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

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 321-340

  Hawkins, Harriet ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Embodied methodologies; Embodied writing; Installation art; Senses; Vision

Indexed keywords

ART; CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY; ETHICS; HEGEMONY; RESEARCH WORK;

EID: 78649692188     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010368605     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. The account of the installation is constructed from a series of visits I made to the piece during March and April 2005. The writing was influenced by contemporary 'creative' geographies and fictocriticism by, amongst others, Alphonso Lingis and Michael Taussig.
2. D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
3. S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
4. C. Nash, 'Reclaiming Vision: Looking at Landscape and the Body', Gender, Place and Culture, 3, 1996, pp. 149-69
5. G. Rose, Feminism and Geography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993)
6. G. Pollock, Vision and Difference (London: Routledge, 1988).
7. J. Dubow, 'From a View on the World to a Point of View in It: Rethinking Sight, Space and the Colonial Subject', Interventions International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2(1), 2000, pp. 87-201
8. H.M. Macpherson, 'Cultural Geographies in Practice: Between Landscape and Blindness: Some Paintings of an Artists with Macular Degeneration', cultural geographies, 15, 2008, p. 261
9. H.M. Macpherson, 'The Inter-Corpreal Emergence of Landscape: Negotiating Site, Blindness and Ideas of Landscape in the British Countryside', Environment and Planning A, 41(5), 2009, pp. 1042-54
10. J. Wylie, 'Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, pp. 519-35.
11. This article sits alongside Toby Butler's analysis of sound art works as a way to explore the multi-sensory experiences of cityscapes. T. Butler and G. Miller, 'Linked: A Landmark in Sound. A Public Walk of Art', cultural geographies, 12, 2005, pp. 77-88
12. T. Butler, 'A Walk of Art: The Potential of the Sound Walk as a Practice in Cultural Geography', Social and Cultural Geography, 7(6), 2006, pp. 889-908.
13. D Cosgrove, Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, p. 10.
14. S Daniels, Fields of Vision.
15. J. Wylie, 'Landscape, Performance and Dwelling', In P. Cloke (ed.) Country Visions (London: Longman, 2003)
16. H.M. Macpherson, Between Landscape and Blindness.
17. See Wylie, 'Depths and Folds'
18. J. Wylie, 'A Single Days Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast Path', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(2), 2002, pp. 234-47
19. H. Lorimer, 'Herding Memories of Humans and Animals', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, pp. 497-518.
20. H Lorimer, 'Herding Memories', p. 517.
21. S Daniels, Fields of Vision
22. D. Pinder, 'The Arts of Urban Exploration', cultural geographies, 12, 2005, pp. 383-411. For other analysis of art works which has moved towards embodied accounts of artist production and consumption see: Butler and Miller, 'Linked'
23. D.P. Toila Kelly, 'Fear in Paradise: The Affective Registers of the English Lake District Landscape Re-visited', Senses and Society, 2(3), 2007, pp. 329-51
24. D. Pinder, 'Ghostly Footsteps: Voices, Memories and Walks in the City', Ecumene, 8, 2001, pp. 1-9. See also many of the articles in the special issue of Social and Cultural Geography on 'Geographies of Art and the Environment', 7, 2006, edited by Sarah Cant and Nina Morris.
25. We should be sensitive here to the slippages between how non-representational theorists from within geography have figured 'representation' and how it is understood by artists and art historians.
26. C. Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005)
27. C. Dogherty, From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004)
28. R.E. Krauss, 'Richard Serra: A Translation', in The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985) pp. 260-74
29. J. Meyer, Minimalism. Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: New Haven University Press, 2001)
30. B. O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1999)
31. E. Sunderberg (ed.) Space, Site, Intervention. Situating Installation Art (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
32. V.C. Sobchak, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991)
33. V.C. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and the Moving Image (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004)
34. L. U. Marks, 'The Skin of the Film', in L.U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), for similar related to film and visual media. See also Wylie, 'Depths and Folds', for these arguments applied to landscape. For a useful summary of these positions see Wylie, 'Depths and Folds'.
35. Interestingly this rehearses in a sense Cosgrove's distinction between vision and sight. Vision, as opposed to sight, is always culturally conditioned, it entangles ideological complexities and tensions with perceptions. Vision implies 're-working - and pre-working - experience in the world through imagination, and imagination's expression in the creation of images. Geography - geo-graphia - has always entailed making and interpreting images,' Geography & Vision, 2008, p. 15.
