2018_EJRNL_PP_HARRIET_HAWKINS_1.pdf
Terbatas Noor Pujiati.,S.Sos
» ITB
Terbatas Noor Pujiati.,S.Sos
» ITB
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