I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

Photos should suggest a word(s) and vice versa. They should be equal and interchangeable.

A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.

What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.

I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter and I'm sort of reporting.

Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art, and that is something you can't will.