Dick Higgins (1938–1998)

Scarce publication (Something Else's first), limited to 1200 copies, by the co-founder of the Fluxus movement; two works in one, each beginning from either end of volume.
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 monstrously big book, decidedly non-commercial. He then suggested that he publish a year’s worth of my writings, which would then provide a cross- section of my work. I was delighted with the idea and proceeded to finish all texts begun during that year (which I seldom do). It is, in fact, representative of my work from that time except that it includes no long texts. The resulting manuscript then lay on his desk for several months, while he tried to make the peace with it.



His studio was downstairs from mine, and every few days I would drop by and ask him what was happening with it. He would stall and groan—it was much bigger than he had expected. Finally he told me that it would be ready “a year from next spring.” That was too late, I said—I needed the books for acting scripts, etc. He said there was nothing he could do about that. I then went to the bar downstairs and had a few drinks, went back up to his studio, removed my manu- script and took it upstairs to my studio, returned to the bar and had a few more drinks. I then went home to Alison Knowles, a fluxus artist to whom I was married at the time.



“Alison,” I said, “We’ve founded a press.”
“Oh really,” Alison said, startled. “What’s it called?” “Shirtsleeves Press,” I said.

“That’s no good,” she said. “Why don’t you call it something else?” I thought about that, and the next day I wrote the “Something Else Manifesto,” in which I promised always to publish “something else,” different from whatever was in vogue at the time.

(From "The Strategy of Each of My Books" 1984)

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 valuable enough that it will now (1981) be reissued by another publisher.

(From "The Strategy of Each of My Books" 1984)… (mer)

Dick Higgins and his Something Else Press epitomized the riotous art of the ‘60s

There are few art-world figures as influential―and as little known―as Dick Higgins (1938–98), cofounder of Fluxus, "polyartist," poet, scholar, theorist, composer, performer and, not least, the publisher of the legendary Something Else Press. In 1965 he restored the term "intermedia" to the English language, giving it new dimension to recognize the dissolution of boundaries between traditional modes of art-making and the open field for new forms that cannot be compartmentalized. His own contributions to intermedia are many―as a participant and instigator of happenings, as writer and composer straddling traditional and vanguard forms, among others―but it was Something Else Press (1963–74) that redefined how "the book" could inhabit that energized, in-between space.

Something Else Press was as much a critical statement and radical experiment as it was a collection of books by some of the most luminary artists and writers of the 20th century: Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Bern Porter, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou, and George Brecht, among many others. Along with his Great Bear Pamphlet series and the Something Else newsletter, Higgins exploited and subverted conventional book production and marketing strategies to get unconventional and avant-garde works into the hands of new and often unsuspecting readers.

Edited by Granary Books publisher Steve Clay and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, this judiciously curated and indispensable compendium of essays, theoretical writings and narrative prose dives deep into the ever-influential ideas that Higgins explored in theory and practice. Clay and Friedman have chosen works that illuminate Higgins' voracious intellectual appetite, encyclopedic body of knowledge and playful yet rigorous experimentation in a selection that includes many writings long out of print or difficult to find.… (mer)

A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms.

The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter’s I’ve Left, Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings, Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, and other projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, and Richard Meltzer, among others. An annotated checklist assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins’s unpublished introduction are also included.

Perhaps no other publisher in the 60s influenced artists’ books more than Something Else Press. Higgins had a firm vision that radical art could be housed in book form and distributed throughout the world and he worked endlessly to cultivate new works that challenged conventional notions of both contemporary art and books. He sought to distribute these titles far and wide, even hiring door-to-door salesmen to pitch titles like Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak and Emmett Williams’s An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. While other presses created extraordinary publications, none were able to achieve the breadth of titles and artists like Higgins, who successfully ran Something Else Press until 1974 in a manner that resembled a more traditional paperback publisher.

Oddly, Higgins hadn’t intended to publish A Something Else Reader himself. Instead, in 1972, he assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal that he then pitched to Random House. They eventually rejected the title and encouraged Higgins to publish it, but before he could do that, Something Else Press went out of business, and the dreams of the anthology evaporated. From there, the proposal went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled A Something Else Reader.

Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, theorist, poet, and publisher, as well as a co-founder of Fluxus. After attending Yale and Columbia Universities and receiving a BA in English, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Printing. He studied music composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage’s course in experimental music at The New School, and participated in the inaugural Fluxus activities in Europe from Fall 1962 to Summer 1963. He founded Something Else Press in 1963 and in 1972, he founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Published Editions). Over the course of his life, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books.… (mer)