"The Transdisciplinary Potential of Remediated Painting"

Over the last decades the notion of what painting is has been considerably widened due to intermediality, i.e. crossovers between artistic media such as painting and sculpture, painting and photography, painting and installation, painting and performance etc. This paper suggests that the transformation of the discipline of painting into an expanded field has not only liberated painting from its ties to its traditional repertoire of materials and modes of representation. It has also released a tremendous potential for image making that takes painting as a point of departure but moves beyond the limitations of dialogic intermedia into the field of transdisciplinary aesthetics. In support of my argument, I turn to the concept of remediation as it was first applied in new media theory by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. The ambition is to develop an apprehension of painting not as an artistic artifact or 'medium-specific' practice, but as a critical remediating process - painting as remediated painting.

What could be gained from this reconceptualisation of the expanded field of painting? Firstly, it introduces an apprehension of painting that starts from the transdisciplinary potential of painting instead of its historical disciplinarity and the attendant assumption that, as a discipline, painting functions independently and establishes its own separate space of cultural meaning. Secondly, it defines painting as active, performative and migrant. It suggests that today painting is active as a cultural force, not just as fine art. In order to substantiate these claims, the paper analyses works by some contemporary Northern European artists.