People get upset when Baghdad, the "Cradle of Civilization" is burning, or when the Buddhas in Afghanistan are falling. These are real concerns.

Seeing your work go into storage in an art museum is obviously a tragedy of any cultural product - which doesn't mean I am anti-institutional.

Stonehenge had an aura but it was also just stone. Then in the sixties, it became a great hedonistic, hippie, druid, rock-n-roll party site. There are amazing pictures of people up on the stones going wild and that's the image I recreated for my model of the project: full access to everyone. I even invented a Stonehenge soccer team that uses spaces between the stones as goals.

I'm depending on other people to take the work and run. And if they run in so many directions, they sort of cancel each other out. So the meaning is always open.

There are ends, occasionally, with projects. That happens. But they are natural dead ends. It's usually the outside situation that demands an ending. I never really settle for one.

My purpose isn't to be confrontational. My purpose is to find out about the world and play myself against it to the extent that it is even conceivable.

I was a lousy academic. I spent most of my time in the cafeteria. But I met fantastic people from all kinds of fields; law, medicine, history, and they eventually dispersed all over the world to do their fieldwork. I liked the way these people committed to the long term in a sincere, visionary way. Their projects weren't about "next season." They were ten-year commitments. They were lifestyle choices that had traditions of fieldwork built into them - moving around, living on location, discipline, a real rigor for research.