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12. 

make it clear to myself. I don't know why I'm having so much trouble. If I (we) live in the age of abstraction, we are going to have a vision, convention, successful & unsuccessful paintings which make a pictoriality that is bound by its basic material, paint itself - we could call it painterly pictoriality, straight pictoriality, delimited pictoriality, etc. The fact, is, not only Louis, but others myself included, have worked this way pretty fruitfully. All I'm worried about is that the other convention, the less strict, all inclusive pictoriality, which allows engineering & vestiges of depiction, might turn out to be a Pandora's box, particularly, if the straight pictoriality is downgraded, now especially, because of the weakness of its champions, & the poor quality of the work of its practicioners. Just because Bush & Bolus are pitiful, & Michael & Clem are treacherous, & probably mostly wrong, I can't take my eyes off the most basic convention of abstraction. As fruitful as Picasso's cubist collages have proven themselves to be, Malevich's W on W, or Bk on Bk are the touchstones. At least,