Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, painter, translator and art theorist. Happenings
and Fluxus, Intermedia, Something Else Press, these are a few of the terms
associated with Dick Higgins. He remarks "I find I never feel quite
complete unless I'm doing all the artsvisual, musical and literary. I guess
that's why I developed the term 'intermedia,' to cover my works that fall
conceptually between these." The founder of Something Else Press he
published works by Alan Kaprow, Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, John Cage,
Merce Cunningham, Emmett Williams, and Ray Johnson among others. His forty-seven
books include Poems Plain & Fancy (Station Hill Press) and A Book About
Love & War & Death (Something Else). He edited and annotated Giordano
Bruno's On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas (Willis, Locker
& Owens) and he is a recent recipient of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner
Foundation. He has two forthcoming books: Merle Armitage and the Modern
Book (David Godine) and 2001: Modernism Since Post-Modernism (San Diego
State University Press).
"For a long time after Maciunas, our group secretary and chairperson,
died in 1978, those of us who had been part of Fluxus or close to him debated
this question. If Fluxus was a form, then anyone who did it at any time,
then or even now, could be Fluxus. If Fluxus was its members, then it was
still going on. If Fluxus was a series of publications edited by Maciunas
or an association with him,
then it was over. We combined these notions like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,
we got terribly ingenious and also, at times, adamant and passionate about
the matter. We distinguished between "Fluxus" and "Fluxism,"
etc. Finally it didn't matter, because we were still alive and changing
and whether or not what we did was "Fluxus," it was also other
things too and it simply stopped being useful to call it
Fluxus. There are many sites on the web where you can get old and new Fluxus
pieces, and I suggest you do so." Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins titles available from Left Hand Books: http://csbh.mhv.net/~lefthandb
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