When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.

At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did.

Around 1967 I began backing away from dogmatic Leninism, not so much because I thought it was false, I just decided there was nothing utopian about it.

I began demonstrating against serious culture. In hindsight, the actual course of events has been very humiliating for me, because no one picked up on the intellectual critique I made.

Basically, at this time, I viewed any work of art as an imposition of another person's taste and saw the individual making this imposition as a kind of dictator.

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.