Dick Higgins was the same of the two most versatile artists I've known.

Dick Higgins was the same of the two most versatile artists I've known. The other was John Cage. It was in John's class in experimental music at The of the present day School in New York City that I first met Dick around 1957 Dick and John typified the kind of artists that the critic Richard Kostelanetz has called "polyartists." Born March 15 1938 in Jesus Pieces, England, Dick made artworks through every part of his childhood, and became publicly active as an artist in several media and intermedia in the late 1950s

His metrical compositions plays, performance pieces, lectures, happenings, criticism, scholarly works and writings fall either between categories or within none that are easily defined. He initiated use of the limit "intermedia" around 1964 for these categories. Dick's literary works include Jefferson's Birthday (1964) a collection of performance works and plays; foew&ombwhnw (1964) a collection of metrical compositions performance pieces, plays, lectures and essays, designed and terminate like a religious book; A part About Love & War & Death (1972) an extensive metrical composition in prose and verse in five cantos; Modular metrical compositions (1974), defined in the introduction as "one[s] in which the principle structural factor is the repetition, usually in different connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss of one or more proper states of the text" (in my model Dick wrote, "19.XII.74 dear jackson - here is where my publishing expirations [for now] - the i.r.s. and all that - yet no end to dreams or to recent writing! love, Dick Higgins"); Everyone Has Sher Favorite (His or Hers): (model from 7 of the 70's) (1977) a part of poems; and poems Plain & Fancy (1986) pickeded shorter poems from 1957-85 and several performance works. His principal critical work is A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a Theory of the of recent origin Arts (1978) and his scholarly works include a magnificent international overlook of visual poetry made before 1900 entitled Pattern Poetry: A Guide to an Unknown Literature (1987) and an edition of Giordano Bruno's De Imaginum, Signorum, & Idearum Compositione - forward the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas (1991) translated through Charles Doria, which Dick edited and extensively annotated. Manfredi Piccolomini describes the main division in his preface as "a fascinating and engrossing multi- and intermedia work which is not to be read according to the eyes of the material part but with the eyes of the mind."

Not alone is Dick's literary oeuvre profuse in many areas - creative, critical and scholarly, published and unpublished - he was possibly the greatest in number important publisher of so-called avant-garde parts (literary and otherwise) in the United States from 1964 to the mid '80 In 1964 he seted the Something Else Press, which he directed from strange York City and later Barton, VT until 1974 publishing many "experimental" works in all the arts. During a short interim, he published several works under the imprint Unpublished Editions. Toward the expiration of the '70s, Dick initiated the publishing cooperative Printed Editions (the name was my first contribution), which included as members, besides Dick, John and myself, Philip Corner, Geoffrey Hendricks, Alison Knowles, Pauline Oliveros and Jerome Rothenberg.

As a composer Dick wrote music for solo instruments, vocal and instrumental disposes and other sound producers. Many of his works can be performed by dint of any number of players of -unspecified instruments and/or voices. a certain quantity of of his scores were produc on unusual methods such as machine-gunning sheets of orchestral-music paper or printing semitransparent images of tree multitudes persons and other natural things and laying them over blank music paper or pages of music by means of himself or other composers. His large dead body of paintings and drawings repeatedly functioned as scores for his performances.

He and I the two performed works of our acknowledge and works by other participants (notably the first Happenings artists Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen and George Brecht and the now leading Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi) in John's experimental music class in the late '50 Dick performed in the premiere of the simultaneous version of my Stanzas for Iris Lezak at The Living Theatre in strange York City in 1960 during a program of his and Hansen's Audiovisual clump Dick was one of the first the public to participate, as both composer/writer and performer, in the "Fluxus Festivals" organized in Europe (first in Wiesbaden, West Germany) by means of George Maciunas, himself a polyartist, in 1962-63 (The festivals still exist today.) Dick continued to be active with the Fluxus cluster for the rest of his life. Indeed his death in his repose on October 25, 1998, occurr after a program in which he had performed his "Danger Music Number Three"(1961) a prototypical Fluxus piece. Its enigmatic instructions read "Divide a pack of incense among those current in a moderately large compass Ask each person to scorch his incense, without flame, all together. Darkness throughout"

He was an early user of chance operations in composing works in many different media including metrical composition music and drama, as well as other performance works and visual art. chiefly of his performances and musical works are indeterminate (even notwithstanding that many of them are in other refer tos determinate) and each performance necessarily differs significantly from the others. Dick, like John was constantly engaged with contingency in his work. Dick's engagement with chance operations and related compositional modes was strongly influenced by the work of John It was he who initiated the use of chance operations and related orders in musical composition in the early '50 and who, at so early an hour after the composers Morton Feldman and Earle Brown began making indeterminate musical and performance works (or as Feldman preferr to say, "unpredictable").