36. R. Longhurst, E. Ho and L. Johnston, 'Using "the Body" as an "Instrument of Research": Kimch'i and Pavlova', Area, 40, 2008, pp. 208-17.
37. M. Crang, 'Qualitative Methods: Touchy, Feely, Look-See?', Progress in Human Geography, 274, 2003, pp. 494-504
38. R Longhurst, 'Using the Body'
39. M. Paterson, 'Haptic Geographies: Ethnography, Haptic Knowledges and Sensuous Dispositions', Progress in Human Geography, 33(6), 2009, pp. 1-23.
40. H Lorimer, 'Herding Memories'
41. E. A. Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989).
42. Recent models in art historical writing for this could be Y. Lomax, Writing the Image. An Adventure with Art and Theory (London: IB Taurus, 2000).
43. T.J. Clark, Sight of Death. An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
44. P. Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)
45. S. Gannon, 'The (Im)possibilities of the Self Writing. French Poststructural Theory and Autoethnography', Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 6, 2006, p. 474
46. S. Muecke, 'The Fall: Fictocritical Writing', Parallax, 8(4), 2002, pp. 108-12
47. H Lorimer, 'Herding Memories'.
48. C. De Silvey, 'Salvage Memory: Constellating Material Histories on a Hardscrabble Homestead', cultural geographies, 14, 2007, 401-24
49. J Wylie, 'A Single Days Walking'.The drivers behind such practices have been variously expressed as, a response to the demands of materials, or explicitly aligned with non-representational theories triangulated with an often personal desire for creative academic praxis.
50. J. Wylie, 'Nonrepresentational Subjects?', in B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds.) Taking-Place: Geography and Nonrepresentational Theory (London: Ashgate, 2010) copy from the author.
51. H Lorimer, 'Herding Memories'.
52. J. Wylie, 'A Single Days Walking', p. 235.
53. E. Grosz writing on Luce Irigaray, in Grosz, Sexual Subversions.
54. E Grosz writing on Luce Irigaray, in Grosz, Sexual Subversions.
55. For discussions of the visual regimes of the gallery see: B. O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1987)
56. C. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995). For work that has explored the critique of the gallery as a space of site see
57. K. Hetherington, 'The Unsightly: Visual Impairment, Touch and the Parthenon Frieze', Theory, Culture & Society, 19, 2002, pp. 187-205
58. J. Drobnick, 'Toposmia: Art, Scent, and Interrogations of Spatiality', Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 7, 2002, pp. 31-47.
59. L.U. Marks, 'Skin of the Film', p. 169 where a similarly intimate gaze is considered in the process of looking at an exceptionally detailed still life paintings.
60. For a longer discussion of the spaces of art see: J. Fisher, 'Relational Sense: Towards a Haptic Aesthetics', Parachute, 87, 1997, pp. 4-11.
61. J Dubow offers a similar visual account in her critique of colonial vision
62. J Dubow, 'From a View on the World to a Point of View in It'.
63. J Dubow, 'From a View on the World to a Point of View in It'.
64. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes trans. by A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998[1968]), p. 24.
65. For further explanation of this form of inter-subjectivity see Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, see also Wylie, 'Depths and Folds'.
66. D. Judovitz, 'De-assembling Vision: Conceptual Strategies in Duchamp, Matta-Clark, Wilson', Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 7, 2002, pp. 95-114
67. M. Walsh, 'The Immersive Spectator: A Phenomenological Hybrid', Angelaki, Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 9, 2004, pp. 169-85.
68. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 155.
69. M. Merleau-Ponty, 'Eye and Mind', in T. Baldwin (ed.) Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 290-324, p. 295.
70. G. Weiss. Body Images. Embodiment as Intercorpreality (London: Routledge, 1998), see also those listed in note 14.
71. H. McPherson, 'The Intercorporeal Emergence of Landscape: Negotiating Sight, Blindness, and Ideas of Landscape in the British Countryside', Environment and Planning A, 41, 2009, pp. 1042-54.
72. Merleau-Ponty, 'Eye and Mind', p. 295.
73. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, pp. 134-5.
74. E. Grosz, 'Urban Flesh', in D. Olkowski and G. Weiss, Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Pennsylvania, PA: Penn State Press, 2006), p. 154.
75. J Wylie's, 'Depths and Folds'
76. V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)
77. V Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts
78. See also the range of discussions in Olkowski and Weiss, Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
79. Vasselau, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 235.
80. Integral to a continuing commitment to critical accounts of vision is a gathering force in geographical scholarship which emphasizes corporeal apprehensions that are in excess of the optical. See for example.D. Porteous, 'Smellscape', Progress in Human Geography, 9, 1985, pp. 356-78
81. L. Law, 'Home Cooking: ilipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong', cultural geographies, 8, 2001, pp. 264-83.
82. Lingis, The Imperative.
83. M. Schafer, 'Open Ears', in M. Bull and L. Black (eds.) The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 25-40, explores how galleries aim to compartmentalize, isolate and train perception in the pursuit of proper, moral subjects.
