Roman Classic Surprise (Öxsjön)
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 15218
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Home Cooking
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- July
- Year of production
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- How can the interior, the still life, and the portrait be reconfigured, via text and performance, as a site of queer turbulence, resonant with the conditions of Covid-19 lockdown?
Roman Classic Surprise (Öxsjön) is a text performatively recorded across three microphones, each attached to a separate amplifier. A central image is of Andy Warhol drifting into sleep and dreaming of Cy Twombly's Roman Palazzo – lyrical, but cut through by a hum of anxiety as rising water floods both artists’ spaces.
Following his extensive experimentation through live performances that split the voice from the body, and critiqued the performance of masculinity, Triming was commissioned by hmn, a platform for exploratory sound work, to first stage Roman Classic Surprise in 2016. In writing its text, Triming drew from his practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art that explored repetition as a tool for unsettling assumptions about knowledge; from a fresh look at the traditional painting genres of the still life, the interior, and the portrait; and from appropriations of the late- twentieth-century modern art canon.
Triming researched various ways in which to enact the text publicly while splitting voice from body, including by distributing speakers among the audience with the performer moving around them, and onstage. Our conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic spurred Triming to rethink a new mediation of his text as a spatialised sound piece, available online. He made a three-track edit and worked with a sound designer who recorded it across three speakers. This ‘sculptural’ recording was platformed on the artist-led site Home Cooking, a new and well-reviewed initiative developed to address the conditions of artmaking during Covid-19. The performance was launched alongside Triming’s conversations with artist-critic Sally O’Reilly and with artists Daria Martin and Marianna Simnett that addressed the ‘queered’ life we are all now living.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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