THE MAIL-INTERVIEW WITH DICK HIGGINS
(USA)
(by
Ruud Janssen - NL)
(In the years 1994 till 2001 Ruud
Janssen interviewed several artists by different communication-forms. This
is interview #43 with Dick Higgins. The Interview took place like a correspondence
where both traveled and also used different media like typewriters, computers,
handwritten letters and e-mails. 3 Years after the Interview Dick Higgins died
of a Heart attack. A short article and CV can be found at the bottom of the
interview, published in the New York Times. This Interview is reproduced by Fluxus
Heidelberg Center with the permission of TAM-Publications - Netherlands.
The dates that questions and answers are?
sent/received are mentioned to make the time-line visible)
(c)2003 - FHC 0304
Started on: 4-6-2020
Ruud Janssen : Welcome to this mail-interview. First
let me ask you the traditional question. When did you get involved in the
mail-art network?
Reply on: 3-7-2020
Dick Higgins: Dear Senior Janssen - I got involved in the
mail-art network in July 1959 shortly after I met Ray Johnson in June. He sent
me a marzipan frog, a wooden fork and three small letters in wood, which I
correctly misunderstood. I sent him some wild mushrooms which I had gathered,
and they arrived at his place on Dover Street just before they decomposed.
RJ : Was this mail-art in the beginning just fun &
games or was there more to it?
Reply on 27-7-2020
(Together with his answer Dick Higgins sent me his
large, 46 pages long, Bio/Bibliography and a contribution to my Rubberstamp
Archive, a stamp-sheet with some of his old and new stamps printed on)
DH: Indeed it was fun to communicate with Ray. But it
was a new kind of fun. I had never encountered anyone who could somehow jell my
fluid experiences of the time when I was doing visual poetry (thus the
letters), food and conceptual utility (perhaps I had shown him my "Useful
Stanzas" which I wrote about then. But what had he left out? Nature - thus
my sending of the wild mushrooms, collecting and studying which was an ongoing
interest (I was working on them with John Cage, an important friend of Ray's as
of mine).
As for rubber stamps, in 1960 when Fluxus was
a-forming my home was in New York at 423 Broadway on the corner with Canal
Street and my studio was at 359 Canal Street a few blocks away. Canal Street
was known for its surplus dealers (some are still there) including stationers,
and one could buy rubber stamps there for almost nothing - and we did! I had
already made some rubber stamps through Henri Berez, a legendary rubber maker
on Sixth Avenue, long gone but he was the first I knew who could make
photographic rubber stamps - Berez made a magnesium, then a Bakelite and
finally the rubber stamp, And I blocked the magnesiums and used them for printing
as well. I had stamps of musical notation symbols made and also of my
calligraphies, etc. At an auction in 1966 when he moved to Europe I also bought
Fluxartist George Brecht's rubber stamps (mostly of animals) which he used
starting ca. 1960; I used those to make a bookwork of my own, From the Earliest
Days of Fluxus (I Guess), which I think is in the Silverman Collection. Others
of my rubber stamps are in the Archiv Sohm and perhaps Hermann Braun or Erik
Andersch have some, I am not sure. I think there was an article on Fluxus
rubber stamps in Lightworks - that must be listed in John Held Jr's Mail Art:
an Annotated Bibliography (Mettuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991) and/or in Jon
Hendricks's Fluxus Codex (New York: Abrams, ca. 1992). I also composed some
music using rubber stamps, notably Emmett Williams's ar/L'orecchio di Emmett
Williams (Cavriago: Pari & Dispari, 1978).
?#060;/span>That's about
all I can add to the rubber stamp thing at this time. It would be much more
efficient for us if I send you my Bio/Bibliography which has facts that need
not be endlessly repeated, so I am doing that under separate cover. The curious
type face I used on that is one which I designed and named for Fluxmail Artist
Ken "Kenster" Friedman, "Kenster."
RJ : Your Bio/Bibliography is quite impressive. The
sentence on the first page: "I find I never feel quite complete unless I'm
doing all the arts -- visual, musical and literary. I guess that's why I
developed the term 'intermedia' , to cover my works that fall conceptually between
these" , indicates you are always focussing on all kinds of media to
express yourself. Which place has mail-art in this?
Reply on : 4-8-2020 , 29 degrees Celsius and about 85%
relative humidity
(Together with his answer Dick Higgins sent me a poster
with title "SOME POETRY INTERMEDIA" explaining metapoetries or how
poetry is connected to many other art-forms. Published by Richard C. Higgins,
1976 , New York, USA)
DH : Yes, I am a "polyartist" -
Kostelanetz's term for an artist who works in more than one medium, and some of
these media themselves have meaningful gradations between them. Visual poetry
lies between visual art and poetry, sound poetry lies between music and poetry,
etc. But between almost any art and non-art media other intermedia are
possible. What lies between theater and life, for instance? Between music and
philosophy? In poetry I got into this in my "Some Poetry Intermedia"
poster essay. If we take any art as a medium and the postal system as a medium,
then mail art is the intermedium between these -
postal poetry, postal music, mail-art [visual
variety], etc.
