Dick Higgins
| Dick Higgins | |
|---|---|
Dick Higgins
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| Born |
March 15, 1938 Cambridge, England |
| Died | October 25, 1998 (aged 60) Quebec, Canada |
| Known for | Printmaking, Composing, Poetry |
Dick Higgins (March 15, 1938 – October 25, 1998) was a British composer, poet, printmaker, and early Fluxus artist.
Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire Higgins was the son of Carter Chapin Higgins and Katherine Huntington Bigelow. His younger brother Mark Huntington Higgins was murdered in the Congo in 1960.
Higgins married fellow artist Alison Knowles in 1960. One daughter of Higgins and Knowles, Hannah Higgins, is the author of Fluxus Experience, an authoritative volume about the Fluxus movement. Her twin sister, Jessica Higgins, is a New York based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung.
Higgins died of a heart attack while attending an event in Quebec, Canada.
Higgins, with the poet Jackson Mac Low, another soon-to-be Fluxus artist George Brecht, and the two innovators of Happenings, Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen, Higgins studied composition with John Cage at the New School of Social Research in New York in the late 1950s. During this time Higgins began to produce the first scores for events that rework everyday activities into performances that may or may not incorporate music.
Higgins and Alison 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, which published many important texts including Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter, Marshall McLuhan, Cage, Merce Cunningham, Cage's teacher Henry Cowell, as well as his contemporaries such as artists Kaprow, Hansen, Claes Oldenburg and Ray Johnson as well as leading Fluxus members Brecht, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Eric Andersen, Ken Friedman, and others. The Something Else Press series of "Great Bear Pamphlets," documented the earliest Fluxus performances.
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