1960's Publications

Dick Higgins (with Bern Porter), What are Legends: A Clarification, Published by Bern Porter, 1960

What Are Legends (1960), my first book, is the theoretical text which goes with Legends and Fishnets (1958-60, 1969; published in 1976). It exemplifies my near-obsession with unifying my theory and practice, written as it is in my “legend” style; this style uses few verbs in the indicative mode, subst

Dick Higgins, Jefferson's Birthday/Postface, Something Else Press, 1964

Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface (1964) is two books, bound back to back. Jefferson’s Birthday includes all the texts which I composed between April 13, 1962 (Thomas Jefferson’s birthday) and April 13, 1963. The book came about when George Maciunas, the organizer of fluxus, offered to publish all my texts. I said it would be a mon

Postface is a rather personal memoir of the early days of happenings and fluxus in which...I was active. I was aware that the pieces in Jefferson’s Birthday would seem strange to most readers, so it was important to me to provide a context for those pieces—the essay is a little thin on theoretical content, but as narrative and polemic (attacking alternative, conventional modes of working) it was v

Dick Higgins, Towards the 1970's, Abyss Publications, 1969

One of [the] essays from the [Something Else Newsletter] appeared also as a pamphlet, Towards the 1970’s with another small press in 1969; in it I tried to predict (with mixed success) what would be of importance to those who followed the new arts in America in the 1970s—notably “a revolution in subject matter” which came true with the obse

Dick Higgins, Foew&ombwhnw (Freaked Out Electric Wizards & Other Marvelous Bartenders Who Have No Wings), Something Else Press, 1969

By 1969 it was clear that I had to do a new cross-section of my work and to reissue the texts which had appeared in the Newsletter, some issues of which were becoming scarce. I therefore did foew&ombwhnw (1969), which is, ironically, bound as a prayer book. The book i