Beuys finally accosted them and asked when they were coming: ‘He needed us too, in order to articulate. We wanted – and were supposed – to cross swords with him.’ Being accepted as a student played a decisive role in Knoebel’s self-confidence and his artistic development:

What was important was being in his class. From my parents I was only used to hearing questions like ‘what do you want to be?’ Beuys did not ask; he left you in peace; that was quite unusual. I first had to find my way and at the time that kept everything open.

When the two Imis demanded to be given their own classroom if they transferred to his class, they were thoroughly surprised that Beuys consented and let them have room 19, smaller than the other two classrooms, 13 and 20. At the beginning Palermo also worked in this room, later for a short time also Jörg Immendorff and Katharina Sieverding. Since the two Imis had a key to the room, they only opened it to friends or on Open House days. They did not give up the room until 1969 when the increase in the number of students meant the demand of their colleagues for more space could no longer be resisted. The privilege to be able to work in one’s own room had been one of the requirements for the development of an autonomous artistic vocabulary. Another important factor was the discussions Knoebel had with Imi Giese and Palermo: ‘Imi was the mathematician, I the constructor, Palermo was the painter.’ The two Imis contemptuously drew a line between themselves and figurative painters like Tadeusz and Anatol. And because of their purist colour and form, they also came just as much in conflict with the figurative style of their colleagues who, sympathising with Marxist student groups (like Jörg Immendorff), wanted art to relate to social issues and rejected an isolated aesthetic discourse. Even though the two Imis were present at the founding of the DSP, Knoebel never was a member, nor was he politically committed. At the interdisciplinary ‘ring discussions’, they both kept to the background, because – as Knoebel said – they didn’t know how to express themselves in a corresponding form. But Knoebel not only held back out of a lack of eloquence, but also because, to him, Beuys’s idea of ‘social sculpture’ was less than convincing: ‘As for “social sculpture”, that wasn’t my thing; I would have been lost there. I had once believed in the healing power of art, but by then had already given this up as a belief.’
This dissociation from the others was part of this duo’s strategy, as was their artistic concept of setting up purism and reduction against variety. In the same way their room was even superficially different from the two other classrooms. It was a clean and tidy workplace they put together out of an assorted arrangement of hardboard panels. While the other students worked mostly with clay and plaster or with found materials, hardboard was Imi Knoebel’s preferred material, an industrial product that was accepted by Beuys, although diametrically opposed to his own material concept: ‘Beuys had no real access to our things… Normally the professors teach in fairly close analogy to their own art. But Beuys was different; he allowed quite different things to get done.’