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.

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.