Jorge Luis Borges was destined to become one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century, but only now is his closest aesthetic ally, the eccentric painter Oscar Schulz Solari, whose professional name was Xul Solar, even starting to get the recognition that Borges always advocated for him.
(DreamWorks, a co-producer of "Chicken Run," was also involved with "Flushed Away".) The technological shift from the traditional Aardman stop-motion animation, using plasticine models, has given the filmmakers new freedom and flexibility — for instance, in confecting sequences that take place in and under water — but the eccentric, handmade "Wallace and Gromit" aesthetic remains happily intact.
Beyond such philosophical propositions, and beyond the aesthetic interest, the tourbillon's eccentric placement has a practical function.
Heartened not just by the selection but by a sense of aesthetic freedom, I found even more eccentric delights.
Rejecting the subjectivity of the neo-expressionist generation and the market-savvy iconoclasm of American and British post-Pop, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Franz West, and other Europeans went in for eccentric, mostly figurative paintings and sculptures that invoked an aesthetic of messiness, cynicism, and decay.
His heavy black notebook was filled with sketches and ideas, as well as eccentric coinages like "plastick" (with a "k" for kitsch), a word to describe his own developing aesthetic.
"The Jinx" is wickedly entertaining: funny, morbid, and sad, at once exploitative and high-minded, a moral lasagna of questionable aesthetic choices (including reconstructions of ghastly events) and riveting interviews (of Durst, but also of other eccentrics, like his chain-smoking-hot second wife).
