Josh Willcocks

Nick Cage: terrible actor who makes horrendous films. I mean un chien andalou your eyes bad. Cusack though? You have his incredible films with the weight of an elephant on one side of the scale and his bad ones, a feather’s weight on the other side. I maintain he was forced into the thimbleful of poorer movies he’s made. The Paperboy was a recent return to good projects.

Great piece (I’d been waiting for this to be published). I read Interview with the Vampire when I was probably too young to – I certainly wouldn’t have made any sexual inferences – because vampires were cool. Of course there has been a bunch of stuff written retrospectively that looks at themes of homosexuality in Dracula, and concerned with vampires in general, but this really helped to clarify the evolution of vampires from being more ambiguous symbols to the open and intentional symbols they are today. Really interesting.

Excuse the rant. I forgot to say: great article.

Zombies are the catalyst for a form of accelerated and fatalistic social Darwinism; or rather they are social Darwinism. They’re emblematic of a plethora of social issues but they’ve lost their potency and each successive film/series is a necrophagic rehash. It’s time metaphors in horror diversified beyond Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves etc. It’s all very well being creative with the old monsters but they’re still the old monsters. Back to the originality of Cronenbergian symbolism please!

Great piece. I think the outback aesthetic is one that resonates with people from all over the world. Even if we’ve not visited those places we’re so used to seeing the desolate, rundown landscapes in Australian film and documentaries that it instantly brings a wave of cultural references to mind.

That’s what’s great about performance art, it’s only limited by law (which can be, and is at times, transgressed). Accessibility is the main issue and the disparity this causes between those who have actually seen the piece and those whose only references are photographs and descriptions or video – it would of course be more powerful in person. But anyway, thanks for reading, I’m glad you enjoyed!

The fact that it does leave a trace on film means that like other forms of art it can be commodified. Rights to video, photographs and left over props can all be sold to generate revenue. Theoretically, it is the perfect critique of globalisation etc., but the very thing it attacks also packages and peddles it.

There certainly are. Yeah, I’ve heard of those two – Ai Weiwei is actually mentioned in passing in the article.

Zhang Huan could easily be grouped with this new wave of body-oriented Chinese artists.