POET, CRITIC, AND ARTIST Marjorie Welish is a demandingly reflexive and independent conceptualist who has been striving to outwit her own restless intellect since the late 1970s. “It’s easy to develop a skill set, which is deadly for art or thinking,” she said in a conversation with composer and musician David Grubbs conducted on the occasion of “Of the Sign: Art by Marjorie Welish—Paintings/Artist Books/Provocations,” an exhibition of her work that was staged at the Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson, New York, in 2023. Welish’s current and ongoing series of diagrammatic diptychs, “Indecidability of the Sign: Yellow/Black,” 2019–, is a mature embodiment of her critical spirit, and represents her earnest determination to engage with abstraction as a means to stealthily upend the hegemonic.
“Indecidability of the Sign” imitates the visual vocabulary of common barrier tape in order to reroute the forces of prohibition into realms of unobstructed permission. The process that unfolds through an endless array of formal operations. These methods are so extensive that the series itself has three different subseries—each one doggedly interrogates and addresses the conceptual gaps that detach the limited from the unlimited. Stacked or folded, fixed or drifting; splayed, sliced, and chopped: The reorientation of the yellow-and-black pattern is distributed unpredictably over the two-panel support, imbuing the tape’s affordances with messages that extend well beyond any notion of constraint. Interrupting the motif’s orchestrations in subseries “B,” Welish introduces knots of barrier-like strings that behave independently of the grid-like arrangements of tape. And “Meander Collab,” another subseries that Welish has developed with architect Deborah Gans, includes trompe l’oeil renderings of blue painter’s tape fragments, punctuating the yellow-and-black diptychs with a supplementary primary color as well as a contrasting signifier. These additional elements augment Welish’s no-nonsense paint handling marked by direct coverage and fluid line work, embodying a hard-edge approach free of style or flourishes. “Indecidability of the Sign: Yellow/Black” eschews the forbidden. Instead, it insists that we perpetually thwart those aspects of life that impede the pleasures of structural destruction and reinvention.
