Dick Higgins, Jefferson's Birthday/Postface, 1964

These two separate works are bound back-to-back in one volume. Postface is a reminiscence about how happenings began by one who was there. It goes on to explain the necessity for happenings, where they went to and what is being done now. The description of Fluxus, the curious explosion of happenings, which enormously expanded the audience and numbers of participants in the movement, primarily in Europe, is virtually the only material on the subject in print. 

Jefferson's Birthday contains all of the works Higgins wrote between April 13th, Thomas Jefferson's birthday, 1962 and April 13th, 1963. As such it is an excellent cross section of the works, primarily theatrical, of this quite unique writer. (From Dick Higgins, What to Look for in a Book - Physically & Catalogue 1965-66, Something Else Press, 1965). 

With introductions by Arman, Kicha Baticheff, George Brecht, William Burroughs, Christo, Diane di Prima, Brion Gysin, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Ray Johnson, Joe Jones, Alison Knowles, John Herbert McDowell, Jackson Mac Low, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Diter Rot, Daniel Spoerri, and James Waring.  

Filliou is a well known French artist and poet, one of the very, very few with any degree of experimentalism. This book consists of apparently pointless questions which lead in fact to highly poetic speculations. 

Originally the book was conceived as a set of postcards, with one question per card. Each card could seem appropriate for any number of friends of the reader and could be sent off. So we made up a card edition. But once the cards are sent away, the book is incomplete. So we made a normal book edition too. 

The excellent jacket notes are by Jackson MacLow. (From Dick Higgins, What to Look for in a Book - Physically & Catalogue 1965-66, Something Else Press, 1965). 

The happening is the most delightful and exciting challenge to theatrical deadweight in many a year. Increasingly, the young people put them on, while the theater institution wonders where everybody is and what became of Broadway.  

This book is the first book that attempts to deal in a concise way with all the aspects of the happening and its related forms and analogues. Al Hansen, one of America's leading pop artists and a pioneer in the development of the happening, here presents his delightful account of what this very lively medium is all about. No work of scholarship, the intent of this book is to inform, to provoke original thought on the the part of the reader, and perhaps to suggest that he try his own experiment. 

(From the jacket cover). 

Ray Johnson is not only the finest of American collagists, well represented in the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the De Cordova Museum (Lincoln, Mass.), etc. He is also the author of innumerable whimsical fantasies and reminiscences, often pointed, which masquerade as playlets, poems, letters. These are mailed to friends, to friends of friends, to anybody to whom it seems appropriate to mail something, and have been described as the New York Correspondence School of Art. A cross section of his work, received by Dick Higgins over the years, has been assembled into this, one of our most beautiful books.

(From Dick Higgins, What to Look for in a Book - Physically & Catalogue 1965-66, Something Else Press, 1965). 

The Four Suits is a collection of very different directions, intended to show the variety of work being done in the general field of happenings and happening-related work. Corner is represented by a collection of his musical events; Knowles has written a dictionary of the letter "T" which is mostly unperformable; Patterson's performance pieces are psychological experiments along the lines of Zen koans; Schmit has contributed utterly classical, private pieces which are done for the benefit of the performer and best without any audience at all. 

The importance of this book is dual: it places the current situation of happenings in the foreground, and de-emphasizes the earlier, painting-derived phase. And it provides texts and methods for those who want to study what is being done today in the way of artistic experiments.

(From Dick Higgins, What to Look for in a Book - Physically & Catalogue 1965-66, Something Else Press, 1965). 

Dada is like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Even worse, in fact, because while two people might well agree on what a thunderstorm is, they could probably not agree on what dada is. The main reason for this is obvious. The more that is written about dada the more far-fetched one must become in order to be original, and the more obfuscated scholarship in the field in its turn, becomes, until we reach the present situation, where literally nobody knows what he has been talking about all these years...the Dada Almanach is, then, the statement of the various dada positions on the basis of which our present misconceptions must be reformed. The dada attitude, it will be seen heron, is profoundly contemporary. Without understanding it, it is simply not possible to evaluate accurately a great deal of the art and philosophy which is most current today. 

(From jacket cover). 

The wisdom of scholars seems to be the process of concentrating on the small detail until the universal in it is discovered. The universal of what? Electrocardiagrams? The eagle's speech in Chaucer's House of Fame? Such universals are perhaps valuable, but they're not entirely delightful. 

Daniel Spoerri, on the other hand, has applied critical and scholarly methods to the arbitrary debris left over from this process of living, namely, the objects on a table. Each is analyzed and recollected, with precision and humor, by Spoerri and by his equally delightful translator and annotator, Emmett Williams. The universals are established this time in terms of Spoerri's life as one of today's best-known artists. And these are fascinating and meaningful to us all. 

Is his private life for sale, as one critic has suggested? Well, what could be more fun than invading it, we ask. And isn't the sharing of the private order for us to see what we do, too? Spoerri defines art as what artists do. This is no solipsism, but an insistence that art be connected directly to life. It is new realism at its best. 

(From jacket cover). 