Some of these are more capable than others of the
subversive function which I value in mail art - it bypasses the gallery world
and the marketplace, so it becomes somehow immune to censorship. If used
aggressively it can make a reactionary politician's life Hell. And it is not
yet played out yet. For instance, while Fax art has no special characteristics
(it is like monochromatic regular mail, "snail mail") what is e-mail art?
Can't it subvert the rich folks' machines? Ruin their modems? Yet even that is
a commonplace, once one has considered it. Little artists can do it. Its power
is inherent in its medium. I can tell you stories of how the Poles of Klodsko
tortured an East German bureaucrat who has banned a Mail art show in (then)
East Berlin. I happened to be visiting there at the time and was involved in
this.
But let's think about more positive areas. Please tell
me about the spiritual aspects of mail art. How do you see that?
RJ : Yes, a nice try to end an answer with a question
to me. I will send you some 'thoughts about mail-art' for you to read, but in
this interview I would like to focus on YOUR thoughts and knowledge. I am in no
hurry, so I would like to hear that story of how the Poles of Klodsko tortured
this East German bureaucrat who banned this mail art show in East Berlin.....
Reply on 17-8-2020
DH : (today in 1843 Herman Melville signed abroad the
frigate 'United States,' this began the journey that led to 'White-Jacket')
It must have been about 1988 and I was traveling
through Poland, reading and performing with a friend, the critic and scholar
Piotr Rypson. Our travels brought us to Klodsko down in the beak of Galicia to
where a group of unofficial Polish artist had gathered to discuss what to do
since the Mail Art Conference which Robert Rehfeldt had organized in East
Berlin had, at the last moment, been canceled by some bureaucrat. It was a
final and irrevocable decision the bureaucrat had made, finalized by his
official rubber stamp besides his signature.
This was a great disappointment to these artists who
had very little opportunity to meet personally with each other, especially
across international borders, and to exchange ideas. However these artists were
Poles, from the land of the liberum votum , and they had six hundred years
experience at protesting. They made a list of things to do. Having access to
some things in America which were problematic in Poland, I was asked to have
four exact facsimiles of the bureaucrat's rubber stamp made up and to send one
to each of four addresses I was given, one was an official one in the
Department of Agriculture in the DDR and the other three were in Poland. I was
also asked to buy some homosexual and some Trotskyite magazines in the USA, to
send them one at a time to the bureaucrat and, if possible, to subscribe in his
name to these things. I did these things and also I appointed the bureaucrat an
honorary member of my Institute for Creative Misunderstanding and sent an
announcement of his appointment to Neues Deutschland, the main communist
newspaper of the DDR.
For a few weeks it seemed as if nothing had happened.
But then I received a long letter from Robert Rehfeldt in English (usually he
wrote me in German) lecturing me on what a terrible thing it was to try to
force a person to accept art work which he did not like. And a few weeks after
that I received a post card from Rehfeldt auf deutsch saying "Fine - keep
it up [mach weiter]."
In this story we can see the usefulness for using the
mails on the positive side for keeping spirits up and for keeping contact with
those one does not see, on the sometimes-necessary negative side for creating
powerful statements which must have caused great problems for this bureaucrat.
I have no idea who these people were to whom I sent the rubber stamps, but I
can imagine that they were forging the bureaucrat's signature onto all sorts of
capricious papers and causing great consternation within official circles of
the DDR. For me this story tells well one of the main uses of Mail Art.
Perhaps it also suggests why Mail Art taken out of
context can sometimes be such a bore. It has no particular formal value or
novelty, especially when one has (as I have) been doing it for nearly forty
years, so that mere documentation seems tendentious and egotistic. Would you
want to only read about a great painting of the past? Wouldn't you rather see
it and then, perhaps, read about it? Making good Mail Art is like making a
souffl?- the timing is very very critical. Who wants to be told about a decade
old souffl? And documenting the matter is not nearly so interesting as
receiving and consuming it at precisely the right moment - with the right
people too, I might add. It is an art of the utmost immediacy.
RJ : What was the reason for creating your
"Institute for Creative Misunderstanding"?
