Dick Higgins

Higgins heard the John Cage Twenty-five-year Retrospective Concert in May 1958, and began studying with him that summer. With other students from Cage's class—among them Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, and Al Hansen—Higgins began staging multimedia Happenings in New York between 1958 and 1961, work that fed directly into the emergence of Fluxus. 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, 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 Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Claes Oldenburg, and Ray Johnson as well as leading Fluxus members La Monte Young, George Brecht, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Eric Andersen, Ken Friedman, Ben Patterson, and others. The Something Else Press series of "Great Bear Pamphlets," documented the earliest Fluxus performances. Alongside the press he ran the Something Else Gallery from 1966 to 1969, which in 1966 mounted the first exhibition of concrete poetry in the United States.

He was an early and ardent proponent and user of computers as a tool for art making, dating back to the mid-1960s, 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. In his introduction, Higgins states, having finished the first three parts of the poem throwing dice, he wrote a FORTRAN IV program to produce part (or Canto) four. His work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making. Higgins also created metadrama poems that were minimal emotional statements or narratives. Between 1976 and 1994 he collaborated with the Italian writer and visual artist Luciano Caruso through 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 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 In 1972, Higgins founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Printed Editions) to publish his short novel Amigo. In 2018, Siglio Press published a posthumous collection of Higgins's writings titled Fluxus, Intermedia and the Something Else Press. Selected Writings by Dick Higgins edited by Steve Clay of Granary Books and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman.