SS: That makes sense since you design each structure in such close collaboration with its user.

MR: One came back from this guy named Bruce Wayne DeBose. Huge, delightful guy. He was amazing. He's so big, and the shelter is something like eleven feet long and four feet wide, and it's tall. When he gave the shelter back he didn't see it as a rite of passage, exactly, but it was no longer something he needed, and he told me to take it back, use it, show it on TV, tell his story.

SS: So you've released these works into the streets, off they go, they're personalized and active and alive, and some of them come back to you. Is it strange to then see them presented in museums?

MR: I don't have any problem with it. It's important that the shelters are presented along with the photographs so the work isn't misunderstood as performance. Proximity to this thing that clearly was used can also cause some discomfort for the audience. There have been preparators who have said, should we clean it? And I've said no, because it's important that they retain the marks of use. One of the exceptions is the piece up at Nato Thompson's show.

SS: The Interventionists (at MASSMoCA, 2004).

MR: Right. That one was a working sketch. I wanted to see if this thing would hold up and once I knew it would, I made one for Joe Haywood based on that prototype.

SS: So the object shown at MASSMoCA had a particular kind of life as part of your process but was never part of somebody's life on the streets.

MR: Right, it never left the studio. But it's important to be clear that I'll never produce one specifically for an exhibition. I don't want the project objectified. I don't want it to become some stupid inflatable sculpture in the middle of the white space that's going to please people. It should make people uncomfortable. Or it should at least have them leaving with some questions, you know?

SS: So, you wouldn't make a new piece for an exhibition, but there are two other options: you might show one of the functional shelters if its owner gave it back to you and gave you permission to show it, or you might show a prototype.

MR: Absolutely. The one that's in The Interventionists was also included in the Cooper- Hewitt Design Triennial. That's where a prototype really makes the most sense.

SS: Do you think that the dialogue that takes place within museums and galleries provides cultural capital that can then push your work further into other, more public conversations?

MR: Yes. The culture audience is not the primary audience, but it's important. There's a really great Hans Haacke quote about this. He was asked if he felt that his work could ever change the world, and he said he doesn't think that he can change the world, but he can change the dinner conversation. I love that. The gallery is a cultural space that's frequented by people who hold power and who are shareholders for companies like Exxon or Mobil, and they might go home and be enraged that this company that they are supporting financially is participating in, say, a breach on international sanctions against South Africa, and that person might go and enact something in terms of a change. So you can connect with the ethical cogs in the machinery that you're critiquing, and that will in turn make the machinery run differently. Or, for instance, a men's organization that saw the work on display at White Columns in 2000 decided to hold a fundraiser and raised something like $30,000. They wanted to give me the money to continue to make shelters but I refused it and asked them to give it to an organization like the Coalition for the Homeless that would be capable of implementing some real change. Also, there were a couple of New York Times articles that came out starting in 1999. A follow-up piece noted that the evidence of the project was going to be on view at White Columns, and a lot of people who read the article ended up at White Columns. So the spaces of galleries are often thought of as being rarified and unavailable to your regular citizen, but I think if the conversation becomes a little more public, then the kinds of places where a prototype might be exhibited may be able to do something that contributes to useful debate.

Getting back to the question of failure: a lot of my projects will enlist function but also failure. The Minaret project (2001), for instance, deals with the absence of the call to prayer in the United States in cities where there is a significant Muslim presence. It's meant to raise awareness. You're hearing an aural presence and it makes you aware of the absence. It's also semicomedic in a Jacques Tati way, since I stand on the top of a building with the most powerful civilian-issue megaphone that you can get, which is not incredibly powerful, and broadcast the call to prayer from this kitschy miniature alarm clock that many Muslims in the U.S. use.

SS: There's a way that the minaret alarm clock serves a similar purpose to your shelters, right? It's a temporary, inadequate solution to a larger social need

MR: Yes. Ultimately the project is set up to fail. I would love for Minaret to disappear because someone builds a minaret in the middle of the city that connotes that there are these important people amongst us from a culture that's been vilified and misunderstood and still undergoes the worst kind of racist scrutiny. We're living this history, and I'd like to know that in 30 years we'll all be embarrassed about it. That's optimistic, but it's related to my desire for paraSITE. It would be great if that project were never done again because somebody came up with some amazing new affordable housing initiative and found a new way of sustaining human life in the city. Both projects are ways of making the invisible visible.

SS: That works in both actual and metaphoric ways in paraSITE: you had initially proposed using black plastic for the shelters, but the homeless men with whom you were collaborating saw that as dangerous both since they wouldn't be able to see out of the shelters and also wouldn't be visible to passersby.

MR: It was great for me to hear that. It was a practical thing but it was also symbolic, so we were speaking the same poetic language. They didn't have any privacy issues but they had security issues-they wanted to see potential attackers, and they also wanted to be seen. That's the kind of thing that you can never figure out for yourself when you're just designing in your studio. A lot of my projects have taken that trajectory: presenting a platform and then letting people enter that platform.