Reply on 26-8-95 (Apollinaire born today)
(Besides his answer Dick Higgins also sent his poem
"Inventions to make")
DH : Kara Ruud, For years I was struck by how little
one understands of how one's work will be perceived by others. We can prescribe
how others will see it at risk of discouraging them. Duchamp, when anyone would
ask "does your piece mean this or that...?" would smile and usually
say "yes," no matter how absurd the question. The impressionists
thought they were dealing with light; we see their contribution is one of
design along the way towards abstraction. The Jena Romantic poets of Germany
saw themselves as applying the philosophies of Kant and Plato to their
writings, but we see it as reviving the baroque and providing a healthy
restorative emotional depth to their poetry which had often been lacking in the
work of the previous generation. The same is true of Percy B. Shelley who knew
his Plato well (and translated passages of Plato from Greek into English), but
who in poems like "Lift not the painted veil" or "The sensitive
plant" moves Plato's ideas into areas which Plato never intended to create
a new entity of art-as-concealment. Harold Bloom, a famous academic critic in
the USA, was, in the 1970's in books like The anxiety of influence, stressing
the role of recent art as cannibalizing and deriving from earlier art. I was
not satisfied with Bloom's models and preferred to extend them and misinterpret
them myself along hermeneutic lines using a Gadamerian model; this you will
find in a linear fashion in my book Horizons (1983) and in the forthcoming
"Intermedia: Modernism since postmodernism" (1996). But a linear
presentation does not satisfy me either; it does not usually offer grounds for
projection into new areas and it focuses too much on the specifics of my own
ratiocinations. To broaden my perspective I conceived of a community of artists
and thinkers who could take conceptual models and, with good will (my
assumption, like Kant's in his ethics), transform these models ?evoking not
simply intellectual discourse but humor or lyrical effects which would
otherwise not be possible. This is, of course, my Institute of Creative
Misunderstanding. Into it I put a number of people with whom I was in touch who
seemed to be transforming earlier models into new and necessary paradigms. I
tried to organize a meeting of the institute, but could not get funding for it
and realized that it might well be unnecessary anyway. I still use that
Institute as a conceptual paradigm when necessary.
So I would not describe the Institute for Creative
Misunderstanding as a "fake institute," as you did, so much as an
abstract entity and process of existence which creates a paradigm of community
of like-minded people by its very name and mentioning. Are you a member of the
Institute, Ruud? Perhaps you are - it is not really up to me to say if you have
correctly misunderstood it in your heart of hearts.
RJ : Who is to say if I am a member? But I sure like
all those institutes and organizations that there are in the network. You spoke
of the intention to organize a meeting. In the years 1986 and 1992 there were
lots of organized meetings in the form of congresses. Is it important for
(mail-) artists to meet in person?
Reply on 5-9-2020 (Cage born -1912)
DH : (laughing) Who's to say if you are a member? Why
the group secretary, of course - whoever that is. Perhaps I am acting secretary
and I say you are a member. Anyway, to be serious, the question of meetings is
not answerable, I think, except in specific contexts. The events planned at
Klodsko could not have been planned without the people being together; but at
other times it would seem unnecessarily pretentious to bring them together -
frustrating even, since most mail artists are poor and they would have to spend
money to be present. At times this would be justified, but if it were simply a
matter of pride or of establishing a place in some pecking order, well that
would not be good.
Think of a camp fire. Shadowy figures are in
conversation, laughing and talking; what they say makes sense mostly among
themselves. A stranger wanders in and listens. The stranger understands almost nothing
- to him what is said is all but meaningleess - and the part which he
understands seems trivial to him. The stranger has two options: he can stay and
learn why what is being said is necessary, or he can go away and suggest that
all such campfires are silly and should be ignored or banned. Mail art is like
that. I go to shows, and the work is arranged not by conversation but according
to a curator’s skills of the past, as if these were drawings by Goya. But they
aren't. Their meaning is more private, often contained in the facts and
conditions of their existence more than in the art traditions to which they
seem to belong. The show therefore doesn't work. Few do. But a show arranged
chronologically of the exchanges among some specific circle mail artists - that
would have a greater chance for an outsider to learn the language and love the
medium. Wouldn't you like to see a show of the complete exchanges between, say,
San Francisco's Anna Banana*1 and Irene Dogmatic (if there ever was such an
exchange) than the 65th International Scramble of Mail Artists presented by the
Commune di Bric- -Bracchio (Big catalog with lots and lots of names, but
all works become the property of the Archivo di Bric- -Bracchio).
?#060;/span>*1 of course
Anna has since moved to her native Vancouver, and I haven't heard of Irene
Dogmatic in many a year)
Chance encounters among mail artists, meetings among
small groups - oh yes, those are quite wonderful. But I don't usually see the
point in large gatherings of mail artists. Actually, there haven't been many of
them - thank goodness. Berlin would have been an exception, methinks.
As e'er- Dick (laughing) (Dicks signiture was placed
here as a smiling face)
RJ : What is the first 'chance encounter' (as you call
them) that comes up in your mind when I ask for a memory about such an event?
