In association with the exhibition IMMA Collection: Freud Project, Gaze, Dr EL Putnam, artist-philosopher, discuss a range of artist’s featured in this exhibition that include Lucian Freud, Stephan Balkenhol, Pauline Cummins, Phil Collins, Mark Manders, Ann Hamilton, Cecily Brennan, Rebecca Horn, Marina Abramović and others. In a lecture entitled, Haptic Gaze: Inviting Touch, we explore how touch is a sense not commonly evoked within art museums and galleries. Even though the act of looking is emphasised in relation to the fine arts, the gaze involves an embodied, multi-sensory experience.

In this response to Gaze, Dr. EL Putnam explores the haptic qualities of looking, including the senses of touch, proprioception, and kinaesthesia, through various works present in the exhibition, drawing from Laura Marks theory of haptic visualisation, or that vision can be tactile. Such an approach invites novel means of interpreting art that highlight the material and embodied qualities of engagement, which open new considerations of the performing body, aging, representation and perception, technology and mediation, gender and the gaze.

About Speaker
Dr. EL (Emily Lauren) Putnam is an artist-philosopher working predominately in performance art, video, sound, and interactive media. Her work draws from multiple themes and sources, including explorations of gender and sexuality, play, materialism, and the study of place, which she investigates through personal and cultural lenses. Her writing and research focuses on continental aesthetic philosophy, performance studies, digital studies, feminist theory, and examining the influence of neoliberalism on artistic production. She is a member of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group (mobius.org), a committee member of the Belfast-based Bbeyond, and Lecturer in Digital Media at the National University of Ireland Galway.

Suggested Reading by Speaker
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2010. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 
Nash, Catherine. 1996. “Reclaiming Vision: Looking at Landscape and the Body.” Gender, Place & Culture 3 (2): 149–70. 

This talk took place on 01 May 2019 at IMMA>

Lecture /  Haptic Gaze: Inviting Touch by Dr EL Putnam

IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is Ireland's leading national institution for the collection and presentation of modern and contemporary art. IMMA TALKS is an activated live programme of talks and events that opens up conversations around the core themes of our exhibition programme, and permanent IMMA Collection, bringing you deeper into the thinking and making of contemporary art.

For further information on IMMA TALKS please contact Sophie Byrne, Assistant Curator, Talks & Public Programmes, IMMA. Email sophie.byrne@imma.ie

Lecture / Haptic Gaze: Inviting Touch by Dr EL Putnam

IMMA Ireland