Author: catsynth

Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, New York

This fall and winter in New York featured an ambitious citywide art project by Ai Weiwei called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. Through fences, cages, netting and other forms of “barrier”, Ai Weiwei well-known landmarks as well as quintessentially “New York” locations into expressions of global migration – a complex phenomenon that includes refugee crises around the world as well as the fights for and against immigration in our own country. While the large installations at Washington Square and Central Park perhaps get the most attention, they are also scattered in smaller locations that are part of daily life in the city. We at CatSynth attempted to track down all the major installations and compiled our experiences into this video.

The large sculptural pieces in Washington Square Park and Grand Army Plaza at the corner of Central Park were the most impressive as iconic.


[Grand Army Plaza / Central Park]

The cage at Grand Army Plaza is quite literal, an easily identified barrier between those in the cage and the rest of the city going about its business outside. Of course, one can freely enter and exit this cage at will. The mirrored piece that fills the Washington Square Arch is more abstract, with the silhouettes of human figures forming a welcoming portal in the midst of an imposing fence. This one was the most aesthetically beautiful for me, with its play on reflections and light from the surrounding city.


[Washington Square Arch]

Many smaller installations were scattered around the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood long associated with immigration and new arrivals to the United States. Indeed, the European Jewish side of my family settled in this neighborhood in the early 20th century, so it holds particular significance.


[Chrystie Street]

Ai Weiwei. #goodfencesmakegoodneighbors #NYC Essex Street Market

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One could be forgiven for overlooking some of these (though the Essex Street Market installation is quite large). In fact, one at East 7th Street was just a narrow fence in the space between two apartment buildings. It took me a couple of minutes to locate it. And business at the boutiques and cafes at ground level went ahead seemingly oblivious.

We also made it to some of the installations in other boroughs, including the one surrounding the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.


[Unisphere – Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens]

The Unisphere is one of the remaining ruins from the 1968 Worlds Fair and with its positive (albeit cynical) message of global and international solidarity, its an apt setting for reflecting on the current migration crises and increasing nationalism worldwide. The borough of Queens has also involved since 1968 to become one of the most diverse places in the world.

And no artistic journey through the would be complete without Brooklyn. Fulton Mall – a section of Fulton Street closed to form a pedestrian mall and bus corridor – was the site of a series of installations adding fencing to some of the bus stops.


[Fulton Mall, Brooklyn]

One more Fulton Street Mall. Ai Weiwei #goodfencesmakegoodneighbors #brooklyn #NYC

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Downtown Brooklyn has become an important part of my own experience of New York in the past decade, and it seems fitting to end here, where older discount stores and new high-rise condo buildings collide. We will have to see how this ultimately plays out…

We end in the Bronx, where this billboard on the Deegan Expressway may not be part of the official presentation, but it made for a fitting conclusion.


[Deegan Expressway (I-87), The Bronx]

Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors will be on display through February 18, 2018. You can read more about the project and its many locations here.

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, MoMA

For us at CatSynth, no trip back to New York is complete without a visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and this time it was an exceptionally rich one, with interesting exhibitions on every floor even amidst the museum’s massive renovation project.  We begin with a look at an exhibition of prints by Louise Bourgeois that focused on her print-making work.  Although primarily known for her sculptures, Bourgeois produced a large body of printed works on paper, textiles and other materials, especially at the beginning and end of her career.  But the themes and characteristic elements remain similar regardless of medium, and the show placed the printed works in the context of her sculpture.  For example, the main atrium of the museum was dominated by one of her large iconic spider sculptures, with late-career prints surrounding it on the walls.

Louise Bourgeois: Spider
[Louise Bourgeois.  Spider (1997)]


[Installation View]

The prints in the atrium featured curved, organic forms, in keeping with the same natural focus in the spider and many of her other sculptures.  We can see this synergy between print and sculpture throughout the exhibition, with early prints and drawings informing her sculptures of the 1950s and 1960s, which combined geometric and architectural elements with organic shapes and textures.

Louise Bourgeois: Femme Maison
[Louise Bourgeois.  Femme Maison (1947)]

Louise Bourgeois: Pillar and Figure
[Louise Bourgeois.  Pillar  (1949-1950) and Figure (1954)]

The vertical nature of the forms enhances the sense of embodiment in the sculptures, while drawings like Femme Maison (shown above) make the connection literal.  Bourgeois revisited these same themes in many of her later prints, perhaps even drawing upon the earlier sculptures themselves for inspiration.

The Sky's the Limit
[Louise Bourgeois.  The Sky’s the Limit, version 2 of 2, only state (1989-2003)]

In addition to the intersection of architectural and biological forms, Bourgeois’ work often explores themes of womanhood, fertility, and sexuality. Indeed, the 1947 Femme Maison combines all three themes.  On particularly poignant series from the 1990s, late in her life, revisits motherhood embodied in Sainte SĂ©bastienne (presumably a gender switch of the early Christian martyr Saint Sebastien).  Childbirth and pain come together in the first more literal series of images, but there is a softer element to the second series, which includes this image combining the maternal figure with a cat.


