A WAKING DREAM

Made by yixiaofu ·

An audio and lighting re-creation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work "Untitled(Portrait of Ross in L.A.)"

Created: November 4th, 2019

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A WAKING DREAM
Yixiao Fu - https://youtu.be/tUBFBSmgQQo
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This project is an audio and lighting re-creation of Felix Gonzalex-Torres’s legendary installation “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” which consists of a pile of candies which individually wrapped in multicolored cellophane. This installation is an allegorical portrait of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991. The pile of the 175 pounds of candy represents Laycocl’s ideal body weight. The visitors are invited to take a piece of candy. The disappearing pile parallels to Laycock’s weight loss and metaphors the diminishing life. 

Gonzalex-Torres’s art practice was, according to some scholars, related to Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theater, in which “creative expression transforms the spectator from an inert receiver to an active, reflective observer and motivates social action”. To articulate such interaction and involvement and using them as the framework for the re-creation process of a spiritual multi-media installation I connect the volume of the candy pile directly to the representation of the audio and the light. 

While the generative ambient environment sound will stay playing forever, the main audio features with the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch reading the poem "Ode to a Nightingale". This romantic poem written by John Keats also explores the wonder of life and death. In the poem, Keats relates the life’s sufferings to the briefness of the bird’s song which reveals another layer of parallel relation to the diminishing life.

The physical design of this piece follows the original setting of Gonzalex-Torres’s work, however, by redesigning the lighting environment the visitors will able to focus more on the audio contents and gain a more immersive and meditative experience of life and death.

Full experience download: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xrojxddQWAiUNP9Vfxk5sRSVxGb0_WPv

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Ode to a Nightingale

By John Keats

Voice: Benedict Cumberbatch  

  • My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
  • My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
  • Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
  • One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
  • 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
  • But being too happy in thine happiness,—
  • That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
  • In some melodious plot
  • Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
  • Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
  • O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
  • Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
  • Tasting of Flora and the country green,
  • Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
  • O for a beaker full of the warm South,
  • Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
  • With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
  • And purple-stained mouth;
  • That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
  • And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
  • Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
  • What thou among the leaves hast never known,
  • The weariness, the fever, and the fret
  • Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
  • Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
  • Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
  • Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
  • And leaden-eyed despairs,
  • Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
  • Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
  • Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
  • Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
  • But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
  • Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
  • Already with thee! tender is the night,
  • And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
  • Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
  • But here there is no light,
  • Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
  • Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
  • I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
  • Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
  • But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
  • Wherewith the seasonable month endows
  • The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
  • White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
  • Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
  • And mid-May's eldest child,
  • The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
  • The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
  • Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
  • I have been half in love with easeful Death,
  • Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
  • To take into the air my quiet breath;
  • Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
  • To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
  • While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
  • In such an ecstasy!
  • Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
  • To thy high requiem become a sod.
  • Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
  • No hungry generations tread thee down;
  • The voice I hear this passing night was heard
  • In ancient days by emperor and clown:
  • Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
  • Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
  • She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
  • The same that oft-times hath
  • Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
  • Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
  • Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
  • To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
  • Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
  • As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
  • Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
  • Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
  • Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
  • In the next valley-glades:
  • Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
  • Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
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An audio and lighting re-creation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work "Untitled(Portrait of Ross in L.A.)"