Lee Triming, past perfect, imperfect, imperfect, subjunctive, subjunctive, perfect, present, present, imperfect, imperfect, present, present

These drawings were made thinking about Robert Barry and Moe Tucker. Other things too – they mostly take a while to come together – but to keep things manageable, these two: this conceptual artist, this drummer.

I use grids and templates to get a drawing started. Not-quite-zen mind humming and looping while the hand repeats small movements, reaches for the rubber. Building and collapsing rhythms. So I think about drumming and drummers all the time. I like drum patterns that fall apart or get lost in noise, maybe come back again. Moe Tucker has this particular quality of insistence, how her singing and drumming ride differently forward, quavering, firm, simplicities that can get read as lack of ability rather than commitment to a particular tenderness and intelligence. Intelligence that slips under radars that stubbornly fail to attune to what it values.

There’s an early interview with Robert Barry where you can almost hear him sighing, either at the questions, or what they point at, or his own confusion, or something all that and bigger. This was shortly after he released cannisters of helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, back into the atmosphere. I think about those gases which are still, probably not expanding, but meandering, reconfiguring. I like that the work wasn’t recorded or presented, just announced. He circulated posters with a phone number, and if you called it, a message recounted the conditions of the work. “From a measured volume to indefinite expansion.” Early conceptual art gives you information you can use to assemble something uncertain. I like how that head game overlaps with and helps me think about looking as an unstable undertaking.



Lee Triming (b. 1971, Brentwood, Essex) lives and works in London, and teaches at the Ruskin School of Art.


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