I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.
If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they're my terms, and they're not.
Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.
I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.
Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.
Teaching at university isn't like teaching in an art school.
Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot.
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
There's a moment of recognition. It's that white-light kind of stuff that just 'works.' I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it's a movie, music, a building, a book.
I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices.
I'd always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.
I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.
I don't necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It's just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.
I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.
Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.
I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories.
I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.
I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
