Dick Higgins


Dick Higgins was an American composer, poet, printmaker, artist, and a co-founder of the international artistic movement and community known as Fluxus. He was an early pioneer of using electronic correspondence to collaborate on art and was inspired by John Cage among others.

Life

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.
Dick Higgins was an influential printmaker, publisher, writer, and poet as well as co-founder to the Fluxus movement of the 1960’s. He was the son of Carter Chapin Higgins and Katherine Huntington Bigelow. He was born in Cambridge, England in 1938 into a rather rich family. This was due to his father owning Worcester Press 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, he 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, Columbia University, Manhattan school of Printing, and the New School. He trained under many influential artists of this time, such as John Cage and Henry Cowell. From Columbia he earned a bachelor's degree in English, and at the New School, he participated in John Cage’s monumental music composition course.
In 1960, he wed Alison Knowles, a fellow artist, and four years later, they had their daughters, Hannah and Jessica Higgins. They both grew up to continue the family fluxus dynasty. His marriage didn’t last too long though, he divorced Knowles in 1970 after just 10 years of marriage. On October 26, 1998, he died in Quebec, Canada from a heart attack at the age of 60.

Career

Higgins heard the John Cage Twenty-five-year Retrospective Concert in May 1958, and began studying with him that summer.
Higgins and Alison Knowles 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 Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Claes Oldenburg and Ray Johnson as well as leading Fluxus members George 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 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. 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 states, having finished the first three parts of the poem throwing dice, he wrote a FORTRAN IV program to produce part four. Higgins also created 'metadrama ' poems 'minimal emotional statements or narratives'. Between 1976 and 1994 he collaborated with the Italian writer and visual artist Luciano Caruso through email correspondence.
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.
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.
Higgins died of a heart attack after a performance in Quebec, Canada.

Books

;As editor with Wolf Vostell