Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community).[1] Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of electronic correspondence.[2] Higgins coined the word intermedia[3][4] to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.[5]
Life
Dick Higgins was the son of Carter Chapin Higgins and Katherine Huntington Bigelow. He was born in Cambridge, England in 1938 into a rather rich family, due to his father owning Worcester Pressed Steel in Worcester, Massachusetts. He grew up with a brother and sister, Mark and Lisa. His younger brother Mark Huntington Higgins was murdered in the Congo in 1960.
As a boy, Higgins grew up and was educated in private boarding schools around the New England area, including Worcester, Massachusetts; Putney, Vermont; and Concord, New Hampshire. When he got older, he spent a lot of time in school; he attended Yale University, Columbia University (1960), Manhattan School of Printing, and the New School. He trained under many influential artists of this time, such as John Cage and Henry Cowell. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia, and participated in John Cage's monumental music composition course at the New School.
In 1960, he wed Alison Knowles, a fellow artist, and four years later, they had their daughters, Hannah Higgins and Jessica Higgins. They both grew up to continue the family Fluxus dynasty.[6] One daughter of Higgins and Knowles, Hannah Higgins, is the author of Fluxus Experience,[7] an authoritative volume about the Fluxus movement. Her twin sister, Jessica, is a New York based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung.[8][9][10] Higgins and Knowles divorced in 1970 after 10 years of marriage[11] and remarried in 1984.[1]
Higgins died of a heart attack while staying at a private home in Quebec City.[12]
He was an early and ardent proponent and user of computers as a tool for art making, dating back to the mid-1960s,[2] when Alison Knowles and he created the first computer-generated literary texts. His A Book About Love & War & Death, a book-length aleatory poem published in 1972 included one of those. In his introduction, Higgins states, having finished the first three parts of the poem throwing dice, he wrote a FORTRAN IV program to produce part (or Canto) four.[16] His work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making. Higgins also created metadrama poems that were minimal emotional statements or narratives.[17] Between 1976 and 1994 he collaborated with the Italian writer and visual artist Luciano Caruso through email correspondence.[18]
Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books, including George Herbert's Pattern Poems: In Their Tradition and On the Composition of Signs and Images, his edition of a Giordano Bruno text, which he annotated. He saw Bruno's essay on the art of memory also as an early text on intermedia. A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts collected many of his essays and theoretical works in 1976. In 1972, Higgins founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Printed Editions) to publish his short novel Amigo.[19] In 2018, Siglio Press published a posthumous collection of Higgins's writings titled Fluxus, Intermedia and the Something Else Press. Selected Writings by Dick Higgins edited by Steve Clay of Granary Books and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman.[20]
Books
What are Legends. Illustrated by Bern Porter. Calais, Maine: Bern Porter, 1960.
Jefferson's Birthday/Postface. New York: Something Else Press, 1964.
A Book about Love & War & Death. Canto One. New York: Something Else Press, 1965.
Die Fabelhafte Geträume von Taifun-Willi. A Hear Show for the Boys at Garnisht Kiegele. Stuttgart: Reflection Press, 1966.
Act. A Game of 52 Soaphorse Operas. New York, NY: Threadneedle Editions, 1967.
Some Graphis Mirrors. New York, NY: Threadneedle Editions, 1967.
A Book about Love & War & Death. San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1969.
Foew&ombwhnw. A grammar of the mind and a phenomenology of love and a science of the arts as seen by a stalker of the wild mushroom. New York: Something Else Press, 1969.
Computers for the Arts. Somerville, Massachusetts: Abyss Publications, 1970.
Die Fabelhafte Geträume von Taifun Willi. Somerville, Massachusetts: Abyss Publications, 1970.
A Book About Love & War & Death. Barton, Vermont: Something Else Press, 1972.
For Eugene in Germany. Barton, Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1973.
The Ladder to the Moon. Barton, Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1973.
^Hannah B Higgins,"The Computational Word Works of Eric Andersen and Dick Higgins", Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Digital Computing in the Experimental Arts, Hannah Higgins, & Douglas Kahn, eds., pp. 271-281
^Higgins, Dick. 2001. "Intermedia" Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., pp. 27–32.
^Hannah B Higgins, The Computational Word Works of Eric Andersen and Dick Higgins in H. Higgins, & D. Kahn (Eds.), Mainframe experimentalism: Early digital computing in the experimental arts, pp.282-283
^Higgins, Dick Metadramas Maltus Barrytown, New York 1985.
^Higgins, Dick. "Lettere di Dick Higgins a Luciano Caruso" (1976–1994) [Letters]. Archivio Luciano Caruso, Box: 23, File: 15, ID: 2, pp. 44. Via de Ginori, 23: Archivio Luciano Caruso. 1976–1994.
^Higgins, Dick. 2018. Fluxus, Intermedia and the Something Else Press. Selected Writings by Dick Higgins. Steve Clay and Ken Friedman, eds. Catskill, NY: Siglio.
Further reading
Steve Clay and Ken Friedman, eds. (2018). Fluxus, Intermedia and the Something Else Press. Selected Writings by Dick Higgins. Catskill, NY: Siglio.
