I remember Frank Stella came to the art school [Minneapolis College of Art and Design] at the graduation time. One of the students in the _Artpolice_ group had gotten in trouble because there was broken glass glued to his collages. And they felt that it was dangerous and they had a lock down on his student show. So I was asked to bring Stella to see the show and unlock it and everything. The thing that was interesting was what he objected to was that cartoon imagery. And that was the first time I understood that the formalists and the minimalists really saw the cartoon image as the antithesis of what they saw as being truly important and modern and everything. My thing that I was teaching was that abstraction, particularly the kind of geometric minimalist abstraction that was becoming big, that was responsible for the towers at the Walker looking like a giant minimalist sculpture—what I would call “corporate abstraction.” And it was obscuring the fact that kids were getting killed at Kent State and that the war was going on and on and on in Vietnam and in Central America and in the Dominican [Republic]. There was a sense that this abstraction was obscuring the political realities. There were very few artists who were political at that time, directly. Maybe Hans Haacke. But basically the market had decided that Don Judd and Stella—these were the good guys, and this was the good stuff, and this is what you wanted in your lobby, and this is what you wanted in your boardroom. So it was posited as an antipode to this abstraction, this kind of corporate abstraction that had become the style of the period.