INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
By Shana Dumont Garr, Cohort ’22
I met the artist-philosopher and èƽ alumna EL Putnam when she was in Boston for her 2023 solo exhibition, Pseudorandom, curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, cohort ’11, at Emerson College. The exhibition featured video art installations and performances created during the COVID-19 pandemic centering on themes of motherhood, feminism, and collaborations with computers via programs she wrote.
We met to talk about her ongoing collaborations with Mike McCormack, an experimental fiction writer and author of six books. McCormack defies the conventions of the novel format in his fictional works set in his native West Ireland; for example, his 217-page novel Solar Bones consists of a single sentence. His forthcoming metaphysical thriller, This Plague of Souls, was named a most anticipated book for 2024 by The Guardian and The Irish Times.
Putnam and McCormack’s shared interest in science fiction led them to meet for regular conversations that enrich their respective artistic practices. They experimentally foreground humanity in technology in the hopes that art can manage the challenging reality of the present. What follows is our conversation.
SDG: EL, thank you for meeting with me today, it is lovely to see you! You’re working with Mike McCormack on an upcoming project, and you have worked together in the past and performed together.
EL: Yes, we collaborated on An Invitation for Arts in Action with the University of Galway, which received a great response. We created this performance in the immediate crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, but our work together began before the pandemic. At the time, I was also processing the grief of my dad’s death, and due to the impact of the virus and lockdown, on grief generally. Many of our meetings were sitting with each other in the dark.
At the time, everything was online. It correlated with my experiences of my father’s death, just prior to the pandemic. Since my father died so suddenly, I missed his final days on a ventilator and said my final goodbye over a video call. This created a different grief cycle when I arrived just prior to his funeral, so Mike and I centered the performance on grief.
SDG: I am so sorry for your loss. How did grief feature in that performance?
ELP: We did not sentimentalize, and explored its Dionysian aspects. As part of the experiential process, I poured honey directly on the glass, which appears to be the camera lens, and spread my fingers through it as Mike’s voice could be heard speaking, with my voice echoing his:
Deny the feeling of our hearts properly broken
We have to keep grief alive
We would not want it to become a waning faculty
We need to be vigilant about this
We need to keep grief alive
SDG: It is incredibly powerful.
EL: I don’t use narration in my work, but I like the way Mike brings it in. We share an interest in the concept of West Ireland as the setting for a sci-fi landscape. Mike wrote a short story about the time-honored custom of hiring women to cry at a funeral, or professional keeners. By bringing in technical innovation, the story steeped in tradition is told without romanticization.
SDG: Are the mutual influences on each other’s work muse-like?
ELP: There is a lot of mutual trust. We will use the concept of a fictionalized cyborg to re-present and de-familiarize the setting. We let each other do our own thing. It’s what happens between there, and not formalizing that process.
SDG: What does the work entail?
ELP: A lot of conversations. We meet and talk. The meetings give us ideas, and we each pursue them with our respective mediums. We get out of the introverted form of art-making. As we worked on An Invitation he asked me, “What is the color of your grief?” I looked through photos I took after my dad died, then pixel-sorted the images which included bright autumn leaves. The words red, orange, and yellow come through early in the performance and I use these colors in some of the generative animations included in the work.
SDG: An answer based on temporal and geographic means.
ELP: Yes. Our current project is still in process; we will be presenting the work at the Mart Gallery in Dublin