'The argument of the eye'? The cultural geographies of installation art

摘要

In the mid 1980s Cosgrove described a geography based on the 'Argument of the Eye'. Since then geography, like the humanities more broadly, has seen the decline of vision's hegemony with embodied accounts of vision taking the place of the detached Cartesian observer. In this article I consider what the geographer's argument of the eye looks like today. In contrast to many recent studies I return to art as a site from which to build my arguments about vision. Employing a mode of enquiry that uses my body as a 'research instrument' the article stages four encounters with a piece of installation art by Tomoko Takahashi. Such embodied enquiries place a series of demands upon the writer, so a part of this article is devoted to critical engagement with an embodied politics of writing, a form of writing which is responsive to the arguments made about the experience of installation art and therefore the argument of the eye the article develops.