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environment. It's just how you do it that counts. That's probably one of the major problems in regard to that. Most people really don't want to change, so they rationalize it in some way why it should remain the same. If it's done right, then it's interesting. I don't know how you feel about that. Do you want to follow through on that idea? Q: I tell you, there were a lot of [liberal babies in the group] who I would have thought would have reacted negatively to all of these ideas. But they got caught up in the building process and the idea of the building. So you had a very positive reaction. RS: That's good then. Q: Rather than resisting the change, they just lacked the tools to deal with it. They could even be positively involved in it. RS: Well, there are very conservative ecologists sometimes, like wilderness societies, that would like to take a city like this and return it back to what they imagine its original state to be, in other words take it back to woods or whatever they have in mind. There was even talk about New York and should it be returned to its original state. I would say that a city like New York or Chicago is like the Grand Canyon, in other words, they're like crystal structures that grow out of man's need. So that if man is relegated to something outside of nature, then that becomes impossible. But there is a school of thought that thinks that way. But all of our views of the earth, let's say, are constantly changing, how we view it in terms of almost a kind of morality. A lot of people would like to go back to what they would imagine a Garden of Eden to be. These are almost pre-religious feelings that a lot of people have of returning to the forest primeval. But actually a city in a sense is a forest of a different kind. Q: Recently, Jack Burnham, [possibly an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago], wrote a very exciting article. To you personally and your friends in New York what seems to be the impact of this, of what he wrote? RS: Jack Burnham tends to get a view in his head, which he gets very excited about, and then he will elaborate on it. And then suddenly he will decide that he wants to go on to something else. He seems to go from one awareness to another awareness to another awareness to another awareness. He seems to be involved in escaping art rather than confronting it. It's that old problem about art and life again. But I don't think there's really any difference. In one of his last essays he took some of Levi-Strauss's theories and imposed them on modern art, and tried to, I guess, find something out about art in terms of archaeology. I'm not quite sure [how I feel about all of his theories], but I disagree about some of his ideas about conceptualism. I think the book, [The] Structure of Art, is somewhat academic, and unsensed, you might say. Q: What about, would you say the same thing about his analysis of Duchamp? 7