You've been arrested five times in NYC and the Supreme Court has upheld your free speech rights. Have you ever been arrested outside of New York?
There's never a law against working with a nude in the street, and I've gotten permits when I was making work with lower numbers of people. So when the numbers went up, that wasn't the issue.
Is it just New York that has a problem with your work?
Each state has different laws regarding nudity. Some are so corrupt, because the pornography industry has so much money, and they are trying to protect the public from pornography and many of the laws are old. But a lot of places like Canada, where the Canadian government has a law against nudity in public, they've opened up the law due to the nature of my work. And it was celebrated, and the traffic controllers were there and it was a piece of pride.
Are other countries are more accepting of your work?
From Portugal to Melbourne, to Chile and London, all the local governments have celebrated my work and have encouraged it to happen. But in New York in the 90's, I was pretty much under the threat of arrest every time I made a work of art. I think it's a great thing. Do you think it's a great thing?
You want to know what I think?
I usually don't turn it around. What do you think?
We ran a Performance Art Festival here in Cleveland for many years and presented 1000 performance artists from 24 countries, so I think of your work as performance art.
I heard that you did that. It's good that a big thing comes in and forces the issue in a big way and pushes away the red tape.
It certainly forces the issue one way or the other.
I've done over seventy of these installations, and every time good things come out of it, politicians and social workers and small business owners are all talking about it.
Your online bio states that the nude bodies in your work "do not underscore sexuality" yet it is an obvious element. What is the role of sexuality in your work?
Well, obviously, the work is working with the nude, which can be sexual or it can be horrible, like the controversy with the prisoner abuse scandal, with the nude bodies positioned in a totally horrible way. When you look at those pictures you don't see the sexuality. There can be an aggressive naked body, a tortured naked body, or a beautiful naked body. In my work, the body is used repetitively as a medium to create a living sculpture to deal with the humanity and the vulnerability of the body, juxtaposed to the public space and the concrete world. So it's not so much sex or sexuality that is involved.
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