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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.