As he began his art career, Halley became interested in the French Post-Structuralist writers, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Paul Virilio, and Jean Baudrillard, many of whose works were translated into English in the late 1970s and early 1980s and were being discussed among New York intellectuals. The ideas of the French writers informed Halley's use of synthetic colors and materials in his painting, and also the writing that he began to produce around the same time. "The modernism I grew up with was that it was spiritual," Halley said, "it was about a kind of purity and Emersonian transcendentalism ... Feeling less and less comfortable with that, I decided that for me modernism was really about skepticism, doubt, and questioning. Things that we now say are part of a postmodern sensibility."