Reply on 18-9-2020
DH : By "chance encounters" I mean those
meetings which could not have been anticipated or which take place on the spur
of the moment. In on Wednesday I arrange to meet you the following Tuesday at
7:30
and if I am unable to sleep Monday night because of
faxes from Europe arriving all night long Monday night and the cat is ill on
Tuesday so that I must waste half the day at the veterinarian's office, you and
I will have a very different kind of meeting from the situation of my meeting
you in the post office and the two of us going to spend a few hours together
talking things over, or if I say: "Look: I cooked too much food, please
come over and help me eat it."
We have all had such meeting, no? Those meetings are
the most productive, I think. Few mail artists (or any artists) can really
control their own time, their own schedule. Only the rich can do that, if
anyone
can. We are mostly poor and must depend on the schedules
of others. But there are days when this is not true - days when it works
perfectly to see someone. Ray Johnson was a master of this - he would call,
"I am with (whoever), we're down the street from you. Can we come see
you?" If yes - great. If not, one never felt locked into the situation.
That is how I never met Yves Klein. One night, perhaps
in 1961, at 11:15 Ray phoned me from down the street and said that Yves Klein
was with him and would like to meet me. I said I'd like to meet him too but I
was in bed and it was a week-day. I had to go to work the next day. We agreed
that I should meet Yves Klein the next time he came to new York. It didn't
happen; Klein died instead.
?#060;/span>It is also how
I met Alison Knowles, - Ray Johnson and Dorothy Podber and myself had dinner in
Chinatown in New York and then they took me to Alison's loft nearby. I had met
her briefly before that, but this time we got to talk a little. That was
thirty-six years ago, and Alison and I are still together.
And so it goes -
RJ : Yes, and also the forms of communication are
proceeding. To my surprise I noticed on your 'letterhead' that you have an
e-mail address too. Are you now exploring the possibilities of the internet as
well?
Reply on 20-10-2020 (sent on 11-10 from Milano Italy)
(Dick Higgins handwritten answer came from Milano,
Italy, where he is preparing a retrospective show of his work.)
DH : Yes, "exploring" is the only possible
word, since the internet is constantly changing. You can "know"
yesterday's internet, but today's always contains new variables.
In the world of computers, most of the
"information" is irrelevant, even to those who put it there. Few of
us bother to download clever graphics since advertising has made us numb to
those. I only download graphics if the text which I see really seems to need
them. I need them no more than I need to watch show-offy gymnastic displays,
divers or pianists who play Franz Liszt while blindfolded and balancing
champagne glasses on their head. What I like on the "net" are three
things:
1) Making contact with people whose contributions to
the internet shows interest similar to my own. Far from being alienating, as
others have said of the web and internet, I find this element a very positive
and community-building factor. For instance, I enjoyed meeting on the internet
a guy whom I'd met three years ago, a visual poet named Kenny Goldsmith, and
had not seen since. Now he does "Kenny's page " -
< http://wfmu.org so /~kennyg/index.html> - where he
creates links to anything in the new arts which excites him. It was like
looking into someone else's library - a revelation, and one which I could use.
It led me to meet him again in person, a real delight.
2) I cannot afford to buy the books I once could. But
often I can download and print out things to read before going to bed. For an
author, what a way to get one's work and ideas around! Why wait two
years for your book to appear, for your article to
come out in some magazine which nobody can afford? Put it on the net and it is
potentially part of the dialogue in your area of interest. Further, it tells
me not only what people are interested in, but what is
going on - a John Cage conference , which interested me, was fully described on
the net for instance - and it gives me access to everything from dictionaries,
indexes and lists of words, people and events. I suppose a saboteur could list false information, and of course
commercial interests can tell me about their stuff, but this only
sharpers my skeptical abilities - I can avoid their
garbage with no more effect than on a commercial television set. I suspect the
internet is a blow to the effectiveness of normal advertising.
3) As someone whose favorite art, books and literature
are seldom commercially viable, I am happy to see how the internet actually
favors the smaller organizations and media. If I access a big publisher's pages
with ten thousands titles, I stop and quit almost at once - it takes too long.
But a small publisher's page is often worth a glance. Further, the phenomenon of links gives an element of three -
dimensionality to the internet. A book sounds interesting. I click on it and I
see a few pages of it. This is like browsing in a wonderful book store. A good
example is the pages for Avec, a small avant-garde
magazine and book publisher in California. I found it
through a link on the Grist pages - < http://www.phantom.com/~grist
>. It's designed by the editor of Witz , a new arts newsletter (address: creiner@crl.com ). Perfect. Another good one
is Joe de Marco's pages < http://www.cinenet.net/~marco
> - full of fluxus things and theater. All this suggests new forms of
distribution, which has always been a
problem for small publishers. If you can safely
transmit credit information to an address on the internet, then, if you live in
a small village as I do, it is as if you lived in a large city with an
incredible book
store near you.
