Dick Higgins
As: Another Seven
Artist
Dick Higgins
Original Title
As: Another Seven
Date1979
Mediumprint on paper
Dimensions60 × 80 cm
ClassificationsFlux Papers
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha (Marie and Milan Knížák Fluxus Collection)
DescriptionDick Higgins was a prominent, versatile artist with a subtle, poetic imagination, as well as an important member of the Fluxus movement. His artistic approach saw him intentionally challenge museums and galleries. Higgins became a pioneer of new music, concrete poetry, pattern poetry, and performance art. He was considered the main theorist of the Fluxus movement, coining the term intermedia in the mid-1960s—a result of his focus on crossing the boundaries of individual artistic media and combining them with media that were not considered artistic. He was also interested in computers and their incorporation into art. Together with Alison Knowles, they created the first computer-generated literary texts during the mid-1960s. From 1965 onward, Higgins loosened his ties with Fluxus and began spreading his activities across a variety of artistic disciplines. During the 1970s, he became active in the mail art movement. Apart from his artistic practice, he was also an avid collector and documenter of pattern poetry, resulting in his publication Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (State University of New York Press, 1987). Higgins’s interest in visual poetry also led him to create printed works, the poetics of which were based on randomized operations with printed text. Furthermore, he was also a painter, with many of his paintings incorporating arrows as their central motif and drawing direct inspiration from his musical notations (Arrow Paintings, 1980–1987). Another group of paintings, created during the late 1980s, comprised maps reflecting various political relations divergent from those observed in the present day. Higgins also intentionally incorporated misinformation in these works, thus making them a blend of fact and fiction. These paintings include dynamic, randomly created maps, as well as pieces resembling, for instance, military maps representing population movements and meteorological maps showing weather patterns. Hence, they relate to the migration patterns of humans and animals resulting from political and ecological crises. Another set of paintings, the Brown Paintings (1990), are made up of various shades of brown, off-white, yellow, red, and other earthy colours, depicting imagery drawn from the history of magic and magic shows, intended as a means of reconciling with popular culture. A further painterly series, titled Blue Cosmologies and intended for presentation in Germany, explored how people in the past saw the universe, while a different series, Natural Histories (1991–1993), thematized how people across history viewed nature.
As: Another Seven (1979) is an example of Higgins’s pattern poetry, which he began focusing on after leaving the Fluxus movement and which he viewed as an opportunity to build on the iconoclastic traditions of Dadaism and Futurism. In this piece, the words as they say are ordered into continuous lines of text and simultaneously arranged into the shape of a triangle. It can therefore be understood as a work of concrete poetry, where expression is reduced to a pattern, devoid of internal logical relations and content. Higgins held a long-term interest in visual poetry and its theoretical dimensions, becoming a respected expert in the field. His master’s thesis on visual poetry, titled George Herbert's Pattern Poems: In Their Tradition, would become the basis for a more extensive study, published as Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (1987).
Dick Higgins (1938, Cambridge, England – 1998, Quebec, Canada) was a composer, poet, and visual artist. Alongside his artistic practice, he was also an art theorist. His artistic approach was significantly influenced by John Cage, whom he studied under at the New School for Social Research in New York between 1958 and 1959. Later, he would study literature at New York University, graduating in 1977. In 1962, Higgins co-founded the Fluxus movement and took part in the legendary Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden. In the winter of 1963, he travelled to Sweden with Alison Knowles, where they organized concerts in collaboration with Swedish members of Fluxus. In the same year, his work featured in an extensive exhibition of Fluxus art Festum Fluxorum Fluxus – Musik und Antimusik at the Staatlische Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. In 1966, Higgins performed at a Fluxus concert in Prague alongside Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier, and Milan Knížák. In 1963, he also founded the publishing house Something Else Press, conceived as an alternative to the Fluxus publications published by George Maciunas and active until 1974. Higgins also founded the publishing company Unpublished Editions (1972–1978), later renamed to Printed Editions (1978–1985), which published books, recordings, posters, and prints by prominent avantgarde artists. These publishing activities helped him become a leading theorist of new artistic tendencies and create an alternative to Maciunas’s Fluxus publications. While they both frequently published works by the same artists, Higgins did not share Maciunas’s determination to replace all fine art with applied art. This difference in conviction saw Higgins loosen his ties with Fluxus, and would eventually lead to his expulsion from the movement. From 1970 to 1971, Higgins taught at the California Institute of the Arts. From 1977 to 1982, he mainly focused on music, publishing sheet music such as Piano Album and Sonata for Prepared Piano. Between 1981 and 1982, he stayed in West Berlin thanks to the DAAD scholarship. During the 1980s, he had several exhibitions at the private gallery Akumulatory 2 in Poznan. He also exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial (1984) and the Venice Biennale, as part of the Fluxus exhibition (1989). Higgins was also a recipient of a scholarship from the Banff Centre in Canada (1990) and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1993). Retrospective exhibitions of his artworks and films have been held at the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura in Milan (1995), the Henie-Ondstand Museum in Høvikodden, Norway (1995), the Poori Taidenmuseo in Pori, Finland (1996), and the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland (1996). His archive, known as the Dick Higgins papers (1960–1994) is housed at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In 1999, his art collection was gifted to the University of Maryland. Higgins’s lifelong partner Alison Knowles—to whom he was married between 1960 and 1970, and then again from 1984 onward—was also a prominent member of the Fluxus movement.
