On October 29, 1976, my twenty-third birthday, I shaved the right side of my face and traveled west toward the North Carolina mountains for the weekend, stopping in several cities along the way.

Journal entry: I considered the act of shaving and walking around in public with a half-shaven face to be a work of art. My initial intention was to create a work of art out of my body….The idea of a self-portrait is dealt with as a dynamic, infinitely changing three-dimensional event as opposed to a normal, static, two-dimensional portrait.