Dick Higgins
A Something Else Reader
Author(s) Dick Higgins
Format Paperback, 6 x 9.25 inches Paperback
Year 2022
Language(s) English
Pages 368 pages
Description
The publication features excerpts 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, De-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. Also included is an annotated checklist assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins’ unpublished introduction.
Perhaps no other 1960s publisher influenced artists’ books as much as Something Else Press. Higgins had a firm vision that radical art could be housed in book form and distributed globally and he worked incessantly to cultivate new works that challenged conventional notions of contemporary art and books. 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.
Curiously, Higgins had no intention of publishing 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 ultimately rejected the title and encouraged Higgins to publish it, but before he could do so, Something Else Press went bankrupt and the dreams of the anthology evaporated. From there the proposal entered Higgins’ archive, where it was found by researcher and curator Alice Centamore, who has compiled the works and assembled A Something Else Reader.
Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams are all included in 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 earning a B.A. in English, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Printing. He studied music composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage’s experimental music class at the New School, and participated in the inaugural Fluxus activities in Europe from fall 1962 through summer 1963. He founded Something Else Press in 1963, and in 1972 he founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Printed Editions). During his lifetime, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books.