34.1higgins intermedia

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2001 The Estate of Dick Higgins LEONARDO, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 4954, 2001 49

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1965Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall be-

tween media. This is no accident. The concept of the separa-

tion between media arose in the Renaissance. The idea that apainting is made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should

not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of socialthoughtcategorizing and dividing society into nobility with

its various subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and land-less workerswhich we call the feudal conception of the Great

Chain of Being. This essentially mechanistic approach contin-ued to be relevant throughout the first two industrial revolu-

tions, just concluded, and into the present era of automation,

which constitutes, in fact, a third industrial revolution.However, the social problems that characterize our time, as

opposed to the political ones, no longer allow a compartmen-

talized approach. We are approaching the dawn of a classless

society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutelyirrelevant. This shift does not relate more to East than West or

vice versa. Castro works in the cane fields. New Yorks MayorLindsay walks to work during the subway strike. The million-

aires eat their lunches at Horn and Hardarts. This sort ofpopulism is a growing tendency rather than a shrinking one.

We sense this in viewing art which seems to belong unnec-essarily rigidly to one or another form. We view paintings.

What are they, after all? Expensive, handmade objects, in-

tended to ornament the walls of the rich or, through their (ortheir governments) munificence, to be shared with large

numbers of people and give them a sense of grandeur. Butthey do not allow of any sense of dialogue.

Pop art? How could it play a part in the art of the future? Itis bland. It is pure. It uses elements of common life without

comment, and so, by accepting the misery of this life and itsaridity so mutely, it condones them. Pop and op are both

dead, however, because they confine themselves, through the

media which they employ, to the older functions of art, ofdecorating and suggesting grandeur, whatever the detailed

content of their artists intentions. None of the ingenioustheories of the Mr. Ivan Geldoway combine can prevent them

from being colossally boring and irrelevant. Milord runs hisMad Avenue Gallery, in which he displays wares. He is pro-

tected by a handful of rude footmen who seem to feel that this

is the way Life will always be. At his beck and call is Sir FretfulCallous, a moderately well-informed high priest, who appar-

ently despises the Flame he is supposed to tend and thereforeprefers anything which titillates him. However, Milord needs

his services, since he, poor thing, hasnt the time or the energyto contribute more than his name and perhaps his dollars;

getting information and finding out whats going on are sim-ply toooooo exhausting. So, well protected and advised, he

goes blissfully through the streets in proper Louis XIV style.

This scene is not just characteristic of the painting world as

an institution, however. It is absolutely natural to (and inevi-

table in) the concept of the pure medium, the painting orprecious object of any kind. That is the way such objects are

marketed since that is the world to which they belong and to

which they relate. The sense of I am the state, however, willshortly be replaced by After me the deluge, and, in fact, if

the High Art world were better informed, it would realize thatthe deluge has already begun.

Who knows when it began? There is no reason for us to go

into history in any detail. Part of the reason that Duchampsobjects are fascinating while Picassos voice is fading is that the

Duchamp pieces are truly between media, between sculptureand something else, while a Picasso is readily classifiable as a

painted ornament. Similarly, by invading the land between col-lage and photography, the German John Heartfield produced

what are probably the greatest graphics of our century, surely

the most powerful political art that has been done to date.The ready-made or found object, in a sense an

intermedium since it was not intended to conform to the pure

medium, usually suggests this, and therefore suggests a loca-tion in the field between the general area of art media and

those of life media. However, at this time, the locations of this

sort are relatively unexplored, as compared with media be-tween the arts. I cannot, for example, name work which has

consciously been placed in the intermedium between paint-ing and shoes. The closest thing would seem to be the sculp-

ture of Claes Oldenburg, which falls between sculpture andhamburgers or Eskimo Pies, yet it is not the sources of these

images themselves. An Oldenburg Eskimo Pie may look some-thing like an Eskimo Pie, yet is neither edible nor cold. There

is still a great deal to be done in this direction in the way of

opening up aesthetically rewarding possibilities.In the middle 1950s many painters began to realize the fun-

damental irrelevance of abstract expressionism, which was thedominant mode at the time. Such painters as Allan Kaprow

and Robert Rauschenberg in the United States and WolfVostell in Germany turned to collage or, in the latters case,

d-collage, in the sense of making work by adding or remov-ing, replacing and substituting or altering components of a

visual work. They began to include increasingly incongruous

objects in their work. Rauschenberg called his constructionscombines and went so far as to place a stuffed goatspat-

tered with paint and with a rubber tire around its neckontoone. Kaprow, more philosophical and restless, meditated on

Intermedia

Dick Higginswith an Appendix by Hannah Higgins

Dick Higgins (19381998)

Hannah Higgins (educator), The University of Illinois at Chicago, Gallery 400, Schoolof Art and Design (M/C 033), College of Architecture and the Arts, 400 South PeoriaStreet, Chicago, IL 60607-7034, U.S.A.

Originally published in Something Else Newsletter1, No. 1 (Something Else Press, 1966).Also published as a chapter in Dick Higgins, Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of theIntermedia(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984). Reprinted by permis-sion of the Estate of Dick Higgins.


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50 Higgins, Intermedia

the relationship of the spectator and thework. He put mirrors into his things sothe spectator could feel included inthem. That wasnt physical enough, sohe made enveloping collages which sur-rounded the spectator. These he calledenvironments. Finally, in the spring of1958, he began to include live people aspart of the collage, and this he called a

happening.The proscenium theater is the out-

growth of seventeenth-century ideals ofsocial order. Yet there is remarkably littlestructural difference between the dramasof Davenant and those of Edward Albee,certainly nothing comparable to the dif-ference in pump construction or meansof mass transportation. It would seemthat the technological and social implica-tions of the first two industrial revolu-tions have been evaded completely. Thedrama is still mechanistically divided:there are performers, productionpeople, a separate audience and an ex-plicit script. Once started, like Franken-steins monster, the course of affairs isunalterable, perhaps damned by its in-ability to reflect its surroundings. Withour populistic mentality today, it is diffi-cult to attach importanceother than

what we have been taught to attachtothis traditional theater. Nor do minor in-novations do more than provide dinnerconversation: this theater is round in-stead of square, in that one the stage re-

volves, here the play is relatively senselessand whimsical (Pinter is, after all, ourmodern J.M. Barrieunless the honor

belongs more properly to Beckett). Everyyear fewer attend the professional Broad-way theaters. The shows get sillier and sil-lier, showing the producers estimate ofour mentality (or is it their own that isrevealed?). Even the best of the tradi-tional theater is no longer found onBroadway but at the Judson MemorialChurch, some miles away. Yet our theater

schools grind out thousands on thou-sands of performing and production per-sonnel, for whom jobs will simply not ex-ist in 20 years. Can we blame the unions?Or rents and real estate taxes? Of coursenot. The subsidized productions, spon-sored at such museums as New YorksLincoln Center, are not building up anew audience so much as recultivating anold one, since the medium of suchdrama seems weird and artificial in ournew social milieu. We need more port-ability and flexibility, and this the tradi-tional theater cannot provide. It wasmade for Versailles and for the sedentaryMilords, not for motorized life-demons

who travel 600 miles a week. Versailles nolonger speaks very loudly to us, since wethink at 85 miles an hour.

In the other direction, starting fromthe idea of theater itself, others such asmyself declared war on the script as a setof sequential events. Improvisation wasno help; performers merely acted in imi-tation of a script. So I began to work as iftime and sequence could be utterly sus-pended, not by ignoring them (which

would simply be illogical) but by system-atically replacing them as structural ele-

ments with change. Lack of changewould cause my pieces to stop. In 1958 Iwrote a piece, Stacked Deck, in which anyevent can take place at any time, as longas its cue appears. The cues are produced

by colored lights. Since the colored lightscould be used wherever they were putand audience reactions were also cuingsituations, the performance-audienceseparation was removed and a happeningsituation was established, though less vi-sually oriented in its use of its environ-ment and imagery. At the same time, AlHansen moved into the area fromgraphic notation experiments, and Nam

June Paik and Benjamin Patterson (bothin Germany at the time) moved in from

varieties of music in which specificallymusical events were frequently replacedby nonmusical actions.

Thus the happening developed as anintermedium, an uncharted land that liesbetween collage, music and the theater.It is not governed by rules; each workdetermines its own medium and formaccording to its needs. The concept itselfis better understood by what it is not,rather than what it is. Approaching it, weare pioneers again, and shall continue tobe so as long as theres plenty of elbowroom and no neighbors around for a fewmiles. Of course, a concept like this is

very disturbing to those whose mentalityis compartmentalized. Time, Life, and theHigh Priests have been announcing the

death of happenings regularly since theform gained momentum in the late fif-ties, but this says more about the accu-racy of their information than about theliveliness of the form.

We have noted the intermedia in thetheater and in the visual arts, the happen-ing, and certain varieties of physical con-structions. For reasons of space we cannottake up here the intermedia betweenother areas. However, I would like to sug-gest that the use of intermedia is more orless universal throughout the fine arts,since continuity rather than categoriza-

tion is the hallmark of our new mentality.There are parallels to the happening inmusic, for example in the work of suchcomposers as Philip Corner and JohnCage, who explore the intermedia be-tween music and philosophy, or Joe Jones,

whose self-playing musical instrumentsfall into the intermedium between musicand sculpture. The constructed poems ofEmmett Williams and Robert Filliou cer-tainly constitute an intermedium betweenpoetry and sculpture. Is it possible tospeak of the use of intermedia as a hugeand inclusive movement of which dada,futurism and surrealism are early phases

Fig. 1. Intermedia Chart, 1995. ( Estate of Dick Higgins) The chart shows concentric andoverlapping circles that appear to expand and contract in relationship to the Intermediaframework that encompasses them.


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Fig. 2. Glasslass, modular poem, 1974. A modular poem is one in which the principal structural factor is the repetition, usually in differentcontexts, of one or more elements of the text. Each element becomes a module that may be expanded, compressed or otherwise altered.Or not. ( Estate of Dick Higgins. Originally published in Dick Higgins, Modular Poems[Barton, Vermont: Unpublished Editions, 1974].)


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preceding the huge ground swell that istaking place now? Or is it more reason-able to regard the use of intermedia asan irreversible historical innovation,more comparable, for example, to the

development of instrumental musicthan, for example, to the developmentof romanticism?

1981In 1965, when the above words were writ-ten, the intention was simply to offer ameans of ingress into works which al-ready existed, the unfamiliarity of whoseforms was such that many potential view-ers, hearers, or readers were turned offby them. The world was filled at thattime with concrete poems, happenings,sound poetry, environments, and other

more or less novel developments; unlessthe public had a way of seeing into thework by causing it to stand still for a mo-ment and be classified, the work waslikely to be dismissed as avant-garde: forspecialists only. To any dedicated non-specialist this could be frustratingonewanted to know well the art of ones

time, since one wanted to hear onesown voice or self at work, without the in-terventions of history and historicaljudgements; this was art whose horizonswould closely match ones own.

The vehicle I chose, the word inter-media, appears in the writings of SamuelTaylor Coleridge in 1812 in exactly itscontemporary senseto define works

which fall conceptually between mediathat are already known, and I had beenusing the term for several years in lecturesand discussions before my little essay was

written. Furthermore, as part of my cam-paign to popularize what was known asavant-garde: for specialists only, todemystify it if you will, I had become apublisher of a small press, Something ElsePress (19641974), which brought outeditions of many primary sources and

materials in the new arts (as well as reissu-ing works of the past which seemed tomerit new attentionworks by GertrudeStein, the dadaists, the composer HenryCowell, etc.). It seemed foolish simply topublish my little essay in some existingmagazine, where it could be shelved orforgotten. So it was printed as the first

Something Else Newsletterand sent to ourcustomers, to all the people on our mail-ing list, to people to whom I felt the idea

would be useful (for example, to artistsdoing what seemed to me to be

intermedial work and to critics who mightbe in a position to discuss such work). Allin all, I gave away some 10,000 copies ofthe essay, as many as I could afford; and Iencouraged its republication by anyone

who asked for permission to do so. It wasreprinted seven or eight times that I knewof, and it still lives on in print in variousbooks, not just of mine, but where it hasbeen anthologized along with other textsof the time or as part of surveys.

The term shortly acquired a life of itsown, as I had hoped. In no way was it myprivate property. It was picked up; usedand misused, often by confusion with the

term mixed media. This last is a vener-able term from art criticism, which cov-ers works executed in more than onemedium, such as oil color and guache.But by extension it is also appropriate tosuch forms as the opera, where the mu-sic, the libretto, and the mise-en-sceneare quite separate: at no time is theoperagoer in doubt as to whether he isseeing the mise-en-scene, the stage spec-tacle, hearing the music, etc. Many fineworks are being done in mixed media:paintings which incorporate poemswithin their visual fields, for instance.But one knows which is which.

In intermedia, on the other hand, thevisual element (painting) is fused con-ceptually with the words. We may haveabstract calligraphy, concrete poetry, vi-sual poetry (notanypoem with a strongvisual element, but the term is some-times used to cover visual works in whichsome poem appears, often as a photogra-phy, or in which the photographed visualmaterial is presented as a sequence witha grammar of its own, as if each visualelement were a word of a sentence, as incertain works by Jean-Franois Bory orDuane Michaels).