[Louise Bourgeois.  Stamp of Memories II, version 1 of 2, state XII of XII  (1994)]

Sexuality comes through abstractly in many pieces, but quite literally in some late-career drawings which have a playful, comic-like quality, as in this page from her illustrated book The Laws of Nature.


[Louise Bourgeois and Paulo Herkenhoff.  Untitled, plate 2 of 5, state X of X, from the illustrated book, The Laws of Nature (2006)]

Bourgeois celebrated both the female and male while turning some of traditional roles and stereotypes on their head.  In the above image, it is the woman who appears to be in control in the sexual moment, with the male figure more passive.  Another particularly amusing riff on gender stereotypes is her sculpture Arch of Hysteria in which a suspended male torso is used to represent “hysteria”.

Art of Hysteria
[Louise Bourgeois. Arch of Hysteria (1993) and installation view.]

Having been on the receiving end of “why are you being so emotional?” comments in the workplace, I rather enjoyed seeing this stereotype turned around.

We conclude with one last piece from the Lullaby series in which a simple red organic form is printed on sheet-music paper.

Untitled, no. 11 of 24, only state, from the series, Lullaby 2006
[Louise Bourgeois. Untitled, no. 11 of 24, only state, from the series, Lullaby (2006)]

Like the drawings from The Laws of Nature, these were done towards the end of the career.  I thought it was interesting that she chose music paper as the foundation for this series.  And for us at CatSynth, it allows us to circle back to music, which permeates our experience of art.

Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through January 28, 2018.  You can find out more information here.

CatSynth Pic: Chord Kitten (Qu-Bit Electronix)

Seen on matrixsynth today đŸ˜ș, featuring modules from our friends at Qu-Bit Electronix.

Just a random synth cat pic via @quebitelectronix.

“Chord kitten from @catsonsynthesizersinspace đŸ’™đŸ±”

Makes you wonder what it was hearing. Or maybe it was reading MATRIXSYNTH.

macOS High Sierra and The Great Purge

Apple’s incessant nagging gets to me. They really seem to want to grab your attention with alerts and updates to a level that reminds me of Microsoft Windows of the early-to-mid 2000s. This is perhaps no more true than with OS updates. I do my best to resist them, but in a moment of fatigue and weakness after busy few days around New York, I gave in and allowed them to update my laptop to macOS High Sierra. After all, I had no trouble at all installing any of the previous mountain-themed updates (Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra), and maybe I would even save a little disk space on my boot drive afterward.

This was a huge mistake. After several minutes of churning – harmless enough – it stopped with the ominous message “macOS could not be installed on your computer.” Unfortunate, but ok, just move on. But after rebooting and attempting to log in, I started getting Linux-style text errors pouring down the screen and a kernel panic. This repeated multiple times and was definitely not good. Not good at all. A boot to recovery mode with Command+R and running “First Aid” in Disk Utility cleared up that problem, but I now had a MacBook Pro stuck in a Groundhog-Day-like cycle of attempting to install macOS and failing.

OK, no need to panic yet. After all, I could restore from Time Machine back in San Francisco. But in the meantime, no CatSynth posts with photos, no CatSynth TV episodes, no app updates. And when I want to get something done, I really want to get it done. Perhaps, in retrospect, it is this impatience that gets me into situations like this.

My best theory as to what went wrong (none of the obvious things via Google search made any difference) is that the macOS installation collided with the older Journaled+Encrypted hard drive, or perhaps the 40GB of disk space was distributed in such a way that hindered installation. So before and after a delightful Thanksgiving with family, I embarked on another direction: making a quick backup image of the still intact drive, and reformat it in a more modern but unencrypted way. Both those operations went smoothly, and macOS High Sierra installed quickly and flawlessly afterward.

But now I had a blank system. I realized rather than tragedy, this is actually an opportunity. The filesystem was basically layers upon layers dating back to at least 2011, a mess of disorganized photos, music, scattered source code and partially uninstalled applications. It was always on the verge of running out of space and running rather slowly. I now had a chance to start again, without losing what I had in the past. I have done such a purge before, but not in several years – I have been lulled into complacency by installations and backups that mostly work. So we are now installing our most used items: Photoshop, Lightroom, Final Cut, Xcode, IntelliJ, etc. The music is simple. I’ll figure out what to do with the photos. And I’ll leave the old image on an external drive.

We are starting fresh, or fresh enough. And while it will be a day or two before I can do videos again, we can certainly get back to more articles; and sort the rest out when we get back to San Francisco. It’s also an observation that in-the-moment impatience is sometimes a blind spot. I need to pause a bit more, perhaps, even in those moments when I don’t plan to.