“You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.”

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.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It’s scary.

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.

It’s really hard for me to use the term ‘history’ in the singular, because it suggests a reductivist view of how moments and events congeal and reflect the passage of time. I’d rather stick to the pluralness of ‘histories’ in order to suggest the simultaneity, the parallel forces at work, which produce lived experience.

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 think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.

I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

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 mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.

Teaching at university isn’t like teaching in an art school.

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

I like suggesting that ‘we are slaves to the objects around us,’ that ‘plenty should be enough,’ or that the ‘buyer should beware,’ within the context of conventional selling space.

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.

I’m trying to engage issues of power and sexuality and money and life and death and power. Power is the most free-flowing element in society, maybe next to money, but in fact they both motor each other.

This is not a village of hate. It’s a village of hope. Don’t let midgets give us a bad name. There are still giants in Harlem, giants who will stand up for our children.

For the world order to be one of peace and justice, for the global village to be a theater of right livelihood.

Part of what attracted me to the village was it had a lot of parallels to contemporary issues.

She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today.

I had met a young lady who wanted to be in the theater.

I dont see a lot of movies that portray the East Village as well as I think they can.

After tea it’s back to painting – a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. From time to time instead of this evening painting session I go bowling in one of the neighbouring villages, but not very often.

I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome.