Maeve Connolly

The work originally conceived by the artist couple Hubbard / Birchler for the Swiss Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale re-constructs the life story of the American artist Flora Mayo. Mayo had a romantic relationship in the 1920s with the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. While he is now one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, her work was de-stroyed, and her life forgotten. Hubbard / Birchler reanimate Mayo’s compelling biography from a feminist perspective, combining reconstruction and documentation to create a multilayered form of narrative. The catalogue, produced for the current exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz, elucidates the research the artists engaged in and documents the installa-tion in an impressive manner

TV Museum takes as its subject the complex and shifting relationship between television and contemporary art. Informed by theories and histories of art and media since the 1950s, this book charts the changing status of television as cultural form, object of critique and site of artistic invention. Through close readings of artworks, exhibitions and institutional practices in diverse cultural and political contexts, Connolly demonstrates television’s continued importance for contemporary artists and curators seeking to question the formation and future of the public sphere. Paying particular attention to developments since the early 2000s, TV Museum includes chapters on exhibiting television as object; soaps, sitcoms and symbolic value in art and television; reality TV and the social turn in art; TV archives, memory, and media events; broadcasting and the public realm; TV talk shows and curatorial practice; art workers and TV production cultures.