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Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.
Life
Higgins attended Yale University, Columbia University (1960), Manhattan School of Printing, and the New School. He trained under many influential artists of this time, such as John Cage and Henry Cowell. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia, and participated in John Cage's music composition course at the New School.
In 1960, he wed Alison Knowles, a fellow artist. Their daughters, Hannah and Jessica, both grew up to continue the family Fluxus dynasty. Higgins and Knowles divorced in 1970 and remarried in 1984.
Higgins died of a heart attack while staying at a private home in Quebec City.
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.
He was an early and ardent proponent and user of computers as a tool for art making, dating back to the mid-1960s,[2] 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. Before writing a program, Higgins finished the first three parts of the poem throwing dice.[16] Higgins also created metadrama poems that were minimal emotional statements or narratives.[17]
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 2018 a posthumous collection of Higgins's writings was published titled Fluxus, Intermedia and the Something Else Press. Selected Writings by Dick Higgins edited by Steve Clay and Ken Friedman.[20]
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