DG:  There's a disease out there — artists want to become architects, and architects want to become artists — which I think I may have started. In 1978, I exhibited architectural models at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (now known as Modern Art Oxford) in a show curated by Mark Francis. I had seen a show at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in which the New York Five architects showed their models, so I thought, "Why shouldn't artists also show architectural models?" Architects show models as propaganda to get things done and also to convey fantasies. I always like things to be on the boundary of those two goals.

But I also think about architects like Philip Johnson, who was a fascist; he only wanted to do architecture that was purely aesthetic. I think a lot of architects secretly want to be artists. In fact, Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall project comes directly from Frank Stella's architecture and also from Richard Serra. So they're imitating artists, these architects, and I think it's some of the worst architecture of the world.

DG:  In the early '70s, I was doing work that was later published in a book called Video-Architecture-Television . It was all about surveillance and how video defeated renaissance perspective with its time delay and linking of distant places. For example, you can be in your living room, and you can see images from the moon on the television. I think that experience is also present in corporate architecture, especially in the phenomenon of two-way mirror glass. Two-way mirror glass functions by making one side into a mirror, and on the other side, where there's no light, you can transparently see out without being seen. This is also where the idea of surveillance came in — I wanted to make work that was both transparent and reflective, and I also wanted to introduce play into a controlled situation.

DG:  Basically, it doesn't. My gallery shows are usually really bad shows. In 1985, I presented a video show that was a labyrinthine installation where you could lie down as if in your own living room and see six different videos in different cubicles. I wanted to align everything in the gallery horizontally, not vertically. I also wanted to get away from the kind of the spectacle that's in the work of Douglas Gordon and Bill Viola, to go back to the intimacy of television and old drive-in cinemas, where you can see other people observing their videos and experience the superimposition of their gaze on your own gaze. From the very beginning of my career, I've believed that the "white cube" is a false issue, and I've always been more interested in the city plan. I've sold almost no work to private collectors or museums, but I do a lot of public commissions — all the issues in my work are public art issues.

DG:  When I was 14, I read Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, and a key section, which Jacques Lacan took for his mirror stage, is a child's first sense of himself in a primitive way. This involves seeing himself as other people see him, which is an important awareness of intersubjective gazes, and I often go back to that concept. When I had a gallery, I showed Sol LeWitt and other minimal artists, but as much as I like minimal art, I was more interested in intersubjectivity. In the modern city, when you look at a shopping arcade you see yourself superimposed on the mirror reflection of the thick glass on top of the product, and there are also mirrors inside as a kind of fragmented apathy. I am interested in the surface of the cities and social interaction inside cities, but my work is often in parks, and I am very much interested in suburbia.

DG:  I've written on the subject in "Corporate Arcadias," published in Artforum, which was about New York City. In the '70s and early '80s, there were suburbanized corporate arcadias — places that were like fortresses in the city because there was so much crime. In America, we were very involved in solar power in the '70s, so the idea was you could make a building that had solar power in the top, and then the atrium, which would be for the public, like a private public park, would be a place where you could experience suburban bliss and also buy things in a suburban shopping mall. I was teaching in Banff in the mid-'80s, and West Edmonton Mall just opened, so I took the students up there and videotaped that. Two years ago, I returned to Banff and videotaped students again. It's not about the alienation of the shopping mall — it's really about entertainment, like in an amusement park.

DG:  I did performances because in the New York art world the artist-as-performer became very important. It all began with Joseph Beuys, who became the artist-as-politician, and I was interested in that. Beuys and Bruce Nauman were real performers; I was more interested in the feedback given to the spectator. When I went to rock shows, I was a spectator, and I've always liked looking at other spectators. What I don't like about the work of Bill Viola, Douglas Gordon, and Pierre Huyghe is that there's this big spectacle where the audience can't see itself. I think that even in cinemas people enjoy looking at each other and being aware of other people's presences.