Bored with ski school?

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

Nolo is quite correct: the hand skiing concept did not originate with PMTS. I did not mean to convey that it had.

The hand skiing concept I came to through Denise McLuggage's book The Centered Skier and through climbing sequence practice. I mentioned HH's system only because I really could not understand that system through the online animated sequences without the extra tool of hand skiing and my colleagues only quit when they had laughed themselves quite hoarse.

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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

comprex : well, I'm flattered. I have yet to ski in the USA, largely because of the extra cost. Since I am an artist ( www.david-johnson.co.uk ) cost is the chief constraint rather than time.
Where are you based?

At present I am organising a group to ski the steep off-piste in the Dolomites (Italy) with a marvelous French guide called Zebulon Roche* (I don't know if you saw my posting on his exploits).The first time he took a group there he couldn't understand why there were no other tracks. He thought it must be dangerous in some way he couldn't detect.
"No" he was told, "The Italians just don't ski much off-piste".

His home is in Val Cenis, which has about a dozen very small to medium resorts skied mostly by the French, and some very good off-piste that no one skis (including some good tree skiing: http://www.skicardiff.com/photos/pictures/Pic_26_6.jpg and http://www.skicardiff.com/photos/pictures/Pic_26_4.jpg ).
Some friends and I skied with him there the last 2 years, having met him in Verbier before that.
One day last year we had skied several valleys and gulleys without seeing another track, when suddenly we crossed some tracks. We joked with him that the mountain was getting crowded but it turned out they were our own tracks from earlier in the day!

* Zebulon (normally Zeb) is a nickname universally used for him and derives from the children's TV character we call Zebedee over here.

(Sorry, folks, just realised this is rather off-subject)

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snowball, the title of the thread is Bored with Ski School, so anything goes.
I just had a look round your webisite. I must admit to a certain scepticism of "modern art" (I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that term), but this may be changing. I was listening to Tracey Emin on the radio the other day. She has had some really bad press, but she came across as independent down-to-earth lady who had a tough childhood, and who explained herself and her art in language I could understand.
Some of your stuff I don't really understand, but Facing the Dark definitely gets a reaction. Such a simple scene (seemingly), but I could stare at it for hours.
I must try and get rid of my fixed preconceptions of what is art.

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

Thanks, Jonpim,

After all it is free

snowball, Over the ten years we spent in Provence we went to vernissage after vernissage. The place is swamped with 'artistes'! Through the summer entire villages are taken over by l'artiste dans la rue' exhibitions. Great fun, some absolutely dire stuff alongside real talent. As much as you can tell from website images, I thought your work was fascinating. Would love to see it one day. Thought I'm not so sure about 'Time Piece'!

snowball , you've some interesting terrain there. Tell me more as the date approaches?

Browsing your website, I have to echo Jonpim, _some_ of the displays are entirely beyond me. However, I was curious as to

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PG, Time Piece was the oldest work in there. I did it when I was still at art school (about 5 years before Damien Hirst went to art school, I think). ( I originally trained as an architect and then changed my mind.)
An Austrian artist used meat in performances but as far as I know I was the first to use it in a static piece (It is also in "The effect of Gravity on the Universe", but hidden).

comprex, Well, to get any further about the nature of art it would be easier to talk face to face. If you thought of my work more as concrete poetry than visual art it might help.
Specifically I feel my work is close to the poetry of the American, Wallace Stevens (I am giving a talk, at a symposium on him next month, called "What Stevens' ideas might look like as visual art")
The arts lie on a continuum from pure music to literature, with visual art in the middle. I am on the literary (metaphorical) edge.

Obviously in skiing I'm not concerned with human intention, so any idea of meaning cannot be of the same kind. (If you believe in god the difference might not be so stark)
Our relationship to a work of art is in parallel to our possible relationships to the world. The emergence of those parallels is what I would call the birth of meaning.

In skiing the relationship is extremely direct, almost the opposite to that of art, even though most artists are trying to bridge that gap and get closer to reality.
They have in common that engagement with reality that pushes aside our usual world of habit and buffered existence: poetry through opening up meaning and questions, skiing through its absolute physical directness of engagement through our bodies with a world that is not human.

In the sense that my engagement with life is the meaning of my life, yes, there is a connection, but not in the way I meant the phrase when I wrote it.

Well, I don't know if this will enlighten or merely fog everything even worse.

As for the Dolomites and Val Cenis etc: sure, but we've got quite alot of interest already and not many places.

[b[jonpim[/b] Re Tracy Emin,: artists usually talk more simply about their work than critics do. (but talking about the nature of art like this I've entered the realm of the critic or the philosopher).

PS Asking what a work of art means is never exactly the right question. The question should be more: how can I look at this so that it becomes meaningful. (A subtle distinction but I hope you get the idea, at least a little).
A common misconception about style in art is that it is something arbitrary that is tacked on. Actually style is a byproduct of the artist trying to deal with something (or several things). The reason that imitators are seldom as good is that they are imitating the look, rather than dealing with the problems that produced it.

snowHeads are a friendly bunch.

"Obviously in skiing I'm not concerned with human intention"

Au contraire, Snowball, skiing is all about intent, which is why people go to ski school, to better match their results with what they had intended.

snow reports

nolo, I guess you probably know what I meant but I'll say it anyway: I was trying to answer comprex's question about the emergence of meaning. What I do obviously relates to my intention, but I'm not, as in art, concerned with discovering someone else's intended meaning (or, more properly, the possibilities of meaning contained in an object intended to contain meaning)*. Someone who believed in god, however, might believe they were discovering a god-given meaning.

* I won't even start on the postmodernist idea of the death of the "author" which rather irritates me.

snowball, I obviously need to loosen the stays on my brain. I don't understand what you are saying. I expect the problem is mine rather than yours. Is it possible to free up rigid minds like mine without illegal chemicals?

You know it makes sense.

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

Thanks for all that. I now am more clueless than when I sent the first post!! Does this mean that no-one who teaches skiing in the resorts I've been to is any good? How do we know if we're being taught correctly? Having researched the archives for good ski schools, I have booked myself some private lessons with New Generation in Courchevel in March. Although I'm going to Obergurgl and Lech first - to be taught the old way? Confused.

Help!!

Bored with ski school?

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