Word: darkeness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...just this side of psychotic. This Batman does not battle crime out of any sense of moral righteousness. He does it because he is obsessed. He likes to scare the hell out of crooks by dangling them off the edge of skyscrapers. He enjoys slinking around in the dark, vanishing and reappearing without warning in the thick mist that envelops Gotham...
Where Batman appears dark and impenetrable, his nemesis the Joker (Jack Nicholson) is just the opposite. Nicholson wears a bright orange and purple suit that stands out from the Gotham cityscape. Dressed like that, the Joker is not about to disappear into the fog. And Nicholson's face, wrenched into a permanent parody of a grin (the result of being dropped, by Batman, into a vat of toxic chemicals), is a perfect complement to Keaton's expressionless mask...
...Wilmarth worked the glass, bending it discreetly and etching it with hydrofluoric acid. This frosted the panels and brought out their color, which varied from a cold ice green to a soft, almost moonstone blue, diffused on the face but sometimes concentrated with sharp energy within the edges. The dark steel, seen through this translucency, lost its declarative character; it blurred, and became a presence, or rather an immanence: something very much there yet hard to define...
...pared-down form that one associates with Rothko at his best, and something more: the sense of a figure, not described but evoked by a flat vertical plane, behind the glass. Even in a smaller piece like Is, Was (Chancing), 1975-76, there is a fascinating exchange between dark and light, solidity and translucency, underwritten by the economical logic of its making: a single sheet of steel cut and folded, a single plate of glass. And the cables that hold such pieces together are not mere connectors. They are conceived as drawing: exact lines whose tautness is both visual...
...best kind of bright early summer's day spoiled by the worst kind of dark imaginings: Is it possible that in this season, otherwise so full of innocent promise, Hollywood executives banish all thought of us as audience -- discerning, judicious, culturally literate? Does the solstice induce in them some Kafkaesque mental process by which we are converted, for purposes of contemptuous calculation, into some lower life-form? Do moviegoers suddenly seem to them to be, say, a vast colony of ants mindlessly munching through forests of Roman numerals, unconcerned about the taste, good or bad, of anything placed...