There were a number of factors. One was that the school [the Minneapolis College of Art and Design] had opened the new building. It had opened darkrooms with no drains. It had opened the building as a public relations … basically to turn the school in the direction of a design college, because there was some idea that graphic design would somehow be more a career path in fine arts. There was a feeling afoot that this change was really going to diminish the fine arts program and somehow make it like a Dunwoody [College of Technology] with better PR. So there was a resistance, especially in the fine arts community in the school—more the students than the faculty.

That was also the summer that Joseph Beuys came to the school to visit [1974], which was also a galvanizing event because it played on the celebrity status of the artist, who was a success. I think his philosophy, which seemed at the time to be basically warmed over socialism, was out of sync with what we were really desiring, which was something more interactive and less judgmental.

The other thing was that some of the students I was working with at that time were very good graphic artists, cartoonists, drawers. Somehow the school had no money for the paper, so the students raised the money to have a paper. That small group together, working with another group on the school paper, was kind of complicit together by contributing to each other.

We kept it rolling that first year. We kept nudging it along. We didn’t want to see the fine arts shut out. That was also when I had my first collapse, was in ’74. In the summer of ’74, I wound up at Golden Valley Health Center. The first few years of the Artpolice were coincident with me getting sick and then getting depressed. It took a while until I got on the lithium therapy to really stabilize the zine. The first year, there were five or six issues. The second year, there were two, and the third year there was one. Then the fourth year, after the lithium therapy kicked in, it was different.

Jack Burnham, the writer who had come to the school at that time too, at some point later said, you know, he was surprised we did more than a couple. But just kept doing it. To me, the difference was that Minneapolis is not Paris or New York. We were in an isolated community and we needed to reach out of that community. There was no Internet. The way to do it was something you could send to somebody for 40 cents. We weren’t asking to be omnipotent. We didn’t want to be number one. We wanted to be in the game. We wanted to be considered. Being isolated in America is almost like you’re only listening to the sounds that are coming from New York or California.

We wanted to create the idea that there was another world other than this world of Artforum telling us what’s good for us. We were kind of out on a limb, happily so.