“It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it”

I think what I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.

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

As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy. From the moment of the crash, the pornography of sentiment never let up.

All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

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’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.

Love is something you fall into.

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.