Word: voiding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...universe as it is now supposed to be with the universe as we had ordinarily preconceived it, the most arresting change is not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in the void...
...Untitled, 1961, the diaphanous mists and blots of color were abolished in favor of a snowy white field on which dense blue circular shapes were deployed; later still, the series that included Untitled, 1970, pushed the activity of color from the center of the canvas altogether, leaving the white void itself as the subject, speckled and edged with exquisitely laced drifts of color that Francis blurred, wet into wet, in imitation of Japanese sumi ink painting...
Raymond Chandler knew the territory well, Nathanael West wrote of it brilliantly in The Day of the Locust, but no one has recently taken the measure of the neon void with such savage precision as Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays was a novel about a young actress, Maria Wyeth, crumbling into the pieces of a psychic jigsaw. Didion drew the Southern California landscape with poisonous accuracy, using its shifting scenes to delineate states of an increasingly troubled mind...
...film, however, Losey makes a sonorous attempt to turn the murder into an oblique existential tract and the assassin into a schizoid avenging angel. Like characters in such previous and more estimable Losey films as The Servant and Accident, Jacson is a scarred and desperate man, searching a psychic void for some small sign of life. When he whispers to his police captor, hoarsely but triumphantly, "I killed Trotsky," it becomes not so much a confession as a self-confirmation...
This theatrical decade of short cuts is perfectly epitomized by Dude, a bulging trash basket of a musical, and an open declaration of total aesthetic bankruptcy. It combines the worst of Hair with the worst of Jesus Christ Superstar-a void-plumbing feat. Dude unravels a numbingly incomprehensible allegory ranging from the dawn of creation to the limbo of suburbia, or some thing like that. Galt MacDermot's rock score is a wall of inchoate sound, and Tom O'Horgan stage-manages this debacle like a mass epileptic convulsion...