The Without
Oil on canvas
3’ H x 4’ W diptych
1990s
The WITH / WITHOUT series rings post-structural changes on an explicit conceptual issue: can a three-color system and a two-color system cohere? Interlocutors interlock, as bands and maze, and as a primary palette of red, yellow, blue encounters fundamentals in black-and-white.
A strong review is this: http://marjoriewelish.com/MW-review-5.html
A rigorous essay analyzing and discussing the quandaries of structure from the series is by Deborah Gans and Mathew Jelacic, in Of the Diagram: The Work Of Marjorie Welish. Slought Foundation, 2003.
Read this excerpt from Gans & Jelacic Architecture and Design:
“The canvas is a single game board, its canvas breaks the boundary of each team’s territory and the contested edge. […] Paint is the chip or coin that allows for syntactic exchange. Bids are made with elements (primary colors), binary systems (two yellows), graphic moves (center and edge), and painterly fields. Within the syntactical field, there are many gambits […] the game’s theory, the modelling of competition for the purpose of equivalence is a form of Game Theory, the mathematical modeling of conflict for optimization. According to such theory, the game has no winner.”
