Dick Higgins
Postface: A Critical Journal of the Avant-Garde
One of Fluxus's major figures discusses in his critical diary the birth of the movement in the 1960s and analyzes the artistic trends of his time.
Dick Higgins (1938-1998), one of the major figures of Fluxus, musician, poet, researcher, theoretician, intermedia artist, publisher, founded Something Else Press in 1965 (dedicated to his Fluxus friends). He published this first essay in 1964.
It is a critical diary that evokes the context in which Fluxus appeared between 1959 and 1963. It unsparingly analyzes the trends of its time and lambasts artistic fashions (Pop art, assemblage, Nouveau Réalisme), New Theater (the Living Theater), as well as the international style in music (musique concrète, electronic music, Stockhausen and Co.). It is a praise of plurality, diversity, and abundance, favorable to the "blossoming of a hundred flowers" and the emergence of "a thousand schools of thought," for amateurs, against the blindness of the professional. Higgins shows the particularity of poet-artists who, since German and English Romanticism, have refused to separate sound, visual, and written forms. Fluxus thus takes up the Dada legacy and expands upon it.