Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins
Born (1938-03-15)March 15, 1938
Cambridge, England
Died October 25, 1998(1998-10-25) (aged 60)
Quebec, Canada
Known for Printmaking, Composing, Poetry

Dick Higgins (March 15, 1938 – October 25, 1998) was a British composer, poet, printmaker, and early Fluxus artist.

Life

Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire Higgins was the son of Carter Chapin Higgins and Katherine Huntington Bigelow. His younger brother Mark Huntington Higgins was murdered in the Congo in 1960.

Higgins married fellow artist Alison Knowles in 1960. One daughter of Higgins and Knowles, Hannah Higgins, is the author of Fluxus Experience, an authoritative volume about the Fluxus movement. Her twin sister, Jessica Higgins, is a New York based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung.

Higgins died of a heart attack while attending an event in Quebec, Canada.


Career

Higgins, with the poet Jackson Mac Low, another soon-to-be Fluxus artist George Brecht, and the two innovators of Happenings, Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen, Higgins studied composition with John Cage at the New School of Social Research in New York in the late 1950s. During this time Higgins began to produce the first scores for events that rework everyday activities into performances that may or may not incorporate music.[1]

Higgins and Alison both took part in the Wiesbaden, Germany Fluxus festival in 1962 that marked the founding of Fluxus activity. He founded Something Else Press in 1963, which published many important texts including Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter, Marshall McLuhan, Cage, Merce Cunningham, Cage's teacher Henry Cowell, as well as his contemporaries such as artists Kaprow, Hansen, Claes Oldenburg and Ray Johnson as well as leading Fluxus members Brecht, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Eric Andersen, Ken Friedman, and others. The Something Else Press series of "Great Bear Pamphlets," documented the earliest Fluxus performances.

Higgins coined the word intermedia [2] [3] 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 contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.[4] He was an early and ardent proponent and user of computers as a tool for art making, dating back to the mid-1960s, 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 says, having finished the first three parts of the poem throwing dice, he wrote a FORTRAN IV program to produce part (or Canto) four.[5] Higgins also created 'metadrama ' poems 'minimal emotional statements or narratives'.[6] Between 1976 and 1994 he collaborated with the Italian writer and visual artist Luciano Caruso (poet) through email correspondence. [7]

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 to publish his short novel Amigo, which was later renamed Printed Editions.

Books

References

  1. ↑ Robinson,Julia and Xatrec, Christian, editors. ‘Plus or Minus 1961 – A Chronology 1959-1963’ Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.
  2. ↑ Higgins, Dick. 1966. “Intermedia.” Something Else Newsletter. Vol. 1, No. 1, February, pp. 1-3.
  3. ↑ 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
  4. ↑ 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.
  5. ↑ 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
  6. ↑ Higgins, Dick 'Metadramas Maltus' Barrytown,New York 1985.
  7. ↑ 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.
  8. ↑ Fantastic Architecture. Primary Information, 2015

See also


External links

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