Dick Higgins

Dick Higgins (1938, Cambridge, England - 1998, Quebec, Canada) 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 and theorists including Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, Emmett Williams, Claes Oldenburg, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, Ray Johnson, Ken Friedman, and others. His most notable contributions include Danger Music scores and the use of the term "intermedia" to describe the ineffable interdisciplinary 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. 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.

Publications

• Something Else Press Newsletters (editor), New York: Something Else Press, 1966-73 & 1983.

• Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface, 2 vols., New York: Something Else Press, 1964, 271+89 pp. [1] [2] [3]

• 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, 320 pp.

• A Book About War and Love and Death, San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1969, [28] pp; repr., UbuClassics, 2004.

• Computers for the Arts, Somerville/MA: Abyss Publications, 1970, 17 pp.

• Fantastic Architecture (editor, with Wolf Vostell), New York: Something Else Press, 1971.

• The Word and Beyond: Four Literary Cosmologists (with Richard Morris, Donald Phelps, and Harry Smith), New York: The Smith, 1982, 400 pp.

• Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

• Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature, SUNY Press, 1987, x+275 pp.

• Giordano Bruno, On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas [1591] (editor), New York: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1991, 377 pp.

• Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press. Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, eds. Steve Clay and Ken Friedman, Catskill, NY: Siglio, 2018, 364 pp. Publisher. [4]. Reviews: Gibbons (Hyperallergic), Harren (Artforum), Ox (Leonardo), Waldow (Brooklyn Rail), Galbreth (Glasstire), Kirkus.

Lectures

• Higgins speaks about Something Else Press and his life since his time at the press, video, Western Front, Vancouver, 1981.
• Higgins talks about Something Else Press publications, video, Artpool, Budapest, 1993.

Literature

• Craig J. Saper, "Event: Intermedia and Dingbats (Something Else Press)", ch. 6 in Saper, Auteur-Publishers: Small Press Practices as Avant-Garde Writing, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025, pp 100-125. Publisher.

See also

• Alison Knowles

Links

• https://library.umbc.edu/speccoll/findingaids/coll043.php
• http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artists/dick-higgins