Performance Research A Journal of the Performing Arts ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20 High Culture Presentations of the self in mountain environments Jonathan Pitches To cite this article: Jonathan Pitches (2020) High Culture, Performance Research, 25:1, 31-38, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2020.1736889 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1736889 © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 23 Apr 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 183 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rprs20 High Culture Presentations of the self in mountain environments JONATHAN PITCHES INTRODUCTION French, from Latin: amator, lover (Collins). What is more interesting is to examine the There are few amateur pastimes without convergence of these two statuses, a convergence a professional counterpart, few home pursuits undeniably accelerated by web-based undertaken in one’s own time that haven’t technologies and the diversification of roles been professionalized and capitalized. The rise associated with them. Hamilton describes these of professional gaming, or Esports (Li 2016), is in illuminating terms: perhaps the most telling example of this – where players’ dedication to video games, originally Many work roles (especially in the media industries) now deliberately avoid classification or refuse official rehearsed in darkened bedrooms and private forms of consecration or authorisation: the reality domestic spaces, has migrated to massive TV celebrity, the social media user, the blogger, the gaming arenas with global exposure. Spelling, citizen journalist, the hacker, and the media intern baking, even hotdog eating have seen similar are all roles performed somewhere between the lines developments, and as a result the phrase ‘turning of paid/unpaid, professional/amateur, authorised/ professional’ might be seen to have lost some of unofficial. (180) its clout. These are ‘liminal’ roles, she argues, ones that Hillwalking, by contrast, has retained its promote modes of complex co-creation rather status as a resolutely amateur activity, for now than linear forms of production. at least. Of course there are various professional Hamilton is echoing points made by others, occupations aligned with hillwalking – fell including the media theorist Axel Bruns, running, ultra-marathons, mountain leading, who in 2007 coined the term ‘produsage’ to guide writing, for instance – but the practice represent a (then) emerging new hybridity of of walking up and down fells itself, solo or in producer and user. So-called produsers operate a group, somehow seems to defy the forces of ‘in a collaborative, participatory environment’, professionalization, not least because of its he argues, ‘which breaks down the boundaries inbuilt Sisyphean absurdity. Locals with jobs to do between producers and consumers and instead living in mountainous areas often look upon the enables all participants to be users as well as passing hillwalker with amusement: Why put all producers of information and knowledge’ (Bruns that effort into climbing a peak if all you’re going 2007: 101). The results of this co-creation or to do is come down it again? produsage, then, challenge previous models Such distinctions, though credible and of cultural production and indeed of artistry, recognizable, are founded on a false dichotomy disaggregating creative processes and artefacts and, as critics such as Caroline Hamilton have across multiple contributors. We need, therefore, pointed out, are fraught with ‘remarkable to rethink the very notion of an artefact, contradictions and oversights’ (Hamilton according to Bruns, recognizing that an object 2012: 179). Amateurism and professionalism that is ‘prodused’ is ‘evolutionary, iterative, and are not best defined in counterpoint to one palimpsestic’ (101). In short, it is never finished. another, she maintains (179–80), as this leads The world of digitally co-created social to the, frankly silly, conclusion that an amateur media may seem a distance away from the wilfully avoids payment for their activities top of a mountain or from the mocking eyes and a professional, by definition, doesn’t like of a Cumbrian farmer, but high peaks and what they do for a living – ‘amateur’: from mountain tops are no more immune from these PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 25·1 : pp.31-38 ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online 31 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1736889 © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. developments than any other space. As outdoor sanity) to this enquiry I draw here on less extreme educationalist Simon Beames concludes in hillwalking practices to approach these questions the chapter ‘Adventure, Technology and Social using examples from