84. C. Classen, 'Don't Touch the Art! And Touch in the Museum', in C. Classen (ed.) The Book of Touch Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. 273-88
85. J. Drobnick, 'Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art and Architecture', in D. Howes (ed.) Empire of the Senses, pp. 265-80
86. K Hetherington, 'The Unsightly'
87. J Dobnick, 'Toposmia'
88. Duncan, Civilising Rituals.
89. D. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision. Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), p. 5.
90. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1992). Importantly such synergistic totality is not the same as saying that the senses must be conceptualized as imultaneous. The experience of 'hearing' the installation's auditory terrain of noises, sounds, and human elodies, occurs only towards the end of my exploration of the installation.
91. Marks 'The Skin of the Film', p. 183.
92. G. Deleuze and F. Guatteri, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Althone Press, 1988), pp. 492-99.
93. Ingold, 'Stop. Look and Listen', in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 277.
94. M. Paterson, The Senses of Touch (Basingstoke: Berg, 2007), p. 21.
95. Conner, 'Serres' Cinq Sens', url < http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/5senses.htm>. A number of different ways to think about senses and sensations have been suggested, as 'levels'.
96. see Lingis, The Imperative, and accumulations see G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. by D.W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2005).
97. Deleuze, writing of Bacon's work notes, 'every sensation... is already and "accumulated" or "coagulated" sensation... Hence the irreducibly synthetic character of sensation', p. 27.
98. A Lingis, The Imperative; M. Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London: Continuum, 2009).
99. M Paterson, The Senses of Touch.
100. See Classen, 'Don't touch the Art', for a concise history of touch in gallery spaces.
101. H. Hawkins, 'Touching Art Touching You', Senses and Society, 4(3), 2009.
102. F.D. Martin, Sculpture and Enlivened Space. Aesthetics and History (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), p. 59.
103. K. Hetherington, 'The Unsightly', p. 199.
104. S. S Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
105. N. Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1987).
106. See also Hawkins, 'Touching Art, Touching You'.
107. J. Derrida, On-Touching- Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. by C. Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
108. M Paterson, 'Seeing with Hands: Touching with Eyes', in The Senses of Touch (Basingstoke: Berg, 2007).
109. See also discussions in: Paterson, The Senses of Touch
110. Vasseleu, Textures of Light
111. Deleuze and Guatteri, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 499.
112. A number of philosophers have written on the relationship between vision touch and inter-subjectivity, for example Merleau-Ponty, Emanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray. For a comparison of their perspectives see, M. Paterson, 'Caresses, Excesses, Intimacies and Estrangements', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 9, 2004, pp. 165-77
113. Vasseleu, Textures of Light. The latter is as Marks writes 'parchingly dry' ('Skin of the Film': 256 n. 20). This is especially clear when read alongside the personal accounts of the former, although this is, admittedly, a paper in comparison with a book length treatment. However, as Marks' own work shows it is entirely possible to write an entire text in such a form.
114. This sensory mimesis is central to the symbiosis of subject and object, the dissolving of power relations between seen and seen.
115. J Wylie, 'A Single Days Walking'.
116. A. Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 9.
117. M. Bille and T. Flohr-Sorensen, 'An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light', Journal of Material Culture, 12, 2007, pp. 263-84, for a discussion of the lost experience of light.
118. For further discussion of this see O'Doherty, White Cube
119. Judovitz, 'De-assembling Vision'.
120. J. Wylie, 'Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love', Transactions Institute of British Geographers, 34, 2009, pp. 275-89.
121. Wylie, 'Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love', p. 279.
122. H Lorimer, 'Herding Memories'.
123. D Pinder, 'Arts of Urban Exploration'
124. Butler and Miller, 'Linked'
125. Tolia-Kelly, 'Fear in Paradise'
126. D.Crouch and M. Toogood, 'Everyday Abstraction: Geographical Knowledge in the Art of Peter Lanyon', cultural geographies, 6(1), 1999, pp. 72-89.
127. Noe, 'Experience and Experiment in Art', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7(8/9), 2000, pp. 123-36
128. R.E. Krauss, 'Richard Serra: A Translation', but she does not make such overt claims. For a series of similar arguments related to film
129. see V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
130. Y. Lomax, Writing the Image and T.J. Clark, Sight of Death. An Experiment in Art Writing.
131. E. Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
132. G. Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5.
133. McPherson, 'The Intercorporeal Emergence of Landscape'.