While highlighting the prevailing role of television in Western societies, Art vs. TV maps and condenses a comprehensive history of the relationships of art and television. With a particular focus on the link between reality and representation, Francesco Spampinato analyzes video art works, installations, performances, interventions and television programs made by contemporary artists as forms of resistance to and appropriation and parody of mainstream television. The artists discussed belong to different generations: those that emerged in the 1960s in association with art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus and Happening; and those appearing on the scene in the 1980s, whose work aimed at deconstructing media representation in line with postmodernist theories; to those arriving in the 2000s, an era in which, through reality shows and the Internet, anybody could potentially become a media personality; and finally those active in the 2010s, whose work reflects on how old media like television has definitively vaporized through the electronic highways of cyberspace. These works and phenomena elicit a tension between art and television, exposing an incongruence; an impossibility not only to converge but at the very least to open up a dialogical exchange.

"The Landscape Series" of 2002 to 2006 was made in quantities of thirty to one hundred 1' square panels, each of the thirty sets generally taking three weeks to complete. The panels were worked on flat, painting eighteen at a time in fifteen minute bursts. They were laid out on an old framed 6' x 3' piece which also served as a container for the pools of colour washed over the textured surface. Two inch square wooden cubes were used to stack the paintings in small towers to dry out. Various factors steered the series development: there was reference to an initial colour plan, thoughts about the load-bearing pressures on a place, tracks and crossing points, airflow, water, spaces and intervals, the nature of settlement in the land. For a city: light and shadows on buildings, streets, side alleys and hidden courtyards, people, stores, traffic, noise, incidents and interruptions. Titles were assigned later to photographs of the line of production. The identity of a place was achieved not by literal description but as an equivalent found by coincidence in the passage of an abstract process.

A special harback editon limited to one hundred copies, Interviews-Artists brings together artists active in the fields of painting, drawing, photography, print and sculpture. Recorded conversations explore work in progress and the development of their practice. Patterns of personal experience link with a broader continuum of progressive ideas and show how their imaginative interventions bear on the world. The collection of interviews with artists developed in three phases; first researched from 1988-92 and published in the quarterly review, Cv Journal of Art & Crafts. Then gathered in an anthology, Interviews with the Artists: Elements of Discourse, (editions in 1993/1996/2001/2007). The second phase was researched from January to July 2010; the third from October 2010 to July 2011. Sixty eight interviews from the collection are published this volume.

Developed as an exploratory study of artworks by artists of Singapore and Malaysia, Retrospective attempts to account for contemporary artworks that engage with history. These are artworks that reference past events or narratives, of the nation and its art. Through the examination of a selection of artworks produced between 1990 and 2012, Retrospective is both an attribution and an analysis of a historiographical aesthetic within contemporary art practice. It considers that, by their method and in their assembly, these artworks perform more than a representation of a historical past. Instead, they confront history and its production, laying bare the nature and designs of the historical project via their aesthetic project. Positing an interdisciplinary approach as necessary for understanding the historiographical as aesthetic, Retrospective considers not only historical and aesthetic perspectives, but also the philosophical, by way of ontology, in order to broaden its exposition beyond the convention of historical and contextual interpretation of art. Yet, in associating these artworks with a historiographical aesthetic, this exposition may be regarded as a historiographical exercise in itself, affirming the significance of these artworks for the history of Singapore and Malaysia. In short, which history rarely is, Retrospective is about the art of historicisation and the historicisation of art.