a community of hikers Media’, ‘the transnational growth and existence practising in the Lake District National Park in of adventure practice is undoubtedly supported England. Despite the less elevated location (below by those actively using new technologies that 1,000 metres rather than up to 3,000 metres) the underpin social media’ (Beames et al. 2019: 88). environment nevertheless provokes some Beames and his colleagues are, in truth, analysing heightened expressive behaviours played out on the extreme, celebrity end of adventure practices the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter. – Big Wall climbing, for instance – whose As a walker and Facebooker myself I am part of practitioners garner hundreds of thousands of this community and in this article I move between followers on media platforms, such as Instagram my own experience of ‘produsage’, to that of and Facebook. But it is equally true, I argue here, others in the region, charting the modes of that the more modest pastime of hillwalking self-presentation adopted. As a group we are is being similarly transformed by social media. united by the shared pursuit of ‘peak bagging’ or, What do the self-made digital artworks produced more specifi cally, ‘Wainwrighting’ – that is, by walkers and disseminated in tight-knit online ticking off each of the 214 fells in Lakeland communities of mountain hikers look like? What declared by artist, guide writer and notorious is it about the mountains that provokes such curmudgeon Alfred Wainwright to be worthy of forms of mediatized self-expression? And how a walker’s attention. do artefacts evolve and transform, to produce the palimpsests Bruns refers to in which ‘projects PEAK PRODUSAGE 1 https://bit.ly/3c751Av take the form of texts authored collaboratively 2 https://bit.ly/3bTipYG … through comments and annotations “in the Mountains have long been the target of careful 3 ‘A Claude Glass – margins”’ (2008: 27)? framing. From the hand-held facilitator of the essentially a small, treated The fi eld of social media production is picturesque known as the Claude Glass, popular mirror contained in a box 3 – is a portable drawing and unimaginably large, and the subset of produsers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, painting aid that was widely dedicating their activity to hillwalking is still vast. to the witty labelling of Skye’s mountains in used in the later 18th century by amateur artists The hashtag ‘summitselfi e’ on Instagram has Alec Finlay’s a company of mountains project on sketching tours. The attracted over 15,000 posts and this fi gure is (2012–13), perspective has been played with by refl ections in it of surrounding scenery were dwarfed by those who have watched YouTube walkers in the mountains. Ever since they began supposed to resemble some videos of more severe forms of hiking, such as the to be climbed, self-immersion has always been in of the characteristics of Italian landscapes by the Mount Huashan Plank Walk in China (ten million tension with an urge to capture what is beheld of façmous 17th-century views since 2014),1 or Half Dome in Yosemite the mountains, an urge that, for Finlay, took him painter and sketcher Claude National Park in the US (four and a half million on a ‘journey toward the fundamentals of viewing Lorrain, hence the name.’ https://bit.ly/32OaCIi views since 2015).2 To bring focus (and arguably itself’ (Finlay 2013). ■ (left) Claude Glass, late eighteenth century. Courtesy of the V&A museum ■ (right) Alec Finlay’s a company of mountains project (2012–13). Photo Luke Allans 32 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 25·1 : ON AMATEURS Those fundamentals underwent radical change pragmatically determined by the ease with which with the advent of smartphone technology and they fi t into a rucksack (or can travel under their the inclusion, in 2010, of the reversible camera, own steam) but there are well-documented a device that could equally point forwards instances of much larger items being dragged up to the landscape or backwards towards the mountains to be framed at the top as a selfi e. user. This ostensibly modest innovation led Marine Matthew Disney, for example, gained to a substantial change in attitudes to self- international recognition for his fundraising portraiture and ushered in the now much challenge to climb the highest peaks in England, maligned practice of ‘selfi e’ taking, one simply Wales and Scotland with a 26-kg rowing machine defi ned as ‘characterized by the desire to frame strapped to his back. Later he was pilloried for the self in a picture taken to be shared with an leaving the same rowing machine on top of online audience’ (Dinhopl and Gretzel 2016: 127). Mont Blanc when he got into diffi culties 4 This is a closed group, The popular press and some academic critiques (BBC News 2019).