I had met American artists and just couldn't believe their energy. London was always such a struggle to get anything going.

My father was a doctor. He was just a great guy, a gentle humanist, and an old-fashioned GP. He'd get up at three in the morning to see patients in different areas if they needed him.

From day one, my idea was always to use the gallery as this animated place to discover culture in a much bigger way.

My art history papers were really politics. They were about the manifestation of culture through the eye of political events. So there was always that refusal to settle in one place, or one discipline or medium.

There's a moment when you say, "Okay, I'm not going to become a dancer. I'm not going to become a painter." So in a sense, I ended up writing about those big conflicts that I felt.

I started as a tap dancer in Durban, which is on the coast. That was an important part of growing up, turning on the radio in the morning and hearing Zulu singing or the news in Zulu.

As far as I'm concerned, the 20th century was performance-driven, but for some reason, the critics and historians didn't know how to integrate that.