John Cage : Notations AGAIN

I had a chance to get to the library and check out the text first hand, and was so impressed that I felt inclined to scan some pages for you. Voila.

Selections from Dick Higgins Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature

Please forgive the uncharacteristically poor documentation, but you should be able to get an idea of the vast variety and eccentric history of the pattern/visual/concrete poem.

Dick Higgins – “Metadramas”

Statement about my “metadramas”

by Dick Higgins

One of the main genres of Fluxus pieces of the 1960s is and was “events.” These were first done before Fluxus, and came to be conceptually framed as a sort of cognate of happenings, which were new at the time-that is, intermedial, free-form pieces which lay conceptually among the bounds of music, theater and visual art. Events differed from happenings in that they were always as compressed as possible, minimal statements that would provide a mental or emotional impact. But, of course, they were highly abstract. I did them, George Brecht did them, and others of the Fluxus artists did them also though, for the most part, somewhat later than 1958 when George, I, AI Hansen and others studied with John Cage in his class at the New School for Social Research in New York, a story which has been told, more or less, to death.

However, events made their point and the genre became well defined over the years, through Fluxus concerts and individual performances and works by, quite literally, hundreds of artists. In the sixties, when purely formal explorations seemed essential to sweep away the overly personal baggage of the 1960s, this was a positive thing. However, in the 1980s, when personal expression has been minimized, and when art performances, the heirs in some respect of happenings, often celebrate boredom and almost always deal essentially with technical and formal concerns, it seems more desirable to do pieces which are mainly minimal emotional statements or narrative ones, complete with characterizations in most cases. I had done a few such pieces previously, but not so consciously as now. I call them “metadramas” because they must be dramatic in order to satisfy the criterion, and, the “meta-” part suggests that they are “next to” or “about” what they relate to-that is, some are dramas about the drama, while others simply don’t pretend to be dramas but do point in that direction. I wrote about sixty of them in the summer of 1985, destroyed most of them, and then noticed that they seemed to define a genre to which the earlier events belong, though not vice versa.

Barrytown, New York

18 September, 1985

via Dick Higgins – “Metadramas”.

RECOMMEND READING MATERIAL: The Great Bear Pamphlets

U B U W E B :: The Great Bear Pamphlets.

Published by Dick Higgins, Something Else Press books contain offbeat and avant-garde material in a neat and tidy, yet quirky form. In 1962 Fluxus founder George Maciunas proposed to publish Higgins’s first major collection–a cross-section of his writing for a year following April 13, 1962, the date Higgins had composed one of his favorite works from the “Danger Music” series and, coincidently, the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. Maciunas’s notion of publishing revolved around the hand-assembled small-edition art multiple that proved an impossible format for Higgins’s four hundred-page manuscript. Maciunas informed Dick that he couldn’t have the book ready until “a year from next spring” at which point he retrieved the scripts, had a few drinks–and, in Higgins’s own words “went reeling home to Alison Knowles, with whom I was living at the time. I said we’d founded a press and she said, ‘Really? What’s it called?’ ‘Shirtsleeves Press.’ ‘That’s no good. Why don’t you call it something else?’” And so he did. Higgins’s editorial idea was innovative, pragmatic and utopian all at once–the plan was to compose a series of “Variations on a Theme of Book.” He described this project as the opportunity “to publish source materials in a format which could encourage their distribution through traditional channels, however untraditional their contents or implications&to introduce European materials and always to have a balance between European/American, famous, infamous and unfamous, past and present.” He wanted to present the work in a trade book format rather than in the small press style per se (often strange and beautiful rough-hewn miracles). This idea was picked up by a great many small press editors fifteen years later in an attempt to make the books look more like “real books” and therefore to function more efficiently within the real world.