Because of links, I do not see how big corporations can commercialize
all this. My computer is black and white, I have no money to invest in their
corporations, and their rubbish is easily avoided. Thanks to the internet, the
damber kind of popular culture will probably begin to lose its strangle-hold on
people's attention. Of course it will take time and other developments too, but
the internet rips off the conservatives' three-piece suits, remakes them and
gives them to us in a better form.
RJ : It seems like publishing is very important for
you. In mail art a lot has been written about the boek "The Paper
Snake" by Ray Johnson, which you published with Something Else Press. What
was the story
behind this specific book?
reply on 27-10-2020 (internet)
DH: There is no doubt in my mind that Ray Johnson was
one of the most valuable artists I've ever known. He was a master of the
"tricky little Paul Klee-ish collage," as he modestly dismissed them;
most of his
work of the late 1950's was collages in 8 1/2 x 11
format-roughly corresponding to the European A3. That was a time when Abstract
Expressionism ("Tachisme") ruled the roost in America, and art was
supposed to swagger, lack humor, be big and
important-looking. Johnson had rejected this long before, had, in the 1950's,
made hundreds or thousand of postcard-size collages using popular imagery,
had also made big collages and then cut them up, sewn
them together into chains, had buried the critic Suzi Gablik in a small
mountain of them (alas, only temporarily), had printed various ingenious little
booklets and sent them off into the world, and, since
there was no appropriate gallery for his work, had now taken to sending his
collages out-along with assemblages in parcel post form. For example, a few
days after I had startled Ray by throwing my alarm clock out the window, he
sent me a box containing a marzipan frog, a broken clock and a pair of
chopsticks, calling shortly thereafter to suggest that we go to Chinatown for
dinner.
But Ray could write too. He was always interested in
theater and performance, had picked up many ideas from the days when he and his
friend Richard Lippold lived downtown in New York City on Monroe Street on the
floor below John Cage (all of them friends also from Black Mountain College),
and he wrote and sent out innumerable playlets, poems, prose constructions,
etc.
I saw Ray around town for several months before I met
him, which was at a 1959 concert where I asked him if he were Jasper Johns.
"No," he said, "I'm Ray Johnson," we got to talking and
soon to walking and not long afterwards to visiting. Years later, when I met
Jasper Johns, in order to complete the symmetry, I asked him if he were Ray
Johnson. I expected him to say, "You know I'm not-why do you ask?"
Instead he said, acidly: "No." And he walked away.
Something Else Press was founded on the spur of the
moment. First I did my book "Jefferson's Birthday/Postface" (1964).
But before the thing was even printed, I decided the next book should be a
cross-section of the things Ray had sent me over the
previous six years. So, having little room at my own place, I packed them all
into two suitcases, visited my mother and spread everything out on her dining
table. I sorted the book into piles-performance
pieces, poems, collages, things to be typeset, thing to be reproduced in Ray's
writing-taking care to include at least some of each category. I knew the book
would be hard to sell, so I didn't want to make it a Big Important Book; I
chose the format of a children's book, set the texts in a smallish size of
Cloister Bold (an old-fashioned Venetian face), decided on using two
colors to simulate four (which I could not have
afforded), and then laid out the pages in a way which I felt would invite the
reader to experience Ray's pieces as I did on receiving them. Ray, who had at
first been displeased by the project, perhaps feeling it would lock him into a
format too much, become very enthusiastic as the project developed. Where at
first he had refused to title the book, later he called it "The Paper
Snake" after a collage and print he had made. He also wanted the price
to be "$3.47," for reasons I have never known (prices of that sort
were always $3.48 or $3.98). And when, one winter day in 1966, the book was
being bound by a New York City binder, I took Ray over to the bindery to see it
being cased in (when the covers are attached to the book). By then he was
delighted and wrote me one of the few formal letters ever received from him
thanking me for doing it.
As for its reception, the book was a puzzler to even
the most sophisticated readers at the time. Even someone who was a regular
correspondent of Ray's, Stanton Kreider, wrote me an outraged letter saying
what a silly book it was. Such people usually felt that Ray's mailings were and
should remain ephemera. There were almost no reviews, but one did appear in Art
Voices, one of the most scorching reviews I have ever seen, complaining the book
was precious and completely trivial, a pleasure to an in-group. These letters
and reviews are now in the Archiv Sohm in Stuttgart, where you can pursue them
for yourself if you like.
RJ : It is good that you keep mentioning the places
where things can be found, if I do or don't pursue, now somebody else might do
it too. There are a lot of archives in the world. Besides the 'official'
archives there are also the private collections that most (mail-) artists have
built up. Are there still things that you collect?
Reply on 29-10-95 (internet)
DH : I feel overwhelmed by THINGS at my home. My
letters are one of the main things I have done in this life, and I try to keep
copies of each letter I send; but there is no space to save them. For years now
my files have been going away - to the Archiv Sohm, for about 1972 to 1989 to
the Jean Brown Archive, and from then till now the Getty Center in Santa
Monica, California.