As: Another Seven (1979) is an example of Higgins’s pattern poetry, which he began focusing on after leaving the Fluxus movement and which he viewed as an opportunity to build on the iconoclastic traditions of Dadaism and Futurism. In this piece, the words as they say are ordered into continuous lines of text and simultaneously arranged into the shape of a triangle. It can therefore be understood as a work of concrete poetry, where expression is reduced to a pattern, devoid of internal logical relations and content. Higgins held a long-term interest in visual poetry and its theoretical dimensions, becoming a respected expert in the field. His master’s thesis on visual poetry, titled George Herbert's Pattern Poems: In Their Tradition, would become the basis for a more extensive study, published as Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (1987).
Dick Higgins (1938, Cambridge, England – 1998, Quebec, Canada) was a composer, poet, and visual artist. Alongside his artistic practice, he was also an art theorist. His artistic approach was significantly influenced by John Cage, whom he studied under at the New School for Social Research in New York between 1958 and 1959. Later, he would study literature at New York University, graduating in 1977. In 1962, Higgins co-founded the Fluxus movement and took part in the legendary Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden. In the winter of 1963, he travelled to Sweden with Alison Knowles, where they organized concerts in collaboration with Swedish members of Fluxus. In the same year, his work featured in an extensive exhibition of Fluxus art Festum Fluxorum Fluxus – Musik und Antimusik at the Staatlische Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. In 1966, Higgins performed at a Fluxus concert in Prague alongside Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier, and Milan Knížák. In 1963, he also founded the publishing house Something Else Press, conceived as an alternative to the Fluxus publications published by George Maciunas and active until 1974. Higgins also founded the publishing company Unpublished Editions (1972–1978), later renamed to Printed Editions (1978–1985), which published books, recordings, posters, and prints by prominent avantgarde artists. These publishing activities helped him become a leading theorist of new artistic tendencies and create an alternative to Maciunas’s Fluxus publications. While they both frequently published works by the same artists, Higgins did not share Maciunas’s determination to replace all fine art with applied art. This difference in conviction saw Higgins loosen his ties with Fluxus, and would eventually lead to his expulsion from the movement. From 1970 to 1971, Higgins taught at the California Institute of the Arts. From 1977 to 1982, he mainly focused on music, publishing sheet music such as Piano Album and Sonata for Prepared Piano. Between 1981 and 1982, he stayed in West Berlin thanks to the DAAD scholarship. During the 1980s, he had several exhibitions at the private gallery Akumulatory 2 in Poznan. He also exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial (1984) and the Venice Biennale, as part of the Fluxus exhibition (1989). Higgins was also a recipient of a scholarship from the Banff Centre in Canada (1990) and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1993). Retrospective exhibitions of his artworks and films have been held at the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura in Milan (1995), the Henie-Ondstand Museum in Høvikodden, Norway (1995), the Poori Taidenmuseo in Pori, Finland (1996), and the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland (1996). His archive, known as the Dick Higgins papers (1960–1994) is housed at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In 1999, his art collection was gifted to the University of Maryland. Higgins’s lifelong partner Alison Knowles—to whom he was married between 1960 and 1970, and then again from 1984 onward—was also a prominent member of the Fluxus movement.
Milan Knížák
1977-1981