Again, the term is not prescriptive; itdoes not praise itself or present a modelfor doing either new or great works. Itsays only that intermedial works exist.Failure to understand this would lead tothe kind of error of thinking thatintermedia are necessarily dated in timeby their nature, something rooted in the1960s, like an art movement of the pe-riod. There was and could be nointermedial movement. Intermedialityhas always been a possibility since themost ancient times, and though somewell-meaning commissar might try tolegislate it away as formalistic and there-

Fig. 3. Piece for Meredith Monks Apartment, intermedia theater piece, 1968. ( Estate ofDick Higgins. Originally published in Dick Higgins, some recent snowflakes (and other things)[New York: Printed Editions, 1979].)


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fore antipopular, it remains a possibilitywherever the desire to fuse two or moreexisting media exists. One can avoid it;one can be like Rosalind Krauss, a muchrespected critic who said in a lecture at

Iowa City in 1981, I am devoted to theidea of trying to bury the avant-garde,which she does by attacking it, ignoringit and its implications, or, even worse,presenting theory as such an end in itselfthat any sort of artwork becomes, at best,an unimportant appendage to thetheory. But there is always an avant-garde, in the sense that someone, some-where is always trying to do somethingwhich adds to the possibilities for every-body, and that that large everybody willsome day follow this somebody and usewhatever innovations were made as partof their workaday craft. Avant-garde is

merely a conventional metaphor drawn(in the mid-nineteenth century) fromthe military, in which an avant-gardemoves in advance of the main body oftroops. Avant-garde is relative, not ab-solute. A conservative poet can be atleast morally avant-garde by moving inthe direction of ever-greater integrityand purity, of vividness or metaphor andexcellence of line. Others seek to follow,even when they cannot; and thus themetaphor retains its relevance.

But when one is thinking of the avant-garde of forms and media, one is oftenthinking of artists who, for whatever rea-

son, question those forms and media.They can reject some (e.g., AndrBretons predecessors in French dada re-

jected the novel, and they were avant-garde, while Andr Breton chose to movetoward some kind of novel as a possibility,thus provoking a break between hisgroup, which in due course became thesurrealists, and the otherand the newgroup, too, was avant-garde). They cancreate others. And often this creation ofnew media is done by the fusion of oldones; this was very common in the late1950s and early 1960s, with the formal

fusions I have already mentioned. No work was ever good because of itsintermediality [1]. The intermediality

was merely a part of how a work was andis; recognizing it makes the work easierto classify, so that one can understand the

work and its significances.Further, there is a tendency for

intermedia to become media with famil-iarity. The visual novel is a pretty muchrecognizable form to us now. We havehad many of them in the last 20 years. Itis harping on an irrelevance to point toits older intermedial status between vi-sual art and text; we want to know what

this or that visual novel is about and howit works, and the intermediality is nolonger needed to see these things. Samewith visual poetry and sound poetry (ortext-sound, if one prefers that term).

In the performance arts, once there wasthe happening which was close toevents; some happenings artists didfluxus, and some did not. At least onefluxus artist, Alison Knowles, evolved inher work until she found herself doingwhat other new artistsmany of whomtook great pains to distinguish what theywere doing from happenings, events,and fluxuswere calling, variously, artperformance or performance art.Where do we look for to find the conti-nuity of these? To their intermediality:they are all the same intermedium, aconceptual fusion of scenario, visuality

and, often enough, audio elements. But will the intermediality explain theuniqueness or value of the very best ofart performance (or performance art)? Ithink not. Some works will become land-marks and will define their genre, whilethe others will be forgotten. At best theintermediality was needed to suggesttheir historical trajectory, to see theirsometimes obscure pedigree (as onemight use it, with happenings, to pointtoward the heritage of happenings fromdada or futurist manifestations). But ifthe work is ever to become truly impor-tant to large numbers of people, it will

be because the new medium allows forgreat significance, not simply because itsformal nature assures it of relevance.

This, then, is the caveat inherent inusing the term intermedia: it allows foran ingress to a work which otherwiseseems opaque and impenetrable, butonce that ingress has been made it is nolonger useful to harp upon theintermediality of a work. No reputableartist could be an intermedial artist forlongit would seem like an impedi-ment, holding the artist back from fulfill-ing the needs of the work at hand, of cre-

ating horizons in the new era for thenext generation of listeners and readersand beholders to match their own hori-zons too. What was helpful as a begin-ning would, if maintained, become anobsession which braked the flow into thework and its needs and potentials. Oneoften regrets the adherence of an artistto a set of dogma: the movement artistis a case in pointhe adheres to theteachings of his or her movement, longafter these have passed their relevance.There is the late futurist, the late ab-stract expressionist, the late pop artist.To be late in that sense is somehow to

create a sort of academicism, good forproviding examples to a class (Okay,class, now this week I want each of you todo a pop art painting), perhaps usefulfor heuristic purposes but not likely to

open up new horizons for the artist orhis viewers, listeners, or readers.And with this I would leave the matter

of intermedia. It is today, as it was in1965, a useful way to approach some newwork; one asks oneself, what that I knowdoes this new work lie between? But it ismore useful at the outset of a criticalprocess than at the later stages of it. Per-haps I did not see that at the time, but itis clear to me now. Perhaps, in all theexcitement of what was, for me, a discov-ery, I overvalued it. I do not wish to com-pensate with a second error of judgmentand to undervalue it now. But it would

seem that to proceed further in the un-derstanding of any given work, one mustlook elsewhereto all the aspects of awork and not just to its formal origins,and at the horizons which the work im-plies, to find an appropriate hermeneu-tic process for seeing the whole of thework in my own relation to it.

Note

1. In 1965 I would have challenged this. But re-searches into the history of visual poetry andsound poetry have suggested to me that virtually allpossible fusions have been made or at least impliedat some time or other, and that the surfacing ofsome volume of such fusions has more to do with

the economics or the fashions of a time ratherthan with its actual Zeitgeist.

APPENDIXBYHANNAH HIGGINS

Intermedia ChartHiggins Intermedia Chart (Fig. 1)resonates with temporally dynamicsociograms, where human interactionsare highly differentiated and radicallydecentralized and based primarily onthe specific needs of a given body, in thiscase artists. According to a model like

this, historic and contemporary experi-ence is diverse, causally flexible and per-missive of the as-yet-unknown.

The chart depicts intersections be-

tween fluxus and related work andmakes no attempt at linear chronology.

Fluid in form, the chart shows concen-tric and overlapping circles that appear

to expand and contract in relationshipto the Intermedia framework that en-compasses them. It is an open frame-work that invites play. Its bubbles hover

in space as opposed to being historically

framed in the linear and specializedart/anti-art framework of the typical


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chronologies of avant-garde and mod-ern art.

GlasslassGlasslass (Fig. 2) is a poem about slith-

ering assonance and the naked page.The sounds of the esses slither, seem-ingly seamlessly surrounding the insideof the readers mouths. Esses spill sexilyacross the pages soft skin, savoring thefancy glass lass.

The Opaque and the TransparentFor the last 20 years of his life, Higginswas, primarily, a scholar/painter. He ex-tended his understanding of intermediatoward the past in the form of historicwritings on George Herberts patternpoems (1977), a translation of Novalis(1978, 1984), a history of Pattern Poetry

(1987) and a book on Giordano Bruno(with Charles Doria, 1991). These schol-arly pursuits constitute the historic basis

of what he explored through the inter-disciplinary and exhaustive sequence ofpaintings that include The Opaque and theTransparent(see Color Plate A No. 2). Inone catalog, Daniel Charles called this

the logical and coherent outcome ofHiggins work. As intermedia objects,these paintings belong equally to thegraphic arts, poetry, music and perfor-mance. In this image, looking at andlooking through are juxtaposed as a re-flective resonance that constitutes a frag-ment and a whole simultaneously. Typi-cal of his work generally, this imagereforms its seemingly iconoclastic aimsby reconstituting fragments as produc-tive of a humanistic sense of the unity ofevery time, place and modality.

Piece for Meredith Monks

ApartmentMy father and Meredith Monk were dearfriends who greatly admired each others

work and occasionally performed to-gether in the middle and late 1960s. Asa child I remember taking lessons atMerediths studio. I include Piece forMeredith Monks Apartmenthere (Fig. 3)

because, when they saw each other at theWalker in 1998, there was so much lovebetween them that they just sat andsmiled at each other for some minutes.That is, I think, a big part of why artistsdedicate works to each other.

Editors Note: A traveling retrospective exhibi-

tion entitled Betwixt and Between: The Lifeand Work of Dick Higgins will originate at

the Columbia College Center for the Book and

the Printed Word on 10 November 2000 andmake several stops at university galleries in

the United States over the course of the next

two years. The show is co-curated by HannahHiggins and Simon Anderson of The Schoolof the Art Institute of Chicago.

Documents

34.1higgins intermedia