I don't think it makes sense for a private individual
to have a closed archive if such a person is going to present a face to the
world. I have read that Yoko Ono founded Fluxus, and I have seen that quoted as
a
fact many times. One critic or student picks up errors
from the one before. I don't know where that "fact" came from. Yoko
is a good. modest person; she was a friend of ours and she had done pieces
which are very much part of the older Fluxus repertoire. But she was not
present on that November day of 1961 when Maciunas proposed to a group of us
that we do a magazine to be called "Fluxus" and that we do
performances of the pieces in the magazine; nor was she in Wiesbaden in
September 1962 when we did those performances and the press began calling us
"Die Fluxus Leute" - the Fluxus people. So while she, for instance,
was surely one of the original Fluxus people, she did not found Fluxus. Well,
if I am going to assert this, it is important that the documents of the time be
available somewhere besides in my own files. Too, my writings are complex and
full of allusions; this is not to create mysteries but to enrich the fabric and
draw on reality. It can be useful therefore that my files be open to anyone who
needs them, and this would be impossible if the files were here in my church.
Then there are other collections: from 1977 to 1991 I
collected things related to Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), - apart from a passage
in Plato's Phaedrus, Bruno's "De imaginum, signorum et idearum
Compositione" (1593) has the earliest discussion I know of intermedia -
but when Charlie Doria's translation of this work came out (which I edited and
annotated) I sold off all the Bruno materials I had. From 1968 to 1990 (about)
I collected patterns poetry-old visual poetry from before 1900 - but that too
has gone away, most of it anyway. I have collected almost all of the books
written, designed by or associated with Merle Armitage (1893-1975), a great
modernist book designer, and my biography of him, "Merle Armitage and the
Modern Book", is due out with David Godine next year. I will then sell
that collection too. Perhaps it was a good experience acquiring these things,
but that part is over now. Other collections have been given away. I collected
a tremendous amount of sound poetry and information on it, meaning to do a book
on the subject. But there was never money to do the book right. Perhaps that
collection also should depart. There is too much art work by myself here in the
church in which I live and work - it gets damaged because it cannot be stored
properly. I would like to move to a smaller place, since I do not need and
cannot afford this big one, and if that happens more things also go away.
There are some phonograph records, tapes and CD's too
- too many to keep track of, some going baack to my teen years when I used to
spend the money I earned by baby-sitting on records of John Cage, Henry
Cowell, G”esta Nystroem, Schoenberg and Stravinsky,
Anton Webern and such-like. I suppose the only books which are also tools and
(for me) reference work-books on design or artistic crafts (orchestration,
for instance), Fluxbooks and Fluxcatalogs (I need to
check my facts), books and magazines in which I am included (so I can tell
where such- and-such a piece first was printed). As for objects, I care about
my
mother's dishes and one table, but that is about all -
the rest can go.
No, I am a temporary collector - as Gertrude Stein
said of her visitors, she liked to see them come, but she also liked to see
them go. I will acquire things when they are needed, but I need to unload them
too. I have no right to own art, even by friends, because I cannot take care of
it properly. It too must go. This church is dark with things, things, things -
and maybe somebody else, somebody younger that I, might like to have them.
RJ : Why do you live in a church?
Reply on 4-11-2020 (internet)
DH : I live in this church because, when I moved to
this area from Vermont (where I had lived almost fourteen years, off and on, up
near the Quebec border) I bought a house, garage and church complex. It
had been "defrocked" by the Roman Catholic
Church in 1974, its consecration taken away and the cross and bell removed, and
it was sold to a couple who wanted it to become an antique shop. However there
was no drive-by traffic so they found that would not
work. But nobody wanted to buy it from them. So I got it at a good price, as
they say. My plan was to live in the house- a modest parsonage,- for my wife
Alison Knowles to use the garage (where we set up a photo darkroom to be
shared), and for myself to use the church as my own studio. For this it was fine.
But in 1985 when my finances began to collapse-with
the decline in the US art world, the rise of our Radical Right and
neo-Christian coalition, and with the Fluxus syndrome among exhibitors and
collectors, I had to rent out the house to survive and to move into the church.
It is a nice space, well suited to be a studio, but it is dark in the winter
and is quite gloomy and expensive to heat. It has no doors so nobody is
separated from anything else that is going on. There are virtually no doors to
close, so there is no privacy. Sometimes I think I will go mad here.?Maybe I have. I would love to move, but like
the previous owners I would find it hard to sell and in any case I have no
money to move. Next winter I may have to do without heat here most of the time
unless things look up. It is a curious environment for an artist.
