Public space can be a lot better with some private space to contradict it and vice versa. It keeps the system alive. If the system is just one thing, then it's closed and it eventually dies.

If something's public then it seems like the important thing is the person in that public. And the notion of rhetoric. I went to Jesuit schools that focused on first there's grammar, then there's rhetoric, and rhetoric's usually seen as a kind of degraded method, because you're trying to persuade.

My first pieces, in an art context, were ways to get myself off the page and into real space. These photographic pieces were ways to, literally, throw myself into my environment. They were photographs not of an activity, but through an activity; the activity (once I planted a camera in the instrument of that activity - once I, simply, held a camera in my hands) could produce a picture.

Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.

Yes, the fear of its blankness. At the same time, I kind of loved it. Mallarmé was trying to make the page a blank page. But if you're going to make the page a blank page, it's not just the absence of something, it has to become something else. It has to be material, it has to be this thing. I wanted to turn a page into a thing.

[My early performance work] started by being the activity of a person, any person, like any other - but once that person became photographed it became a specialized person, the object of a personality cult.

It was an incredible way to grow up, because words that you're taught - these definite things - you realize they sort of beautifully fall apart; that words are tenuous. In the middle of a large word, there's a small word that possibly contradicts the larger word. So I grew up where, on the one hand, the only thing I would ever think of doing was something in writing, music, or art, and on the other hand, I could've reacted strongly against it because it would've been a way to rebel.