For the academic year 1966–1967 Alloway accepted the post of Writer in Residence at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He described the job as “awful.” He and Sylvia were distant from their friends and art networks; the job was a non-event; Carbondale was culturally primitive; and socially their life was unfulfilling.

However “awful” the year in Carbondale, even more awful was being away from New York at a febrile time in the art world. Art was being opened up to all sorts of possibilities in 1966 and 1967. Although painting's status was on the wane as the predominant art form, there was a development, largely emanating from Stella, of the painting as object purged of not only subject matter and content, but also compositional relationship. The objectness of paintings by Robert Mangold, Jo Baer, Brice Marden, and Robert Ryman often drew attention to the activity of perceiving the concrete and real in a particular space. However, painting was considered by many practitioners less “real” than sculpture which, “existing in real space and physically autonomous,” often overshadowed two-dimensional work with a number of alternatives such as: the full-blown Minimalism or “Specific Objects” of Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Carl Andre; the innovatory uses of materials including, as Lippard lists them, “opaque and translucent plastics, vinyl, neon, and fluorescent light, cloth, [and] synthetic rubbers;” or materials—like metal used by Richard Serra— uncompromising and even threatening in their presence. More radical still was a seeming attack on the very idea of an art work. John Baldessari recalled how, “weary of doing relational painting,” he began to wonder whether “straight information would serve.” Conceptual art of the time included Baldessari's own combinations of banal photographs and text, and Joseph Kosuth's definitions and visual representations. Art was becoming reflexive and posing questions about its own definition and role. Robert Morris argued that much new work was “in some way more reflexive because one's awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work is stronger than in previous work…” Wider values beyond aesthetics were being explored: work such as Dan Graham's Homes for America in Arts Magazine made the “socio-economic basis of art an intrinsic part of works.”