An avant-garde classic, this dynastic novel begins as a thinly disguised three-generations history of Stein's family and ends trying to encompass "all who ever were or are or could be living." Stein's belief that the essence of an individual is revealed in movement rather than content of word and thought becomes the method of this revolutionary and influential work, generally unavailable for over 40 years.

(From Dick Higgins, The Arts of the New Mentality: Catalogue 1967-1968, Something Else Press, 1967)  

Printed wooden box with plexiglass lid containing paperback book, fifteen folded poster, one numbered and signed photo silk-screen, one packet of Bromo Seltzer mounted on a sheet of mirror paper, and one matzoh.

Wolf Vostell is Germany's leading Happener - “D]é-Coll/age: unpasteurized, tear off, the take off of an airplane” term is applied to Vostell’s erasures, demonstrations, events, happenings and the international avant-garde anthologies he’s edited since 1962. This is a collection of all Vostell’s scenarios to date, large black and white reproductions of 15 gorgeous Happenings notations, objects chosen by Vostell and a signed numbered colored silk-screen print, all in a wooden box. 

(From Dick Higgins, The Arts of the New Mentality: Catalogue 1967-1968, Something Else Press, 1967)  

Some things are hard to verbalize, other to verbalize about. The last is true about Games at the Cedilla, because the concepts in the book are inherently not verbal, in the primary analysis, and are, in fact, anti-conceptualizations. In fact this point is precisely what this book is - an assemblage of aesthetic researches, done very much as a scientist might document his experiments, and in the same spirit. Since he is researching a very large number of quite different subjects, no overall conclusions are possible, on the one hand (in fact they would violate the spirit of the work). On another hand (there are more than two), it is inevitable that the different fields of research should be presented in a sort of parallel chronological order, as they would be in a scientists notebook in which he happened to tend two quite different bodies of investigation, perhaps towards quite different ends, rather than broken down into sections - all the “one minute scenarios” here, the poems there, the visual materials in another place, etc., as would happen in a normal collection. 

What we have is actually not so anarchic as it sounds. This book is a selective distillate of the notebooks kept by George Brecht and Robert Filliou, the one an American artist and scientist (n whose name there are a number of industrial patents at Washington D.C.) and the second a southern French sceptic, Robert Filliou, among whose credits are working on the United Nations white paper on the post-Korean War economic recovery for South Korea and also other economic theses., as well as variously uniquely reputed poems, plays, art exhibitions and revolutionary exploits. The Celia itself is LA CÉDILLE QUI SOURIT, a shop they operate at Villefranche-sur-mer on the Côte d’Azure where small works of avant-garde art are sold along with postcards, jewelry (by Donna Jo Brewer/Jones) and all kinds of things which do or do not have a cedilla in their (French) name. And at the Cedilla the notebooks are kept, as the researches are developed, in the manner appropriate to the investigations, with a bottle of ether the cheapest pleasant wine or the pleasantest cheap wine, depending upon the occasion. In this way, the dread disease to all artists, humorlessitis, is prevented from appearing, and the artists involved (and the others too) remain in good aesthetic health. 

(From jacket cover)

This is a facsimile of the 1879 edition concocted by Dick, long gone (died 1901) Philadelphia editor publisher. Douglas Blazek reviews in Olé: “…a rundown of all sorts of weird & diverse parlor games - some weird enuf to allure you into doing the thing, a great bk for someone else to own & you to read while they’re taking a bath…a bk to thumb thru like the Sears Catalog.” 

(From Dick Higgins, The Arts of the New Mentality: Catalogue 1967-1968, Something Else Press, 1967)

Once upon a time I spent my first summer in New York, and one hot day, with a thirst for such things, I went to take a Pierian sip at the Gotham Book Mart, where on never knew what marvelous little magazines might turn up. That day, in August 1958, I found Explorations, a small (one dare not say "little") magazine edited by Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter. McLuhan I know of at the time as a Joyce scholar and an expert on Wyndham Lewis, who was a hero of mine. So I bought it. 

Great was my surprise when I got home and discovered it was not a magazine at all but a superb essay documenting, analyzing and detailing all the implications of the arts through their sensual impact on the intellect, and especially, through their cumulative effect. This last insight is perhaps McLuhan’s major contribution to criticism. So much of the criticism of the past is purely qualitative; the McLuhan essay that forms the bulk of this book is quantitative. In dealing with it subjects it examines the typical and ignores the exception, except in the self of an alternative, just as an anthropologist prepares his field studies. The approach is utterly objective. One had the feeling that McLuhan knew all about what the was decrying, yet was, possibly, annoyed by it. With all the insight of hindsight we could, perhaps, draw a parallel with Ibsen, who was accuse do being a nasty fellow because he documented in his dreams the weakness of his time, and was therefore identified in the non-participating mind with the very problems he was anxious to eradicate. But this is not a symmetrically opposite parallel. Another temptation would be to say that McLuhan, in his more recent work, is denouncing the media that he seems to be highlighting and praising, and that his public among the media oriented Advertising Creativity personnel are mistaking his subject for his objectives. But this I not entirely true either, in my opinion. 

(From jacket cover)