But for today, let us behold the bounty and fullness of our lives, the highs and the lows, which bear witness to our being alive, beholding them without too much theologizing, but with simple gratitude.

-Buddy Stallings

The priest at my church runs a blog, and a few weeks ago he closed one of his posts with this.  Coming from him, it’s a theological statement, one about how we should live our lives, the gratefulness we have the ability to carry in our hearts.  But I think it’s a beautiful assessment of the world, whether or not it is taken with a religious perspective in mind.  With the semester’s end, I find myself looking back at the months we’ve passed, and, even more, looking forward to what is to come, and I am full with what Buddy Stallings calls “the bounty and fullness of our lives.”  I like this, that we can be so aware of all the things we have, regardless of the pitfalls and troubles we are living in the midst of.  I like that we are able to see through to light, if we push hard through the shadows.  That, really, I think, is an enormous part of why we have art.  Which is not to say that art is always about good, always about illumination.  Sometimes its very purpose is the dark and the shadow.  But I think a lot of art has the ability and the intention of increasing our sense of the world.  And that, I think, by its very nature, must “bear witness to our being alive.”  We live in the fermatas and the brush strokes, in the joy between the letters on the page.

I came across this image that I took when we visited the Clay Bodies exhibition back in September. It seems like so long ago that we walked around Chelsea and stumbled into gallery after gallery. This one stood out to me the most because it reminds me of Miley’s Wrecking Ball Video, even though Miley’s hair is a lot shorter and she prefers swinging on balls rather than swings. I think the beauty of this sculpture is in the attention to detail, from the wrinkles on her elbows to the dimples on her legs. Of course, her nudity is probably the first thing that captures anyone’s attention, but her long hair and relaxed pose take away from this scandalous feature and lend a free, almost childish feel to the sculpture. On the other hand, it could be viewed as the woman experiencing ecstasy, but that all depends on the viewer’s perspective.

Miley Before Her Transformation

A group of Harvard Medical and Dental School students created a parody for the famous song “What does the Fox say?” for the 107th Annual Second Year Show.  I wanted to post this hilarious video because like my previous post, I stated that the last two final group presentations were extremely funny, so I decided to post something along those lines. This video is basically, as my title states, the function of the spleen in the body.  So here is this informative, yet funny parody:

I came across this really cool article about a man who used the art of dressing up and photography to help cure his wife of breast cancer! He thought that making his wife laugh, would help her heal because after all laughter is the best medicine. Although i’m not sure if this would actually work as a cure, I do think that this man is a genius. He took it upon himself to do what he can for the situation, even if it cause him some embarrassing moments! True love!

Bob Carey travelled the country in a pink tutu, taking pictures of himself at some sites. His hope was that these embarrassing photos of him would make his wife,Lisa laugh!

(pictures from buzzfeed.com)

These are just a few of his works. His wife Linda said that these pictures were effective, funny, and did help time pass. When her nurses saw the photos, they enjoyed them too! After getting positive feedback, Bob decided to continue with his project and soon enough the Tutu Project was born and went viral.

“Oddly enough, her cancer has taught us that life is good, dealing with it can be hard, and sometimes the very best thing—no, the only thing—we can do to face another day is to laugh at ourselves, and share a laugh with others.” -Bob Carey

This article was on Buzzfeed.com titled “This guy travelled the country in a pink tutu just to make his wife laugh during Chemo” by Maycie Thornton.

So I came across this awesome book/cube/atlas by Tauba Auerbach. It has nearly every color you could think of. All mixtures of different colors and all shades and tints possible. And I’m sure you may be thinking: “Wow, what a completely useless block of paper.” But I feel that it may be useful to many artists and editors. This would be perfect while learning how to mix colors when it comes to painting as it would provide a great comparison tool. It also has a great range of colors, but I really doubt anyone would use it for practice as it is worth $200-500. It’s a cool piece of art though! What do you guys think?

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/09/tauba-auerbachs-rgb-colorspace-atlas-depicts-every-color-imaginable/

The artist’s website: http://taubaauerbach.com/

What is art? Dictionary.com defines it as “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.” Pay attention to the last part of the definition. Words like beautiful and appealing are used to define what art is, but those words are extremely subjective. According to this definition, art can be anything, art is solely defined as art by the person looking at it. So all the blank canvases, random splatters of paint and other objects you might call useless and not art are art, just not to you. Alright no to the main point of my post. I found a video, a very random and weird video, my question to you guys is: is this art? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LnERaK2cwY&feature=c4-overview&list=UUMV5yXyh6BSZOkTft_cl3vg

http://talentsearch.ted.com/video/Phil-Hansen-The-art-of-the-impe;TEDNew-York/

This clever artist’s story is quiet an inspirational tale of getting past all restrictions to do what you love. Regardless of Phil Hansen’s progressively shaky hands and the destruction of his nerves, he never stopped making art. Or rather he embraced his defect and created a unique style of his own. And from that stemmed the idea to limit his art to induce new forms of creativity.