I often refer to this "Fluxus syndrome." It
is my term for a problem that I face. It goes like this. A gallerist, critic or
exhibitor tells me "I like your work. I know you are a Fluxus
artist." Then they see more of my
work and they compare it to the work of George
Maciunas, whom they take to be the leader of Fluxus instead of its namer and,
in his own preferred term, "Chairman" of Fluxus. They note that there
are
differences and they say to me: "But that work is
not Fluxus. Do you have any Fluxus work?" I say yes,-and I show work from
the early sixties through late seventies. It still does not resemble the work
of Maciunas.
It isn't usually even fun and games, which is what the
public thinks of as Fluxus. So I am marginalized in Fluxus shows, or I am left
out of other collections because "This is not a Fluxus gallery/museum
show/collection." The problem is all but unavoidable, and in vain can one
point out that if Fluxus is important, it is because of its focus on
intermedia, that Maciunas recognized this repeatedly, that he knew perfectly
well that there was room in Fluxus for work which did not resemble his at all.
If one says anything like this in public, it is taken to be a disloyalty to
George or some kind of in-fighting for prestige. I have sometimes been tempted
to show my work under a false name in order to escape this syndrome altogether.
But even that sounds as if I were ashamed of my Fluxus past, which I am not,
even though it is not awfully relevant to my work since the late seventies.
Also I still feel affinities to some of my Fluxus colleagues, though the work
of others has, in my opinion, become repetitious crap. Many of my Fluxfriends
could do with a little more self-criticism, in my opinion. Fluxus also has its
share of hangers-on, people who were utterly marginal to the group and who kept
their distance during the years when Fluxus had not acquired its present and
perhaps false public image, but who are now all too willing to con their way
into the list and to enter their colors for the next tournament.
RJ : This story about "Fluxus syndrome," is
quite interesting when I compare it to mail art. There is the difference that in
mail art most artist try to avoid the traditional art-world, and there is even
the phrase "mail art and money don't mix" by Lon Spiegelman, that is
used by others too. There are on the other hand also artists who say to
organize a mail art show and then start to use entrance-fees and ask for money
for catalogues ; try to 'con' people in the mail art network. What do you think
of "mail art and money don't mix"? I know it's not an easy question
to answer.
Reply on 11-11-2020 (internet)
DH : Money and mail art? Money and Fluxus? Mixing? You
are right, I can't answer that one easily. Certainly if somebody got into mail
art (or Fluxus) as a means of advancing his or her career- "Gee,"
says the dork, "ya gotta get inta as many shows as possible, I was in thirty-two
last year and here's the catalogs to prove it," -he or she would swiftly
learn that is not what the field is for. Rather, its purpose is to combat?alienation, and that is only in some
respects an economic problem. Mail art has tremendous disruptive potential (and
even some constructive social potential), as I described in my story about
Polish mail artists and the East German bureaucrat. And it has great
community-building power - even my hypothetical dork can say" "Wow, I
got friends all over, from Argentina to Tunisia." But I must make a
confession: I have probably seen forty or fifty actual exhibitions of mail art,
and NOT ONE OF THEM was interesting to see. There were good things in each of
them of course, but the effect of looking at them was weak. Why? Because they
did not reflect the function - they always treated the sendings as final
artifacts (sometimes ranked according to the prestige of the artist). But mail
art pieces are virtually never final artifacts - they are conveyors of a
process of rethinking, community-building and psychological and intellectual
extension. Thus it is, I think, a distortion to think, of mail art as a
commercial commodity of any kind. Because it is typically modest in scale
usually and it is usually technically simple, the finest piece may come from
the greenest, newest or the least skilled artist. There is no rank in mail art
so long as the artist thinks and sees clearly.
Nevertheless, the issue of money is one which must be
faced. Lack of it can ruin your capability for making mail art, for one thing.
When the heat is gone and you can't afford to go to the doctor, it is very hard
to focus on making this collage to send away, even though one knows that do so
would bring great satisfaction and comfort. Yet the mail art itself is not
usually salable, and nobody gets a career in mail art. One is free to be
capricious, as I was circa twenty-odd years ago when I spent two months
corresponding only with people whose last names began with M. It is not, then,
so much that mail art and money do not mix but that mail art simply cannot be
used to produce money, at least not directly, - which is not to say that one
mail artist cannot help another. Obviously we can and do. I remember when
Geoffrey Cook, a San Francisco mail artist, undertook a campaign through the
mail art circuit to free Clemente Padin, the Uruguayan mail artist (among other
things) who had been jailed by the military junta for subversion. It worked.
And many is the mail artist who, wanting to see his or her correspondent, finds
some money somewhere to help defray travel costs and such-like.
With Fluxus, the issue is different. Fluxart has in
common with mail art its primary function as a conveyor of meaning and impact.
