Ignore the Gap? How may translation theories elucidate intermediality in contemporary works of art

paper presented in the session: Copies and Translations: Re-placing the Original.
The paper takes seriously the activity of ‘replacing’ an ‘original’ image by exploring the intersections between drawing, printmaking and other media forms in the work of three contemporary artists: Christiane Baumgartner,
Oscar Muñoz and Regina Silveira. All three artists work across various media and hence, material boundaries. In Baumgartner’s case this entails video and the wood cut, for Muñoz it is photography and (in the chosen example of his
work) screen printing with charcoal dust on water. Silveira’s Mundus Admirabilis (2008) appropriates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century entomological
print forms, combined with ceramics and textiles, to transform architectural spaces with plottercut vinyl. Often the operation, that is the aesthetic, political and affective charge, of such works is subsumed under the notion of an allencompassing but ill-defined ‘expanded practice’ or an unproblematically understood ‘postmedium condition’. Alternatively, such artworks are conceived in terms of a simple mirroring of a multi-medial socio-cultural environment. My
paper starts from the assumption that in these works certain conventions and systems of value, which are associated with materials and images, undergo a change that is comparable to linguistic translation. How then can the concept and
theories of translation be productively employed to investigate such works’ interpictorality or, rather, ‘intermediality’? What might such an approach add to these concepts? By the same token, the question is asked whether artistic
operations such as the ones selected, in their turn, are able to ‘remediate’ notions of translation.