I wouldn't say the anthropologists were making art, but they were definitely justifying their practices with very personal reasoning, passion, and they were also experimenting with form. There was a sense of trying to be as sincere as possible, whether you were investigating something far away from you or very close.

Of course, I'd welcome protest. Good criticism is hard to find.

In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.

I think the wildest wildlife you can find these days is in Chernobyl, where wolves are running around breeding quite well in the nuclear disaster zones.

I try to make that tension almost stupidly overt in my projects, almost ridiculously so. I keep coming back to the same obvious points again and again.

Of course I can have a simple reaction of sympathy and sorrow to destruction. But you also know that you can't have new things if you don't occasionally destroy the old. That's something you're really not allowed to say because things are often destroyed according to particular power relations so it means taking a stand in those cases, which I am not really interested in doing either. I think I am simply interested in looking.

The Stonehenge proposal got a lot of interesting criticism. One of the best - or worst - said something like, "Go home to Las Vegas." I think this project could possibly be realized at a very late part of my career. Right now, I don't have the authority, the budget, the credibility.