We often met in a favorite bar to mutter about our grievances, and to dissipate our accumulated dissatisfactions. Sometimes we became involved in long, testy arguments which normally ended unsatisfactorily, when they ended at all. Once in a while, someone would offer to beat me up. It was not unusual for us to sit sullenly through long, electric silences while we drank beer and fouled the air with smoke from our cigarettes. It seems to me now that at such times, there was enough hostility among us so that if it were late, and quiet, and you listened carefully, you might have heard the hiss and snarl of outraging thoughts.

I used to imagine countless small cliques of militant young artists such as ours gathering in studios or homes or in bars in every state in the Union, night after night, year after year, uttering billions of words in opinions and repartee that existed only for the length of time it took to voice them. Sometimes it seemed to me that all over the country the same things were being said, heard, and forgotten forthwith, all in a unified effort to extend the frontiers of futility.

There were paradoxes. If no work should refer to the works before it, then none should look like any other. But if no work resembled its predecessors, there could be no progress and certainly no success, since we all knew that both depended upon a coherent body of work. On the other hand, an artist might paint works which resembled one another (a "series" one mark of a maturing artist) in which case it was accepted that he had created his own realm, his own visual language. But what peculiar realms and extraordinary languages these were! No one could seem to comprehend them except the artist himself, and one could often wonder, quite legitimately, if he did either. When we critiqued one another's work, we spoke in technical terms such as color relationships or compositional balance, rather than in message terms, as we had tacitly agreed that the meaning of a painting was too subtle to be verbalized, too virginal and exquisite to be communicated in anything so inadequate as words. Even the title of a work was rarely related to its content, since we ourselves did not ordinarily know what the content was, or indeed, if there was any content. Thus, the product continued to be the process, and some of us began to wonder about the purpose and the value of sending messages which were not received, in a language which no one knew.