But Fluxworks are not usually mail art and do not usually depend on a network
of recepients. Some are enormously large. Some take large amounts of time to
construct, some are expensive to build and so on. Given this, issues of
professionalism arise which are not appropriate to mail art. If I insist on
making my Fluxart amateur and to support myself by other means, I may not be
able to realize my piece. I am thus forced at a certain point in my evolution
to attempt to live form my art, since anything else would be a distraction. I
must commercialize the uncommercializable in order to extend it to its maximum
potential. What an irony! It is, I fancy (having been in Korea but not Japan),
like the expensive tranquility of a Zen temple in contrast to the maniacal
frenzy of Japanese commercial life outside it. Peace becomes so expensive one
might imagine it is a luxury, which I hope it is not. So one is compelled to
support it.
?#060;/span>
The difference is, I think, that commercial art
supports the world of commodity; Fluxus and other serious art of their sort
draws on the world of commerce for its sustenance but its aim lies elsewhere ?
it points in other directions, not at the prestige of the artist as such (once
someone once tried to swap, for a book by Gertrude Stein which he wanted, two
cookies which Stein had baked, then about twenty-two years before) and
certainly not at his or her ego in any personal sense (John Cage musing at the
hill behind his then home, "I don't think I have done anything remarkable,
anything which that rock out there could not do if it were active"). One
must take one's work seriously, must follow its demands and be an obedient
servant to them: nobody else will, right? If the demands are great and require
that one wear a shirt and tie and go light people's cigars, then out of storage
come the shirt and tie and out comes the cigar-lighter. That is what we must
do. But we do not belong to the world of cigars; we are only visitors there. It
is a liminal experience, like the shaman visiting the world of evil spirits. We
can even be amused by the process. Anyway, that's my opinion.
RJ : Some mail artists say that the mail art network
is more active than before. Others say that mail art is history because almost
all the possibilities of the traditional mail have been explored, and that all
the things that are happening now in mail art, are reproductions of things that
happened before. Is mail art a finished chapter?
Reply on 16 December, 1995
(Santayana born today (1863) and Jane Austin too
(1775)
DH : Well, I think both sides are right. Mail Art is
more active than before if more people are doing it. Of course, for those of us
whose interest in exploration I am glad they are doing it even though I see no
need to do it AS SUCH myself. Mail Art is [only?]
history if all the possibilities have been explored - yes, if one's job is to
explore things only formally. Of course I love history - without it I never
know what
not to do. For me this last assumption is therefore
right so far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Why should we assume that
doing something once means it need not be done again? That is what I call the
"virgin attitude," fine for people who are
hung up on sleeping with virgins but a dreadful idea if it is really love that
you want. Aren't you glad that Monet painted more than one haystack or
waterlily painting? Don't you have a food recipe which you would hate to
change? A "finished chapter?" That has even more problematic
assumptions.
?#060;/span>After all, a
chapter in a book (including the Book of Life) involves reading, and the best books
invite reading more than once. Isn't reading as creative as writing?
?#060;/span>Mail Art is,
in my opinion, not a single form. I am not much of a taxonomist-someone else
can decide how many forms it is, can classify and sort it out. What I know and
have said in this interview is that Function precipitates Form. So long as new
uses for Mail Art can appear, new forms are likely to arise. Just for
instance-e-mail letters and magazines are relatively new. The ways we can use
them have not
fully revealed themselves. The politics of this world
are as fouled up as ever; perhaps there are mail art methods (including e-mail
methods) which can be used to help straighten things out or at least point to
the problems in a startling or striking way. No, I think mail art may be
history - it has been with us at least since Rimbaud's burnt letters ?but only
a Dan Quail (a proverbially obtuse right-wing politician here)
would say, as he did in 1989, that "History is
Over!" And as long as there are people-artists-living alone here and
there, confronted by problems (professional, formal, human or social), Mail Art
is likely to have a role to play in helping to alleviate those problems.?What we must not do is allow ourselves to
take ourselves too seriously-tendentiousness is a natural health hazard for the
mail artist. The freshness and unpredictability of the medium are part of why,
if mail art works at all, it really does. Just as we must always reinvent
ourselves, according to whatever situations we find ourselves in, we must always
reinvent our arts. And that includes mail art.
RJ : Well, this is a wonderful moment to end this
interview. I want to thank you for your time and sharing your thoughts.
APPENDIX :
From: miekal and < dtv@mwt.net
>
To: “Ruud Janssen?< r.janssen@iuoma.org >
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2020 21:23:28 +0000
Subject: FLUXLIST: [Fwd: Dick Higgins, Fluxus Co‑Founder,
Dies]
Dick was
a sometime contributor here, witty, generous and courageously outrageous ‑‑
online and in performance, this his finale:
“Thus Higgins' musical composition "Dangerous Music No. 17" of 1963 consisted of Higgins' wife, the poet Alison?Knowles, shaving his head. "Dangerous Music No. 2,"?which Higgins had performed on Sunday at the colloquium? in Quebec City, involved screaming as loudly as possible for as long as possible.?#060;o:p>