Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.

There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.

I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, "I'm afraid I have to go to New York after all."

I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.

Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.

Actually, New York is great for playing around. I made a lot of studies for New York-a big vacuum cleaner lying on the Battery in Manhattan.

The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.