Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.
I decided that expressionism was a cheap way of getting a reaction - show anybody ripped apart, and you get sympathy. I was deliberately trying to show the human body as whole and relatively healthy.
That was in 1957. And there I found out that Germany is a kind of province. I didn't know anything about expressionism, about the Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism. I was uneducated, so to speak - and everybody else was more or less uneducated, too.
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.
I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn't what I was interested in. All of it had an impact - as did happenings - because I could see that art was changing from expressionism, which I was doing at the time, or thought I was doing. But it wasn't the direction I really wanted to go.
Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.
I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.
I don't use the accident - 'cause I deny the accident
Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.
When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.
And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.
The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!
I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, "You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer?" I said, "Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me. "
