What is it about?
'Searching for the Welsh Landscape' was an art project that adopted a deliberately absurd approach to dealing with the question of whether national identity can subsist in the landscape. The paper questions the assumption that engagements with mountains should be serious or earnest, and argues that humour and absurdity are legitimate responses.
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Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Representations of mountains are unnecessarily one-dimensional; their relentlessly weighty seriousness is infused with an inherited visual and textual culture of mountains that still clings to a romantic mystique, with little regard for the trivial, the incidental or the funny. Which one of us today is able to hold an iPhone up to Snowdon and take a photograph that is truly our own vision of what we actually witnessed when we were there, and not what we have been conditioned to expect?
Perspectives
The paper emerged partly as a reaction to presenting my absurdly-conceived work at a conference about "mountain culture" in which virtually every other contributor adopted an overtly serious tenor. I felt that my contribution stood out for its silliness, flippancy and irony, and wondered later whether it might even function as a kind of corrective to all this unnecessarily limiting seriousness...
Dave Ball
University of Southampton
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Searching for the Perfect Welsh Mountain, Performance Research, February 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2019.1624023.
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