This idea eventually results in Hansen’s wacky, humorous ways of expression, like using solely karate chops to paint a giant image of Jet Li (which is a pretty amazing feat considering that the side of ones hand is a strange shape). These random and somewhat crazy ideas eventually culminated in his thought evoking project, Goodbye Art, in which the medium the art was created is consumed by some external force, rots or is just destroyed.

It can be quite appalling to many that an artist would go to great lengths to create something only to ruin it. A vast majority of people have this idea that art and literature leaves a person’s mark on the world and is what makes him/her memorable, but I feel that Hansen expresses that art does not have to be physically there, everlasting or perfect to be inspiring or memorable. Hansen’s story just goes to show you that one can change the winds of life by taking a problem and manipulating it to do something you love or create something inventive.

This TED Talent Search video reminded me of a random page by Alden Tan that I came across a while ago (this is actually a commercial website but his posts are quiet interesting). This man strongly believes that life shouldn’t stop you from doing what makes you happy and literally makes a post saying that there is no excuse to let life’s problems hinder you because others seem to find a way out (so why shouldn’t you!): http://alden-tan.com/no-excuses/.

For those of you that have your own personal “shakes” in life, there are always new possibilities and a way out of just about any obstacle with hard work and a bit of creativity. Just some hopeful words before the craziness of finals next week :).

I wanted to post this video because it reminded me of the final presentations today which were extremely funny. Christmas is also approaching, so I wanted to show this holiday/comedy video of Jimmy Kimmel- the Naughty or Nice edition because it portrays this joyous spirit accurately. Kimmel uses fake lie detectors, but the the two brothers who are a part of the test do not know this information and simply nod their heads in agreement to whatever Kimmel says. I don’t want to give away from the video, so here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTuQPSvXuv4

I, along with a rough dozen other Macaulay freshman, have spent the last two months working on the exhibition of Snapshot photos that went on today.  It was a very amateur show, and it did not look like it was curated by professionals, but it’s something that I think all of us ended up being proud of, if only because of the amount of time and care that we dedicated to it.  I think the event was scheduled terribly, because finals are looming so close, which made both the work of curating and, for everyone else, actually attending, much more of a challenge, and I know a lot of people didn’t make it, but I just think that the entire concept behind Snapshot is an interesting one.  Which is not to say that I don’t understand why people grumbled about having to go–I probably would have, too, if I weren’t one of the curators.  But what emerged from the meetings we had was really interesting–I began to see the places where people’s passions began to overlap with the work they were dealing with.  Because I am a writer, I wanted to deal with the interaction between text and photography, so another curator and I ended up making one exhibit wherein we wrote poems inspired by photographs and paired them together, and on my own I built an accordion book in which I literally layered photographs, on transparencies, over the text of a poem I wrote.  Another project, which was nixed due to a really unfortunate logistical twist of fate, involved the relation of an image of dance to the snapshot images.  One show paired microscopic images with the snapshot pictures, thus uniting biology and photography, and architecture students curated exhibitions involving their own focus of study.  In one, manmade light imitated natural light, and in another, the manmade elements of the photos were cut away, so that they only lined up if you stood in the right place, and, if you stood elsewhere, the separation between manmade skyline and natural environment was emphasized.  In a third, all the photos of bridges were lined up so the bridges connected into a single long span, and in a fourth images of crosswalks were attached in a circular panorama, which the viewer stood inside of.

This is really inspiring to me, this ability we have to unite different spheres of our lives, even in something as small and as simple as the Snapshot show.  It gives me hope, too, that we will continue to do new things, that we will continue to live and make the world exciting.  And I think it makes the experience of the world more beautiful, if we are able to find the things we are passionate about in seemingly unrelated circumstances, if we can pass our daily lives in excitement and in awe.

The semester is finally coming to an end. We’re facing our daunting finals head on. We’re all still trying to find a niche in this college. No one really knows what they want to do till they’ve experience a variety of things. I found a useful list of advice, from a senior at Fordham University, that I thought would be beneficial to read and think about.

Here it is: http://thoughtcatalog.com/celia/2013/12/22-college-seniors-on-their-advice-to-college-freshmen/

Some pieces of advice may not apply to everyone but it is pretty generalized and encompasses the college experience in most aspects.

P.s. It contains some profanity but I’m sure everyone can handle it.