I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands, and saturate yourself with it.

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 go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.

I can't imagine a life without thinking, doing art. I don't feel any need to be a world traveler or an adventurer. I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. I think somehow I know that I should have a larger vision of art, but I can't think of what that would be.