Dick Higgins  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Dick Higgins (born Cambridge, England 1938, died Quebec, Canada 1998) was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Like many of the other Fluxus artists, he studied composition with John Cage. He married artist Alison Knowles in 1960. He founded Something Else Press in 1963, which published many important texts by artists including Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, Emmett Williams, Claes Oldenburg, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, Ray Johnson, Ken Friedman, and others. His daughter, Hannah Higgins is the author of Fluxus Experience, an authoritative volume about the Fluxus movement.

Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name. His most notable contributions include "Danger Music" scores and the use of the term Intermedia to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s. He was an early and ardent proponent and user of computers, as a tool for art making, dating back to the mid 1960s. He published forty-seven books, including a translation of Giordano Bruno's On the Composition of Signs and Images, which could be seen as an early text on multimedia. The Book of Love & War & Death, a book-length aleatory poem published in 1972 may have been one of the first computer-generated texts: in the introduction, he describes writing a FORTRAN IV program to randomize the lines in one of the poem's cantos. A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts collected many of his essays and theoretical works in 1976.

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.
  • Modular Poems. Barton, Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1974.
  • City with All the Angles. A Radio Play. West Glover Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1974.
  • Spring Game. An Opera for Shadow Puppets. West Glover Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1974.
  • Classic Plays. New York: Unpublished Editions, 1976.
  • Cat Alley. A Long Short Novel. Willits, California: Tuumba Press, 1976.
  • Five Traditions of Art History. An Essay. New York: Unpublished Editions, 1976.
  • An Exemplativist Manifesto. New York: Unpublished Editions, 1976.
  • Legends & Fishnets. Barton, Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1976.
  • George Herbert's Pattern Poems. In Their Tradition. West Glover, Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1977.
  • The Epitaphs = Gli Epitaphi. Napoli, Italy: Morra, 1977.
  • Everyone Has Sher Favorite (His or Hers). New York: Unpublished Editions, 1977.
  • Ett Exemplativistiskt Manifest. Lund: Kalejdoskop Förlag, 1977.
  • The Epickall Quest of the Brothers Dichtung and Other Outrages. Illustrated by Ken Friedman. New York: Printed Editions, 1978.
  • A Dialectic of Centuries. Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts. New York: Printed Editions, 1978.
  • Of Celebration of Morning. New York: Printed Editions, 1980.
  • Piano Album. Short Piano Pieces, 1962-1984. New York: Printed Editions, 1980.
  • Twenty-Six Mountains for Viewing the Sunset From. Barrytown, New York: Printed Editions, 1981.
  • The Word and Beyond. Four Literary Cosmologists (with Richard Morris, Donald Phelps, and Harry Smith). New York: The Smith, 1982.
  • Horizons. The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
  • Pattern Poetry. Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
  • The Journey. Eight Colored Scenes. Barrytown, New York: Left Hand Books, 1992.
  • Buster Keaton Enters into Paradise. Barrytown, New York: Left Hand Books, 1994.
  • Modernism since Postmodernism. Essays on Intermedia. San Diego, California: San Diego State University, 1997.
As editor with Wolf Vostell
  • Pop Architektur. Concept Art. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1969.
  • Fantastic Architecture. New York: Something Else Press, 1971.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Dick Higgins" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools