphosis as: “The emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view.” The phenomenon of look-alikes across geographically and historically distant cultures fascinated archeologists, art historians, anthropologists, and linguists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two competing explanations they proposed (the permanence of human nature/human migrations in a distant past) were far from persuasive, and the topic, deemed embarrassing, almost entirely vanished from scholarly debate. Claude Levi-Strauss's remarkable attempt, in 1944–45, to provide a structural account of the phenomenon was met with utter silence. In recent years several scholars have been less intimidated by this issue, but too often they resort to the old nativist, a-historical argument, sometimes abusively basing their claims on neuroscience. A structural, sociohistorical account of pseudomorphosis is needed today more than ever.