Transposing Genre, Translating Style

Within the context of the conference on transposition and painting, the paper argued that topics of transposition and translation should be more fruitfully approached at the level of style and genre in painting, rather than in terms of visual morphologies and compositional operations. The initial argument was around a conception of all artistic strategies as modes of hybridization, whether or not these are overt and conscious. The hybridizing operation can be usefully thought of as both transposition and translation. Within this framework the paper then considered the artworks and writings of Art & Language/ Charles Harrison; and of Glenn Brown and Lucy McKenzie. In selected works of Brown and McKenzie a trompe l’oeil painting practice serves as a means of translating other pictorial ‘voices’ or of mediating other kinds of information, as in McKenzie, where it is frequently used as a way of pictorially mediating text. As the paper argues, this produces a complex and provocatively recalcitrant hybrid of artistic genres and positions, which offers fertile territory for painting today.