Dick Higgins

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Dick Higgins (1938–1998) was an American composer, poet, printmaker, illustrator, and a co-founder of Fluxus.

Life

Dick Higgins was the son of Carter Chapin Higgins and Katherine Huntington Bigelow. He was born in 1938 in Cambridge, England, into a very wealthy family due to his father's ownership of Worcester Pressed Steel. Mark and Lisa, his brother and sister, grew up together. In 1960, Mark Huntington Higgins, his younger brother, was assassinated in the Congo.

Higgins grew up and was educated in private boarding schools around the New England region, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire. As he grew older, he spent a lot of time in school. He attended Yale University, Columbia University (1960), Manhattan School of Printing, and the New School. He trained under many well-known musicians of the day, such as John Cage and Henry Cowell. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia University and was active in John Cage's pioneering music composition course at the New School.

He and Alison Knowles, a fellow artist, married Hannah Higgins in 1960, and the couple had their children, Hannah Higgins and Jessica Higgins. Both grew up to continue the family Fluxus dynasty. Hannah Higgins, one of Higgins and Knowles' daughter, is the author of Fluxus Experience, an authoritative book about the Fluxus movement. Jessica, her twin sister, is a New York-based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung. Higgins and Knowles divorced in 1970 after ten years of marriage and remarried in 1984.

Higgins died of a heart attack while living in a private residence in Quebec City.

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Career

Higgins first heard the John Cage Twenty-Five Concert in May 1958 and began working with him that summer. Both Higgins and Alison Knowles attended the Wiesbaden, Germany Fluxus festival, which marked the beginning of Fluxus activity in 1962. He founded Something Else Press in 1963, which published many influential books, including Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter, Marshall McLuhan, Cage, Cage's teacher Henry Cowell, Cage's instructor Henry Cowell, As well as poets Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Claes Oldenburg, and Ray Johnson, as well as La Monte Young, George Brecht, Bern Watson, Aaron Neville, Ben Patterson, Benjamin Patterson, and others. The original Fluxus performances were chronicled in "Great Bear Pamphlets" by Something Else Press.

He was an early and ardent advocate of computer art making, dating back to Alison Knowles and the first computer-generated literary texts in the mid-1960s. War & Death, a book-length aleatory poem published in 1972, included one of them. Higgins states, having completed the first three parts of the poem and to produce part (or Canto) four. Higgins also wrote metadrama poems that were not strictly emotional or narrative. He worked with Italian writer and graphic artist Luciano Caruso from 1976 to 1994 by 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 translation of a Giordano Bruno text that he annotated. Bruno's essay on memory served as an early text on intermedia. Centuries: Centuries' Dialectic of Centuries: Notes on a Theory of the New Arts. In 1976, Edward Grey's essays and theoretical works were collected. Higgins founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Printed Editions) in 1972 to publish his short story Amigo. Fluxus, Intermedia, and Something Else Press were among Higgins' writings collected in Siglio Press' 2018 publications, including Fluxus, Intermedia, and Something Else Press. Dick Higgins' selected Writings were edited by Steve Clay of Granary Books and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman.

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