Searching for the Perfect Welsh Mountain

Abstract

Why do we feel compelled to recount our experiences of mountains through narratives of majestic views and personal epiphanies? Why does so much get left out of conventional representations? Searching for the Welsh Landscape was a solo exhibition at Aberystwyth Arts Centre exploring the problematic notion that national identity subsists within the landscape. Focussing on the artworks’ “tactically absurd” means of engaging with a given context of mountain culture, this article sketches out a position defined in opposition to a “seriousness” understood to be the normative mode of engagement with mountains and landscape. Central to the project was a knowingly futile, two-year search for a “perfect Welsh mountain”, which is positioned here within a lineage of irrational instruction-based conceptual art. Unfolding through a performative process of walking, the search simultaneously inhabits and violates conventional forms of engagement with mountains. The influence of existing cultural representations of the Welsh landscape leads to a conflicted experience, manifested in the artworks’ absurd juxtapositions of the serious and the non-serious. Although the absurd is encountered as “insufficient” (due to a lack of established structures of understanding necessary to account for its sense), it is in fact doubly productive: firstly, as a form of critique that draws attention to the codes and conventions underpinning clichéd forms of representation; and secondly, liberated from narratives of meaning and coherence, as able to account for a broader spectrum of experience, bearing closer witness to actual lived encounters with mountains. Absurdity reveals mountain culture to be unnecessarily one-dimensional, its relentlessly weighty seriousness all-too-often clinging to a romantic mystique, with little regard for the trivial, the incidental or the funny. Mountains, it is argued, sometimes display their own sense of the ridiculous.